Louisville, KY
Greg is a retired neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, with a long-standing interest in computers and programming, beginning with Fortran IV in the 1960s. When Linux and open source software came along, it kindled a commitment to learning more, and eventually contributing. He is a member of the Scribus Team.
Authored Comments
I would say that it's not a matter of trying to make mistakes, as the article seems to imply, it's a matter of pushing the boundaries of what you know, and if you do that enough, you will make mistakes. And it's not the making of mistakes that is by itself an automatic benefit, it's going back and sorting out what you did wrong, and reversing the damage, maybe even prevent someone else from causing the same damage.
When I was young I spent a great deal of my time taking things apart to see how they worked. If you knew how they worked, you might later fix them if they stopped working. The trick was developing a sense of how to take things apart without breaking them or not being able to put them back together again. With time, you learn what kinds of disassembly are risky, which are safe. Later in life I have found that there is a lot to learn from tinkering -- taking a working Python script and fiddling around with it to try to do some other things, but sometimes breaking it and then understanding why it broke.
I recently by accident tried to use Gnome, and as usual, gave up very quickly. I have been using KDE for a variety of reasons, one being that when I install KDE on upgrading, I have a basically usable and understandable desktop that I can gradually tweak to my liking. Not so with Gnome, where I am faced with a blank screen and no clues as to where to start to make something useful to me from it. I am not going to launch into an extensive investigational search for documentation. Back to KDE and plasma.