Hubris

I often see people exhibiting hubris. I look at them and see how obviously wrong they are and how arrogantly they believe themselves to be right.

It is strange how when I'm being arrogant I just don't see it...

I used to hate dealing with people. Growing up I lived in a very chaotic environment. To this day I long for an environment with structure. I always feel people were unpredictable. Just when I thought I'd figured out the people around me, as a child, they totally confounded me. Sometimes in a good way but most off in a bad way.

In my late teens I was introduced to computers. It had limited memory (a few kilobytes). The instruction set was relatively small. It was CISC based with no pipelines, caching, etc. Execution of an application was fairly linear and simple. There were interrupts but the main application would halt when an interrupt occurred. So there was never two things happening at once. This was bliss. I could make this box do things. It was VERY predictable.

To this day I look at computers and think, it is a finite state machine. We should be able to write bug free software. Why can't people program properly. If I had the time, I could write PERFECT software. I've often dreamed of building a computer, writing the operating system, writing all the applications, doing everything right from the start. No crashing, no updates needed, no patches, no viruses.

Today I was reading a blog on software design by someone who reminds me a lot about myself but is obviously smarter... Kent Beck. After reading the article I thought, "Kent seems to have a lot more answers and is much more self-aware then I am but he still has questions and things he is trying to figure out about software design. How arrogant of me to even imagine for a moment that time is the only limiting factor in writing the perfect operating system with perfect software."

Have you spotted your hubris today?