What I Know About Playing the Bass

Damian Conway spoke here at U of T last night. He’s very engaging, though I think I would have enjoyed the talk more if the examples had been shorter (and if there had been less Lara Croft at the beginning—still not sure what that was all about). The best part came right at the end, when he said (roughly), “One of the reasons I’m a good hacker is that I write code every single day.” My first thought was the number of times I’ve told students to try to find balance in their life: play Ultimate, knit, anything to avoid a one-note existence. But then I thought about what a jazz musician named Al Gorman once told me: you can learn how to play bass like John Paul Jones or Ron Carter in six hours—every day, for ten years. Nobody tells them to get a life; instead, society recognizes that if you want to be the best there is, you have to focus single-mindedly. When programmers do it, they’re called geeks, but maybe that level of geekery is essential. (And maybe that’s why I’ll never be Damian Conway… ;-)