[OFF-TOPIC] How do I find a mentor when no one I work with knows what they are doing?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 1:10 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or: The boss is a former programmer, perhaps even a very good one, but
> he's not at all involved with the day to day issues, but still wants
> to tell you how to do things.

Heh. The boss was a bit like that at my last job. Kept telling me
stories of how he programmed some microcontroller in its assembly
language... if I wanted to kill time, they were interesting stories,
but if I wanted to get some work done in a high level language, they
weren't particularly helpful.

He also was majorly stuck in a concrete style of coding - consequence
of assembly language programming, I think - and couldn't wrap his head
around logical layout, functional styles, that kind of thing. I dread
to think what he'd be like with Haskell or LISP; I wouldn't even have
dared introduce him to Python's generators. (Although he probably
wouldn't have been bothered by generators. He was majorly turned off
by the whole thing of significant whitespace and basically just told
me "there will be no Python here". Bah.)

ChrisA