Last week I found an interesting site while searching for a thorough explanation of red-black trees on the web:

Confuzzlement is a glorious state of being that involves a lot of confusion, frustration, and maybe a little bit of raving lunacy. In a good way, of course. Confuzzled people celebrate their ignorance openly and strive to reach a higher level of ignorance by learning from other confuzzled people. A confuzzled person is proud to be ignorant, but the unwashed masses are often incapable of seeing the subtle difference between being brilliantly clever, pretending to be stupid because you can't be bothered to think, and being genuinely stupid. They key to being confuzzled is having fun with it. -- Julienne Walker

Once again I realized that there's still so much we don't know, so much we still have to learn. All of us, but especially me.

I'm refering to the following words of Alan Kay on the FONC mailing list:

All I can say, is that it is not about code, and I'm pretty sure that playing with code won't help STEPS. In many ways it's about escaping from code! Escaping from thinking in terms of code.

It's about concepts in dynamic relation, that beg to be represented clearly, and then be put into a runnable form, most often via a new language made for the purpose.

"Well, of course,", I should've thought, "he's been saying this for several years now!":

We don't know how to design systems yet. So let's not make what we don't know into a religion for god's sake. What we need to do is to constantly think and think and think about what's important. And we have to have our systems let us get to the next levels of abstractions as we come to them.

-- Alan Kay in his talk at OOPSLA 97

Somehow, I managed to not get it until now.