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I just got out of an advisor meeting, and each time he asked about some potential complexity I told him about the trick I was using to avoid the issue entirely. At the end, he told me in a surprised tone that it was THREE bullets I had dodged[*], and then he went on to suggest that he would be impressed and disappointed if I managed to get everything working without confronting and beating some deep, fundamental issue.
I left with the weirdest feeling of pride I have ever felt. I guess I've internalized more of the engineer/hacker mentality than I thought -- I find simple solutions more satisfying than virtuoso performances (assuming both work, of course). But he's probably more right than me in the long run -- part of the job of a researcher is to add to the toolbox, not just to use it.
([*] IIRC, he wanted to know about the coherence of my semantics of assertions; if I needed a fixed point semantics for recursion; and whether I needed to define a contextual equivalence to set up my equality relation.)
I left with the weirdest feeling of pride I have ever felt. I guess I've internalized more of the engineer/hacker mentality than I thought -- I find simple solutions more satisfying than virtuoso performances (assuming both work, of course). But he's probably more right than me in the long run -- part of the job of a researcher is to add to the toolbox, not just to use it.
([*] IIRC, he wanted to know about the coherence of my semantics of assertions; if I needed a fixed point semantics for recursion; and whether I needed to define a contextual equivalence to set up my equality relation.)
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I assume this is Jonathan you're talking about?
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