What's a C expert?

[Marshall Cline]

In article <2014 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) writes:

>In article <12214 at well.UUCP> tmh at well.UUCP (Todd M. Hoff) writes:
>>After a few lengthy arguments nobody could satisfactorly answer
>>this question: What do you need to know to be an expert C programmer?

>You need to be able to determine what the programs do that won the
>Obfuscated C Code Contest *without* using a compiler! :-) :-)
>Note that I separate the concepts of knowledge and wisdom here, you
>asked about knowledge!

Walter's comment is insightful: let's realize the difference between
knowledge and wisdom.  Indeed, having knowledge is probably a necessary
condition for being an expert, but no amount of knowledge can make one
an expert unless the alleged expert can judge/discern between subtle
distinctions, etc.  Consider a large database containing all the valid
`C' constructs and idioms.  It might be argued that the database contains
lots of `knowledge', but it (the database) clearly is NOT an `expert'.

Thus the original poster asked the wrong question.  It's not what you
need to know, since NO volume of knowledge can make one an expert.
[But this discussion probably belongs in "comp.lang.c.philosophy" :-)]

Marshall
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