Zed A. Shaw, Painter

But, to be any good at these things you have to study for an incredibly long time, and many times start early in life. Most of what top professionals end up doing is just practicing a hole ton until they internalize these concepts and to the point they don't think about them.

The reason I think these concepts take a lot of practice is because they are something you cannot understand intellectually, but instead have to experience. You could read about painting or music your whole life and still never be able to do either. Same with programming.

There's also a performance aspect to all of these things. Doing them doesn't mean you can talk to a bunch of people about them. You do them for other people, and that's how you get paid or get recognized. That performance aspect requires practice for real time action.

Well, he just learned a different set of cliches from the Neo Classical genre that don't translate into a Jimi Hendrix cover. In the context of the Blues that's fucking terrible. Compare that to Stevie Ray Vaughn's version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An4uDegHB8s … Now *that* sounds "right".

The same applies to painting. I know painters who do immaculate perfect still life paintings who then can't paint a fucking landscape or portrait to save their life. That's because, they didn't really master the concepts so much as master applying the concepts to a cliche.

Programming is the same as well when it comes to mastery of concepts in the service of cliches. I couldn't code a video game to save my life, but ask me to make a network protocol, programming language, assembler, or anything about "language" and it's no problem.

Walk up to the average game programmer and ask them to write a network protocol and they choke and die. Or, how they all use Lua 'cause they can't code their own languages. Or how they keep using C++ for no reason at all. That's not because the concepts are hard though.