Jon Sterling on Nostr: There's something that didn't really crystallise for me for a long time, which I ...

There's something that didn't really crystallise for me for a long time, which I think I might have learned from Bob Harper implicitly, not sure.

If you like someone's research and want to emulate it, it is more important to read the things that they had *read* than to read the things that they had *written*.

Obviously you should read it all, but I often run into people who are banging their heads against something I wrote when I was just a beginner in a topic trying to understand it myself, and they would be a lot better off reading whatever I had been reading at the time. (A good way to figure out what someone had been reading is to look at the bibliography in their paper or note!)