That "something" is basically passion and motivation, a child-like fascination with computers and the powers they can give you. People like this are so valuable and great to work with not because they have some innate power to understand algorithms, but because they sell a brand of optimism reminiscent of the "old" tech industry, the American postwar optimism of the 90s, where new things actually were revolutionary.
Let's be real, in 5-6 hours he designed a very nice, simple algorithm to produce likely words from a dictionary based on frequency analysis, and produced 30 lines of Python code implementing it. A lot of engineers today could have done this.
The "specialness" was that he did it on his own time and enjoyed it.
Let's be real, in 5-6 hours he designed a very nice, simple algorithm to produce likely words from a dictionary based on frequency analysis, and produced 30 lines of Python code implementing it. A lot of engineers today could have done this.
The "specialness" was that he did it on his own time and enjoyed it.
There was an xkcd relevant here about enjoying Python: https://xkcd.com/353/