Papers

I'm currently writing the background chapter of my thesis, and this involves a lot of re-reading of papers. Several times now I've thought "if only I had read this two years ago! This would have been so helpful, I could have avoid so many mistakes!" Of course, I had read the papers two years ago, and I thought at the time that I understood them (in the same way that I think I understand them (better) now). So, maybe, I should have put a lot more effort into properly understanding these papers when I first read them? Well, yes, I probably should, it would have saved me a lot of pain and effort. But, I can't help thinking that maybe I had to do all the work and suffer all the mistakes before I really could understand them. I like to think so, because then I don't feel so bad about wasting months on bad ideas that I could have avoided by spending a few days more on a paper.

p.s. I would particularly like to single out the two variations on the variant parametric types paper by Atsushi Igarashi and Mirko Viroli. It seems to be the paper that keeps on giving; I've read it at least five times now, each time in some detail, and yet everytime I seem to get more out of it!