What Scala?

[Sean Kelly]

== Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org)'s article
>
> We all know stories of lousy-student rise to genius. John Backus, Thomas
> Alva Edison, Einstein... You know why? Because they're spectacular
> stories. There have been plenty of geniuses who also happened to be good
> students, but nobody cares for that detail because it's expected and
> therefore uninformative.

And some of the stories are just that: stories.  Here's a quote from Michael Shara,
a curator at the New York Museum of Natural History's exhibit dedicated to
Einstein:

    "This myth that Einstein was a mediocre student is definitely not true," says
    Shara. "He was highly inquisitive; asked questions all the time. And we have his
    report card. You see that he was an excellent student — straight A's, of course,
    in physics and trigonometry and geometry.

But then people also believe that Lemmings commit mass suicide periodically
to control overpopulation, so it seems that people are more interested in
false but compelling stories than true but boring ones :-)