Getting better with meta-thinking

{

Some excerpts from a great post from Ola Bini, one of the JRuby core developers:

In short, I believe that being able to abstract and understand what goes on in a programming language is one way to become more proficient in that language, but not only that - by changing your thinking to see this part of your environment you generally end up programming differently in all languages...

A little further on, emphasis is mine:

... I call this meta-level thinking. I think it's mostly a learned ability, but also that there is an aptitude component.

Cheers for this as a "learned ability" which would give one pretentious enough to call his blog "Metadeveloper" some hope.

}