> When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan [0] replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."
>Common sense would dictate that the most experienced programmers should have been assigned to these difficult tasks, but, as Hopper glibly explained, young people did not know that they were supposed to fail.
He just happened to be the first to grok them. Question is how he came to face those problems without any apparent precedent.
I think for most people, not knowing a problem is unsolved will lead them to try out many more approaches than if they knew. The problem is that most of the approaches will be approaches that have already been tried before and the rest will be useless. This does nothing for the solving of the problem but greatly aids your own understanding.