27 Jan
2012
27 Jan
'12
7:31 a.m.
On 01/25/2012 06:02 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
But I am a smart guy - no, honest, really I am - and I
am literate,
numerate, I understand the basics (no pun intended) of programming and
so on. I am also a professional
explainer-of-difficult-technical-concepts.
I do not dispute this.
I really do believe that I /should/ be able to get
this, but the texts
and so on that I have read make me feel like I am brain-damaged. /The
Little Schemer/ for instance is virtually line-noise from the very
first page.
And I can certainly see how this would be the case. Indeed I felt
the same way. (I still feel the same way about the book!) It took some
time, but then it clicked.
I think it has to do with training the brain in certain ways, and
it's later difficult to do something any other way. It was HARD to wrap
my brain around the concepts of functional programming (to the limited
extent that I have!), and I have probably a dozen languages under my
belt. It's NOT "just another language" in that they're all
fundamentally similar except for little pieces of syntax...it really is
a whole different way of thinking and visualizing a problem.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
New Kensington, PA