Tag: philosophy

Analogies are a bridge

Analogies are often used to introduce folks to new ideas, introducing them not directly, but through comparison and inference. This seems to work well in all areas, including technical. The risk in using them in technical matters, though, is that person will never move past the analogy and into the realm of accurately understanding the subject matter.
For a long time, I very much disliked analogies. Perhaps this was due to bad personal experiences in my study path with them, or alternately, hearing other folks go on and on about how “such and such is just like such and such” when that is simply not the case. In the past year, though, three interesting things have happened.
The first is that I’ve chatted with someone, who is very level headed and takes the time to talk through his point of view, who is a proponent of analogies.
The second is that I’ve taken a much closer look at how people teach, and, they certainly don’t do it by throwing their students into the deep end.
The third is that I visited a foreign country where it was clear to me that it wasn’t just the language, but just about everything, that I didn’t understand. On the trip I had the experience of analogies about “how things work” in the country just keep popping into my head. It was the strangest thing, but it was interesting, too, because I finally realized the role of analogies:
Analogies are a helpful bridge, that you must cross. If you stay there, you will never get to where you really want to be.

On Lisp

During my vacation, I skimmed Paul Graham’s book On Lisp. There were many interesting bits in there:

  • He really tries to “sell the wonder of Lisp”. I’m not sure is possible, though.
  • “Users prefer double edged swords to blunt ones”
  • I think that he loves Scheme, but uses CL for practical reasons.
  • He digs deep into code, heavily visiting macros and even implementing continuations, non-determinism, and an object system
  • He is probably a world-class hacker who will never be recognized for his talent, but instead his success
  • This is probably not a good “first Common Lisp book” as it is very deep stuff

Why Computer Science Doesn’t Matter

Why Computer Science Doesn’t Matter is an essay about the lack of computer science in the educational curriculum today, and what can be done about it. They’ve come up with an interesting, and successful, approach.

[I want] to place computing where it belongs: in the hearts and minds of every single student.

Here here!

Memes are Brainwashing

From Wikipedia:

A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Whether or not you agree in the validity of memes as a science (I don’t); the term is often used in authoratively in pop culture. They typically represent some bit information, usually in the form of a frequently repeated phrase, that spreads around and around the community. In the programming community, there are plenty. For example, here are a few: “convention over configuration”, “don’t write code just to make the compiler happy”, or “every developer must learn how to program concurrently: it is the future”.
The interesting things about memes are that they often have an element of truth behind them. For example:

  • “Convention over configuration”: Abstract away often repeated work
  • “Don’t write code just to make the compiler happy”: Use the right language for the task at hand
  • “Every developer must learn how to program concurrently: it is the future”: Use the right problem solving approach for the task at hand
  • “[My programming language] is purely functional“: For the type of program I am writing, side-effects are not welcome

The idea of memes is to pass around the interesting idea so that we can all benefit from it. The problem with them, though, is that they don’t. Instead, they sort of pass around a half-truth whose only intention is to further, most probably, some individual’s agenda. For example:

  • Lisp is convention or configuration taken to the extreme, but you never hear anyone saying that (If you hear me saying it, slap me), and they shouldn’t. Ruby on Rails is to Ruby as Struts was to Java; the only and therefore best of its time.
  • “Don’t write code just to make the compiler happy” is pretty silly. Use a statically typed language for a reason. Use dynamically typed language for a reason. There is a difference. You should understand the difference and its impact to your development process.
  • The IEEE, ACM, and nearly every presenter at JavaOne 08 preached fear of the multicore future without expounding on why every developer needs to master multi-core programming (solution looking for a problem?). That said: if every programmer learned how to program really well in the first place, we might not need 64 cores.
  • “Haskell is purely functional, so it is better than all other impure languages”: Please help me, the reader, understand why!

Because memes are half-truths, people often don’t get to the meaty goodness of the truths behind them. Perhaps at some gut-level they know there is a very good truth hiding back there. If, like most people, though, they don’t explore it further, then they will instead assume the meaty truthful goodness to be the ugly, half-truth of the meme. Since the community largely supports the meme; it becomes common knowledge that the individual must accept it in order to keep his place in the community.
Therein lays the danger of memes, whenever the meme is reintroduced, the individual sort of experiences the behavior modification reaction much like a Skinner pigeon; they have to buy into nonsensical statements about which everyone agrees. Sprinkle any article or blog post or discussion with any number of such memes and you have instant gold for making your point unbeatable. It is a strange and disappointing phenomenon that draws into question much of what is written in the tech world today.
Addendum: 12/10/08
Today I fixed typos, revised the grammar, and altered the content to reflect what I actually meant. As such, I believe this to be a “good faith” modification that didn’t merit change-tracking for the reader’s sake.