So I’d like to clarify something about the previous post: When I said the problem was linguistic, I did not mean that the solution to the sample question was linguistic. It’s still a programming question (and, in fact, deeply prejudiced towards a particular language), but the point is people without a certain kind of linguistic framework can’t be taught to solve it.
Throws LacunaException
I found this old Jeff Atwood post (yes, it’s because it was linked from so-called “Hacker News,” okay?) about the apparent intractability of teaching programming, based on an academic paper. The upshot is that 1) some (and perhaps a majority of) people are simply incapable of coming to grips with programming and 2) these people seem to derive almost no benefit of any kind from programming coursework.
An example of a question that can be used to determine if someone will get anything out of studying program is presented:
Read the following statements and tick the box next to the correct answer.int a = 10; int b = 20; a = b;
The new values of a and b are:
- [ ] a = 20 b = 0
- [ ] a = 20 b = 20
- [ ] a = 0 b = 10
- [ ] a = 10 b = 10
- [ ] a = 30 b = 20
- [ ] a = 30 b = 0
- [ ] a = 10 b = 30
- [ ] a = 0 b = 30
- [ ] a = 10 b = 20
- [ ] a = 20 b = 10
So people throw out a whole lot of explanations for this in comments and inevitably devolves into “teachers suck” because everyone on the internet is such a fucking precious snowflake, but I’m not going to get sidetracked by that, because then I’ll just get depressed and never get to the point.
Which is: the reason this information confuses people is that they think that variable assignment is confusing because it’s a mathematical abstraction, but this isn’t true. Variable assignment, and a number of similar concepts that you need to wrap your head around in programming are confusing because they are linguistic abstractions, and linguistic prejudices are confusing and difficult to override (or, as is apparent here, even identify) because they develop than people tend to think they would, and so much work goes into preserving them. Understanding computers requires one to assume intuitively (although not consciously) that meaning is pretty arbitrary, which is arguably the single most important step to understanding (again, often in a pre/non/sub-conscious way) how to interact with the rules whereby meaning is generated.
Sensitive Crimes in a Punt
So since my recent reference to it, I have been hankering to reread “Motifs.” It’s true that I often find myself thinking this, but I often fail to get around to it, plus it’s a pretty rich vein, as evidenced by the fact that I came away with some new stuff this time around.
In the past I have tended to focus on the stuff that can be traced fairly explicitly to “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The consciousness divided between perceiving and obscuring, the shattered shield, that sort of thing. This time I was more caught up in the processes of retrieval and ritual. When I was at Hampshire I sort of dismissed Benjamin in favor of Adorno, and I think that even at NYU, where I (along with everyone else) really embraced Benjamin and sort of understood his cultural turn, stayed leery of the stuff that evoked the past too enthusiastically.
Now that I’m an old man I sort of see where some of what he was getting at has to do with the fact that it’s easier to create your own culture in rituals when you have fewer external factors to deal with. Feeling straitjacketed by circumstance, I wonder if there is some sort of madeleine that I might require as well. There’s something to understanding that there was a nature that one was invoking.
Of course, you don’t want to go too far along that path. Just as you’re about to to say “There did I live” about the “breakers, rolling the images of the sky” you get to the stuff about photography and remember that Benjamin was a sentimental Luddite. Still, it’s good to let yourself get to the pretty part and not focus too much on stuff like “Even though chronology places regularity above permanence, it cannot prevent heterogeneous, conspicuous fragments from remaining within it.”
Parrying His Own Tweets
One of the stops on my busy Thanksgiving sojourn was Matthew’s, where he and his mother attempted to coerce C’s experiences into a narrative about how texting is rotting the delicate minds of the youth of America, and god only knows what else. During the discussion I took it upon myself to point out that adults weren’t any less susceptible to the compulsions of constant phonography, but because that was orthogonal to what they were trying to get C to say it only held anyone’s attention as fleetingly as a “LOL” sent via text message.
I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.
This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.
–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.
The Stupid Past, The Stupid Future
I gave up on reading Great Expectations. The sanctimony overcame the quirky humor, and I couldn’t be bothered to keep track of what was going on any more. Now I’m reading Wuthering Heights, mostly because of Hark, a Vagrant. It’s way better, although every single character is totally fucking loathsome. Almost as bad as Austen, in that regard.
Speaking of loathsome, the previously observed race to the bottom of the Facebook-UI-emulation barrel continues apace with Gmail and WordPress’ control panel being the latest things that I use to become completely fucking horrible. It’s enough to make me hope that rich fucks do in the global economy completely so I’ll be too poor to see it get any worse.
American Christians: “I Ain’t Rendering Shit to Caesar!”
Here is a delightful conflation of prejudice and rights. If your beliefs prevent you from performing your job, you accepted that job in bad faith. This kind of equivocation is disgusting, and I hope she gets the sacking she richly deserves over it.
Wall-terfall
In a recent phone conversation with a friend I was chided gently (or, to be fair, tacitly) for not involving myself in a conversation that he begun via the medium of facebook. Of course, the obvious response to something like this is to adapt the disdainful tone of the habitual Facebook-abstainer, but I think it may be worth considering what I don’t like about it, especially as its popularity has allowed its design principles to cast their baleful influence far and wide.
Leaving the whole content issue aside, the “wall” format that FB copped off of Twitter a few years ago is hell on conversations. The stream of detritus that it represents encourages only the briefest and more cursory interactions, and furthermore encourages monitoring to such an extent that taking time out to string more than a glib aside together prevents its use as intended. Topics are not to be stepped into, they are to be waved at as they go by.
I think that there’s a real false sense here that seeing everything go by constitutes a grasp on the world. The fact that the internet has made everyone a bogoexpert on every subject in existence has been fairly widely noted, and this sort of info-consolidation encourages that no end. Nobody bothers to remember that actually knowing about a particular thing and using it as a lens is the best option a human being has available for real comprehension.
Wikipedia Continues Efforts to be Totally Useless to Computer People
Not long ago some exuberant Wikipedian got rid of the articles for a bunch of non-mainstream computer languages. Now someone has nominated and incredibly famous Perl hacker for deletion. The new motto of the Wikipedia editor is “If I have flung my poop far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants, whose articles I then nominated for deletion.”