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Is there really no demand? Or do those of us who like to learn that way just get used to researching these things ourselves so quietly get on with it. Many of t

Is there really no demand? Or do those of us who like to learn that way just get used to researching these things ourselves so quietly get on with it. Many of the existing tutorials are at least a good starting point to teach engineers what topics they need to examine in more detail. Anecdotally, when I've mentored juniors engineers I've had no shortage of people ask me "why" when I've explain concepts at a high level; them preferring I start at the bottom and work my way up. So I quite believe there could be an untapped demand out there.

nrabulinski 5y ago
There’s a difference between understanding something and learning how and why it works the way it does. You can understand how a compilation pipeline works never working with any low-level code and never writing a compiler yourself. You can walk across a bridge and understand it connects point A with point B and don’t understand how a specific bridge has to be constructed. A concrete implementation is just an implementation detail and if you focus too much on it you’ll get tunnel-visioned instead of understanding the concept behind it EDIT: And I say that as someone who likes both learning and teaching from the ground-up. But there’s no demand for it because that’s not how you efficiently learn the concepts and understand the basics so you can take a deeper dive yourself
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  > you’ll get tunnel-visioned instead of understanding the concept behind it You might have gotten tunnel-visioned but it's not a problem I've suffered from when learning this way. And why do you think I cannot understand the concept behind the code after reading the code? If anything, I take the understanding I've grokked from that reference implementation and then compare it against other implementations. Compare usages. And then compare that back to the original docs. But usually I require reading the code before I understand what the docs are describing (maybe this is due my dyslexia?) Remember when I said everyone's brain is wired differently? Well there's a lot of people today trying to tell me they understand how my brain works better than I understand it. Which is a little patronising tbh.

nrabulinski 5y ago

There’s a difference between understanding something and learning how and why it works the way it does. You can understand how a compilation pipeline works never working with any low-level code and never writing a compiler yourself. You can walk across a bridge and understand it connects point A with point B and don’t understand how a specific bridge has to be constructed. A concrete implementation is just an implementation detail and if you focus too much on it you’ll get tunnel-visioned instead of understanding the concept behind it EDIT: And I say that as someone who likes both learning and teaching from the ground-up. But there’s no demand for it because that’s not how you efficiently learn the concepts and understand the basics so you can take a deeper dive yourself

hnlmorg 5y ago
> you’ll get tunnel-visioned instead of understanding the concept behind it You might have gotten tunnel-visioned but it's not a problem I've suffered from when learning this way. And why do you think I cannot understand the concept behind the code after reading the code? If anything, I take the understanding I've grokked from that reference implementation and then compare it against other implementations. Compare usages. And then compare that back to the original docs. But usually I require reading the code before I understand what the docs are describing (maybe this is due my dyslexia?) Remember when I said everyone's brain is wired differently? Well there's a lot of people today trying to tell me they understand how my brain works better than I understand it. Which is a little patronising tbh.