3 ms·
Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing Doing With your hands. Seeing in reality. Getting burned with the soldering iron. Smelling the flux. Hea
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Lasting and solid foundations are made by experiencing
Doing With your hands. Seeing in reality. Getting burned with the
soldering iron. Smelling the flux. Hearing the signals and seeing them
on the oscilloscope. We need presence, feeling, the ownership of
knowledge as personal experience, not vicarious hand-me-down accounts
or diagrams.
As a kid I wired up NAND gates and transistors. When it came to logic
it felt like there was something tangible I could reach out and touch
through tactile imagination. Building a computer from chips,
wire-wrapping hundreds of connections to a 68000, RAM and EEPROM chips
took a whole summer. After that I could see a data-bus and an
address-bus. I know what they feel, and smell like. I got good at
patching dataflow DSP because 20 years earlier I spent hours in the
studio patching analogue synths.
Descartes Error is a book by Antonio Damasio [1] that talks about the
weakness of purely rationalist epistemology. The foundation is laid
long before we are even aware of knowing and learning. That book had
an influence on me to understanding cognitive activity as embodied.
This is why we need to let kids fix bikes, fall off skateboards and
climb trees. It's why giving them tablets and chromebooks instead of
things that get their hands dirty is no good.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/100151-descartes-error-emotion-reason-and-the-human-brain https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/100151-descartes-error...
- galaxyLogic 4y agoI think that is the reason why I prefer to develop software by debugging. I can "see it in action". So "debugging" is not just about getting rid of bugs, but having a better view of your software as it exists when it executes. Just reading the source-code doesn't give as good of a view at all. Source-code is like circuit-diagrams, debugging is like plugging in power to it.
- agumonkey 4y agominsky used the null program trick IIRC. start directly in the debugger :) at my job we spend an awful lot of time trying to set up things se we can see what's going on
- agumonkey 4y agoYou mention physical electronics. After the raspberry pi wave I dabbled into electronics, thinking I would have an easy time, boy was I wrong :) There are so many things even for the tiniest circuit. And yeah even soldering is a sophisticated piece of knowledge with moving parts everywhere (alloy, flux, iron, board geometry and layers, ground planes) and you quickly get a sense of: I need to KNOW how to solve this good and fast. Not just "just use that tool and maybe it will work". It went to the point of rewiring how I approach software.
- xmprt 4y agoMinecraft has been an incredible educational tool in the last 5-10 years and you're doing yourself a disservice by dismissing it so quickly.
- meristohm 4y agoMinecraft is even better if a person has some experience with physically moving dirt.