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> I would also have a hardtime processing/registering something if I'm not able to derive it analytically from first principles. I still find it easier to unde

> I would also have a hardtime processing/registering something if I'm not able to derive it analytically from first principles. I still find it easier to understand something if I understand it from the ground up instead of in an ad-hoc way. For example, I found it easier to reason about probability once I had seen a rigorous definition for what a probability distribution is. I guess the reason is that it gives me a way to sanity check my intuition. I still struggle with the fact that in software development, you get hundreds of technologies thrown at you and you barely have any time to understand them all fully. It makes me sometimes feel not very confident in what I do. I feel that I could understand e.g. Kubernetes better, if I had real in-depth (not just superficial) knowledge about networking. A lot of the time I'm just missing crucial information like "what problem are we trying to solve?", "why does this technology work the way it works?", etc. Something like Kafka is another example.

hyperthesis 3y ago
I had a hardtime remembering if I didn't understand. But I tried an experiment at uni (once...) to learn a subject solely by rote. I could typically recall about 7 out of 10 items. I was astonished I could do it at all. Unfortunately, I lost all my usual strengths in that subject: unable to generalize, unable to justify, unable to adapt. Re: software technologies: non-leaky abstractions are the way to understand without details. Algebras are a great example: arithmetic, concatenation, boolean, Kleene, relational. Although they still leak (overflow, PCRE, etc), an idealized core plus ad-hoc crap beats all-crap. jq has an algebra of , and | operators (though it doesn't call it that) \aside git: I wonder if git internals can be interpreted as an algebra (absent in UI)? TBF I tried to design a programming language around git internal operations (tree navigation and construction), but it was tedious to use. Maybe something analogous to a declarative SQL over relational algbra would solve this?

hyperthesis 3y ago

I had a hardtime remembering if I didn't understand. But I tried an experiment at uni (once...) to learn a subject solely by rote. I could typically recall about 7 out of 10 items. I was astonished I could do it at all. Unfortunately, I lost all my usual strengths in that subject: unable to generalize, unable to justify, unable to adapt. Re: software technologies: non-leaky abstractions are the way to understand without details. Algebras are a great example: arithmetic, concatenation, boolean, Kleene, relational. Although they still leak (overflow, PCRE, etc), an idealized core plus ad-hoc crap beats all-crap. jq has an algebra of , and | operators (though it doesn't call it that) \aside git: I wonder if git internals can be interpreted as an algebra (absent in UI)? TBF I tried to design a programming language around git internal operations (tree navigation and construction), but it was tedious to use. Maybe something analogous to a declarative SQL over relational algbra would solve this?