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Of course those starting at the bolting together of significant blobs may learn their way down to the more fundamental levels too as they start to dig into the

Of course those starting at the bolting together of significant blobs may learn their way down to the more fundamental levels too as they start to dig into the libraries that they use and even down into the languages. I don't take a particular view on which is the better way. The distance from the fundamentals up to something superficially impressive seems a very long way to me. So I think probably the realistic approach for most will be to start of the bolt things together and then discover a desire to understand the fundamentals. I think to start at the fundamentals end needs a lot of patience but it probably suits those intolerant of magic.

innguest 12y ago
I think to start at the fundamentals end needs a lot of patience but it probably suits those intolerant of magic. Very well said; I'm one of those people and that's what drove me from Ruby to Haskell - Ruby and its frameworks are all very magical and don't seem to hinge on any common foundation other than the intricate details of Ruby's object model, which is not a satisfactory set of principles, but an arbitrary set of rules. On the other hand, while Haskell is several times harder for it, it does eventually quench the thirst to connect every new thing I learn with the foundational things I already know (and which are in fact a set of simple rules - lambda calculus).