another frustrating learner question, CLOS
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From: ccc31807 on 26 Feb 2010 10:48 On Feb 26, 10:18 am, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > There is nothing in your post to indicate that your environment was > corrupted in any way. Occam's razor suggests "confused user" instead > of "corrupted environment". I admit to being a confused user. I corrupted the environment, not realizing it, and confused myself. That's why I posted the question ... to get help in unconfusing myself. > You have been asking questions here about Lisp for about half a year, > you got this far with learning it, and you have been teaching people > programming? I've been asking questions here for several years. I don't have a lot of time, and Lisp is just a hobby at this point. I'm just an amateur, but I don't expect criticism for being an amateur. As to teaching, about ten years ago I worked at a junior college teaching C++, Perl, JavaScript, and HTML. I've been on both ends of the confused user equation, and learning is a lot easier if the learner has someone handy who can unconfuse him. > I am lost for words. Good. > There are plenty of good guides, many of them are free. PCL is an > example. Given the array of excellent Lisp books, Lisp tutorials, and > other resources, complaining about the lack of a "guide" is ... (no, I > don't want to complete the sentence). When I said a 'guide' I meant a human being who could look at your work and teach in real time. In this case, instead of wasting a couple of hours and becoming frustrated, a 'guide' might have suggested checking the names of functions that I had previously used. Unfortunately, a self taught person usually has an idiot for a teacher. CC.
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 26 Feb 2010 11:04 ccc31807 <cartercc(a)gmail.com> writes: > Unfortunately, a self taught person usually has an idiot for a > teacher. You're calling idiots all the great professors who wrote the books he reads, all the great teachers who wrote the tutorials on the web he reads, and so on. Thanks for them. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 26 Feb 2010 11:14 ccc31807 <cartercc(a)gmail.com> writes: > Unfortunately, a self taught person usually has an idiot for a > teacher. You're calling idiots all the great professors who wrote the books he reads, all the great teachers who wrote the tutorials on the web he reads, and so on. Thanks for them. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 26 Feb 2010 11:20 ccc31807 <cartercc(a)gmail.com> writes: > On Feb 25, 6:08�pm, Ron Garret <rNOSPA...(a)flownet.com> wrote: >> That rumbling sound you hear is Erik Naggum rolling over in his grave. >> >> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/fc76ebab1cb2f863 > > What if committing the dirty hack is the solution to the problem? Like > processing a data file in a one time script? The meat of Erik message is that the problems that have this kind of solution are not problems worth to be solved, but problems worth to be rendered unrelevant. > Why spend an hour writing > an elegant, maintainable program when all you need is a one liner that > you will never need again? Because it is a sure sign, says Erik, as you'd know if you'd read his post, that you will keep having to write such one-liners, that this problem will keep occuring. > True, the one liner will be ugly, obtuse, > unreadable, unmaintainable, but if it does the job quickly and easily, > why use something that is hard and slow? Because if god had made us to write perl one liners, he would have fitted us with a USB link to the computer. > If you need a puree, you run the food through the food processor, and > the incredibly brain damaged hash tables and syntactic sadomasochism > is simply the form of the processor. I'll agree in a heartbeat that a > block of Perl code can look like line noise, particularly if it > involves regular expressions and hash references (which it usually > does), but Perl's facility of > (1) providing a powerful tool for pattern recognition, matching, and > replacement, and > (2) providing sophisticated and very finely grained data structures > makes life easy WHEN THE USE OF THESE TOOLS IS APPROPRIATE TO THE JOB! You've not understood the first word of Erik's Message. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: ccc31807 on 26 Feb 2010 12:16
On Feb 26, 11:04 am, p...(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > > Unfortunately, a self taught person usually has an idiot for a > > teacher. > > You're calling idiots all the great professors who wrote the books he > reads, all the great teachers who wrote the tutorials on the web he > reads, and so on. Thanks for them. Lighten up, Pascal. I didn't way that self taught persons were idiots, but that USUALLY their teachers were idiots. I didn't call great minds idiots -- there is a difference between learning the subject, and advancement in knowledge by investigation, research, observation, theorization, etc. Indeed, the scientific method is based on ignorance, which is why we collect data, analyze it, formulate an explanation, experiment in an attempt to falsify the explanation, collect the data from the experiment, and iterate. I don't know Lisp, I want to learn, so I choose a teacher but the teacher I choose doesn't know Lisp either. Maybe I made the choice for a very good reason, such as the lack of other teachers, but that doesn't make the teacher knowledgeable. Again, a self taught person usually has an idiot for a teacher. I'll stand by that. CC. |