another frustrating learner question, CLOS
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From: Duane Rettig on 26 Feb 2010 12:38 On Feb 25, 6:56 am, ccc31807 <carte...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Feb 25, 9:31 am, Zach Beane <x...(a)xach.com> wrote: > > > Blaming gods is a great way to absolve yourself of responsibility and > > avoid learning from your actions. > > Are you serious? Or are you saying this with tongue firmly planted in > cheek? (I was attempting levity, which probably wasn't evident.) > > > You accumulated state in your system that interfered with its normal > > operation, and you fixed it by restarting from a clean state. This is a > > drastic but sometimes effective problem-solving technique, and can be > > the easiest thing to do when you don't yet know how to inspect and > > manipulate the system's accumulated state to get it back in order. > > Yeah, it took me about three microseconds to figure this out. That's > not the answer, and it's certainly not the question, but at least I > learned that this is a problem you can have, which isn't a problem in > my normal working environments. > > > No gods were involved in the making or solving of this problem. > > They were either the programming gods, or the programming fairies, or > the programming elves. There is simply no explanation other than > supernatural beings who interact with humans in an arbitrary and > capricious manner, making logic, reason, and science totally > illogical, unreasonable, and unscientific. ;-) I came from a hardware background; I usually attribute unexplained behaviors to Gamma Rays. > > worth preserving, anyway. Now that I know better, I feel fine about > > building up important state on my Linux systems and have confidence in > > my ability to recover from accidents without starting completely from > > scratch. > > In my experience, a lesson really isn't driven home (as opposed to > just learning it) until it has been validated in the school of > practical experience. This has happened to me in the past, it will > happen in the future, and now I can began to explain it and develop > strategies to deal with it. It's all part of learning to use a new > language. If you really base your knowledge on first-hand experience, then I feel sorry for you; you will then never stand on the shoulders of giants, because of your need to be firmly grounded in first-hand experience. Being grounded isn't always a Good Thing. Duane
From: ccc31807 on 26 Feb 2010 12:55 On Feb 26, 11:20 am, p...(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > > 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. So you build a tool kit to render this kind of problem irrelevant, and you name the tool kit 'Perl.' > > 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. That's what I do all day, every day, because management needs reports, reports generated from data, reports that have to be prepared from raw data files. For standard reports, you put them in a script to generate them automatically. For non-standard reports, you write a quick one- liner, or a short ten line script. There's no way you can make a one- size-fits-all solution, unless your name happens to be Procrustus. > > 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. ;-) > You've not understood the first word of Erik's Message. That's because it was a non-sensical, irrational rant. It's kind of hard to derive meaning from the meaningless. CC.
From: Duane Rettig on 26 Feb 2010 12:57 On Feb 26, 8:04 am, p...(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) wrote: > ccc31807 <carte...(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. I think not. If you were to go to the great professors (they might be "professors" in teaching institutions or "profess-ors" of a particular discipline), most would tell you, if they're honest, that they would not have been able to provide such teaching material if it had not been for one or more mentors in their field got them to the point where they could then make further inroads to the same field. The poster to whom you are responding is looking for a mentor, and is rightly stating that he is not that person for himself. Thanks for them. Well, I do agree with this. Duane
From: Tim Bradshaw on 26 Feb 2010 13:02 On 2010-02-26 16:04:54 +0000, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > 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. You need a better parser and probably some more bits of precision. Hint: "usually".
From: Tamas K Papp on 26 Feb 2010 13:04
On Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:55:44 -0800, ccc31807 wrote: > On Feb 26, 11:20 am, p...(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon) > wrote: >> You've not understood the first word of Erik's Message. > > That's because it was a non-sensical, irrational rant. It's kind of hard > to derive meaning from the meaningless. It is a coherent and well-reasoned (if emotional) piece of writing about an important issue. You may not agree with its conclusion, but calling it non-sensical just because you don't appear to understand it is certainly not justified. Tamas |