----- Original Message -----
From: "K. K. Subramaniam" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Cc: "BGB" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 9:47 PM
Subject: Re: [fonc] goals
On Wednesday 14 Jul 2010 9:25:11 am BGB wrote:
there is much emphasis on people understanding an entire system, whereas
often a programmer does not need to have such comprehensive
understanding.
I like the way Dan Ingalls introduced his design principles in the article
quoted earlier:
"The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for
the
creative spirit in everyone"
As you point out, most of the daily grind requires only a superficial
understanding of concepts. But creative endeavors involve grand leaps of
thought that require a much greater depth of understanding - one that cuts
across subjects and looks beyond vocabulary.
The current generation of computing is sufficient for the first set of
tasks. I
hope FONC is geared for the latter.
BTW, the use of metaphors like deep or grand leap do have a basis in
wirings
in our brain. See references to long-distance connectivity in:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=idle-minds-intelligence
hmm, thinking here...
not sure how this relates to the article, but seems to me about right.
well, a further distinction can be made:
low volume deep thinking;
vs high-volume superficial thinking.
like, a person skilled in low-volume deep thinking would tend to notice many
subtleties, and maybe make a lot of "deeper" connections, but may easily bog
down in other situations (like, say, they have to mentally keep track of the
behaviors of a large number of people, or respond to lots of questions and
jump between several different conversations, and quickly change between
performing multiple tasks possibly at the same time).
a person more skilled in high-volume thinking will do these types of tasks
easily, but may be easily defeated by a task involving only a small number
of items with non-trivial interactions (or may feel cramped and frustrated
being expected to sit in one place and think about a single task for more
than a short period of time...).
or, in analogy to art:
a person can spend many days working on a single piece of artwork, examining
and adjusting many little details for maximum aesthetic affect;
another person can produce many pieces of artwork in a single day, examining
and adjusting many little details of their process for maximum efficiency
and volume.
even though both are artists, they would have notably different abilities
and skillsets, and neither could likely effectively do the job of the other.
the low-volume artist would likely feel bewildered if expected to produce,
say, 25 images in an 8 hour shift;
the high-volume artist would likely feel lost in trying to make an image
that looked like much more than something out of a comic book...
one might try to draw a person posing by some vines and a lamp-post, putting
much effort into the reflections on the glass and metal, and on the shimmer
of the water on the lake in the background.
the other might try to draw a person right in the middle of being blown
apart by machine-gun fire from a large robot with chunks partly detached and
in the (implied) process of flying off. their idea then of improving the
aesthetics is to start putting sparks on the ground and spent bullet casings
on the ground near the robot, and then they lose direction after approx 30
minutes or so...
something sort of like this could also matter WRT programming language
preferences as well...
then again, it could also be related to psychology as well (not sure, like
where people in different tempermants and using different cognitive
functions would likely fall on these sorts of scales).
or such...
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