On Jun 26, 6:17 am, Gian Uberto Lauri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Children pick up other language without any conscious effort because > either they learn it by using with parents, relatives and friends or > they are involved in a game-like style of learning.
Actually, it's proven that there's a critical period for language learning "coming naturally" that ends around age seven. Children actually have enhanced learning abilities due to brain physiology and plasticity. > T> I know people who find all kinds of vehicles easy to learn but > T> never mastered a bicycle (despite trying). People, plural, as in > T> more than one of them. > > Again, fear, or maybe, some malfunction in the balancing organs. But > fear mainly. You do not see what keeps a bike upright and running, you > have to trust that you can. Oh, come off it. One of those people is a physics professor, who knows the mechanics of gyroscopic stability and things of that nature backwards and forwards. And his sense of balance is fine -- he has no trouble with that except when he's quite drunk. He told me the problem was the bike tipping over before it could get up enough speed to become stable. My own guess being there's a "knack" you may or may not eventually get, for getting past that initial hurdle and getting it up to speed when it becomes stable. Of course, this "knack" isn't something found in any instruction manual. I'm wondering if getting your head around unix arcana is also dependent on an iffy "knack" where you "get it" and somehow know where to look for documentation and problem fixes, despite everything having its own idiosyncratic way, and "get" some sort of workflow trick going, or you don't. Personally, the thing I always found most irritating was the necessary frequent trips to the help. Even when the help was easy to use (itself rare) that's a load of additional task switching and crap. Of course, lots of the time the help was not easy to use. Man pages and anything else viewed on a console, for example -- generally you could not view it side by side with your work, but instead interrupt the work, view it, try to memorize the one next step, go back to your work, perform that next step, back to the help to memorize another step ... that has all the workflow of a backed-up sewer, yet until and unless the commands become second nature it's what you're typically forced to do without a proper GUI. Navigating also being a pain -- generally it's easy to get it to scroll down, or exit; hard but usually possible to scroll up in case you overshoot; and there's some arcane search capability, but it isn't straightforward to use so you can't use it because you'd need to be open to the help for the help viewer or other tool instead of the help you're trying to search, and then your search would come up empty. The searching-help instructions not being in the same help file as the target of your search proves to be the final straw, and you throw up your hands in disgust after going a few rounds with "thetool", "man thetool", and "man man" and make an inch of progress in an hour, most of it spent on typing, scrolling, or memorizing rather than on working with "thetool". Maybe the thing I really, REALLY deplore is simply having 99% of my attention forced to deal with the mechanics of the job and the mechanics of the help viewer and only 1% with the actual content of the job, instead of the other way around. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
