11–20 of 68 posts
I think in English. Whenever I'm thinking about a problem, my solutions are immediately described in my head at a high level. This allows me to rapidly iterate over the solution space without having to venture down into the pseudocode or code level until I've found something I'm convinced will actually work.
Apart from that I prefer to think in images.
-The Matrix 1999
Ask Lazyweb about my blog's new design... that's like using the crowd as a source of wisdom... crowdsourcing... OMG I invented a new word wait check urbandictionary... oh cool I'm getting answers... upvote... hmm this submission is tangentially related to my blog, i'll promote it in the comments... upvote... hmm should I change my profile from 'social media expert' to 'social media genius'? Too forward? Oooh one of my older tweets is getting retweeted... Follower count... damn, just got rickrolled again! Hmm the world is moving to Twitter... it's a killer of something... subscriptions... RSS... hmm there's a photo of me that isn't tagged, let's come up with a clever nickname for myself in that tag... RSS Killer... means RSS is dead... Email alert... new follower! w00t fellow social media expert... I'll follow her too... doesn't seem as smart as me though... oh shit, it's Follow Friday! who's mentioned me? who's mentioned me? hmm I need a "10 Things" post to submit to Digg... 10 Things I like about you... funny movie, who was that actress? check imdb... is it in my Netflix queue? Oooh shiny funny new failblog post... I wonder what's new in the app store...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It depends on the situation, but I generally think in terms of pure functions and types. " This resonates. I think in a weird pseudocode myself and after getting a grip on type theory I find I think in typed weird pseudocode.
Well, I think it's reasonably intuitive to think that way. It basically involves asking yourself the questions - "what types of values am I interested in?" "what types of results do I expect?" and finally "how do I get from input to output?" I think most programmers probably think it reasonably similar terms - it's just that having working in STLC or a high-level functional language gives you some mental machinery th…
This is what we are really talking about when we claim that reading, e.g., SICP will make you a better programmer even if you don't work in Lisp.
SICP is not a book about Scheme. It's a book about computation that happens to use Scheme. And it is resolutely abstract, encouraging you to think in non-linguistic terms. One of the bits I remember best was near the beginning, when they talk about the shapes of computational processes -- iterative processes have a different shape from recursive processes. Now I use that sort of mental picture all the time.
The goal is to think about software like a mathematician thinks about math. If you're thinking in a language, it's like the way I thought about math when I was nine years old -- to the extent that I knew what a mathematician was, I thought it was someone who was really really good at the long division algorithm. Someone who could subtract really fast!