The purpose of C++ template generics only made sense to me after I started using Haskell.
Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
191–200 of 946 posts
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#192the null concept being referred to as “the billion dollars mistake” - until discovering optionals and gradually opening up to FP, category theory, etc
The “billion dollar mistake” was not the null concept itself, it was having all reference types be nullable, i.e no distinction between nullable and non-nullable in the type system.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#193Parenthood. Now I see how much my mom was right, but couldn't put things in proper words.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#194YAGNI and KISS. When I was a junior developer I used to overthink and overdesign solutions, most of which was never needed. It took many years and a lot of battle scars to realize that less abstraction is more. Today I see a lot of juniors do the same mistake and I ask them to revise their designs to keep it simple.
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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#195Domain Driven Design. The book by Eric Evans lays out a bunch of concepts and as a developer that had not owned the architecture of a big domain, it was hard for me to see exactly where they fit. But after reading the book a couple times, and then encountering a few tricky domain modeling challenges, I started to see where these patterns add value. Also, as I started trying to describe the cohesive domain architectur…
This is the book by Eric Evans?
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#1961. Everyone is the main character in their own story.
This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing.
2. Representation matters.
I knew this for a long time, but it didn't fully click until years had gone by and I realized I had unconsciously held myself back from pursuing a wide range of things because I just didn't see anyone like me there.
3. Rules in life are just constructs that we as humans have created.
Starting a business helped the most on this one. That's when I started to see that "rules" or "procedure" are all made up and exceptions can always be made.
(Edit: typos)
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#197Matrix multiplication. First encountered it in high school, where the textbooks presented matrices without any real motivation, and matrix multiplication just seemed like a weirdly-defined operation. Once I got to linear algebra in college and matrix multiplication was presented as the way to compose linear transformations, it made a lot more sense.
It took me taking a class in neural networks in my thirties to really understand matrix multiplication
I did a fairly rigorous linear algebra course in school, and it went over my head despite passing it.
Saw it explained in a single slide of Andrew Ng's ML course and everything clicked perfectly.
Where I lived math was taught like fucking shit, it was all algebra and zero context as to why it could be useful in real-life scenarios, zero abstraction such as visualization or metaphor. Everyone involved in concocting that pedagogic aberration should feel terrible about it.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#198Basic music theory. Almost no one I encountered bothered to actually explain anything. They simply regurgitated things and I guess expected me to somehow intuitively understand something or other.
Sadly, mathematics classes are like that as well. Instructors start throwing equations on the board, expecting us to somehow connect it all together. The best math textbook (Theory of Algebra) I ever read had little sections about the person who revealed a particular subject, why they were studying it, and how the subject is used.
Sadly many professors fall victim to the Curse of Knowledge. It doesn't help they need to follow a tight schedule and intuition isn't something you can develop in a single lecture. I suppose self-study and repetition is the most likely solution.
>The best math textbook (Theory of Algebra) I ever read had little sections about the person who revealed a particular subject, why they were studying it, and how the subject is used.
I've found the best type of books provide motivation for concepts, how they have evolved, etc.
Take Computer Science for example, many of its concepts were area of research for decades but from a student's perspective it seems these concepts were always here instead of being constantly refined until the states they're now in.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#199YAGNI and KISS. When I was a junior developer I used to overthink and overdesign solutions, most of which was never needed. It took many years and a lot of battle scars to realize that less abstraction is more. Today I see a lot of juniors do the same mistake and I ask them to revise their designs to keep it simple.
I use the rule of threes to kill off any premature abstractions. ie. Don’t think you need to make this generic if you have one or two different variants of it. Most often it’s one- so it’s very easy to see that you’re just solving imaginary problems at this point.
Each abstraction has a mental cost for reading and understanding the code so I try to be sparing. Too many code bases in my youth were a nightmare to navigate because I could never find any actual concrete code.
Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?
#200The purpose of C++ template generics only made sense to me after I started using Haskell.
I have to agree. I couldn't understand templates until Haskell introduced me to it. But Haskell is expressive enough that the intuition comes naturally.