I'm starting to believe that people who disagree with your sentiments described here simply don't get it yet (I, for one, agree with just about everything you said). I don't mean that as a put-down and I don't mean that condescendingly. We're all learning at our own pace. But I think you are correct. Thanks for sharing this.
First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
#12The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
-Edsger Dijkstra
Re: First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
#13The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer. -Edsger Dijkstra
IMO use of abstractions is vital to any profession, not just programming. This is because of how the human brain is structured: we can only hold 5-9 things in our working memory at any time. In order to tackle more complex concepts, we have to chunk several basic ideas into one theory, which is a big part (though not the only part) of what abstraction is all about.
Re: First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
#14Great article right up until the last sentence. If anything moves a scientist to prayer, he has been mislabeled.
Re: First Blog Post: Abstractions are Generous
#15Great article right up until the last sentence. If anything moves a scientist to prayer, he has been mislabeled.
'Atheist' is not a prerequisite for 'rational', as much as many atheists like to pretend this is the case. I don't personally 'get' prayer, nor do I practice it despite my Catholic upbringing, but I can see how the practice might be psychologically comforting. It's basically an acknowledgement of not having complete control or knowledge.
The thing about prayer that most people don't get is it's just a form of meditation. A lot of people think that it's just saying a bunch of words, others that it's just a conversation with God. It can be the latter and you can extract value from that if you believe but, in the sense of the former, it's never this.
If you think about repeating Hail Mary on rosary beads for n amount of times, this becomes very similar to other Eastern forms of meditation, notably the Hare Krishna mantra. The key is the clearing of the mind and focusing on the mantra.
I don't agree with many of the practices in Catholicism, having also been raised one myself, but I can certainly see the parallels in prayer with meditation as a whole. If you get meditation, prayer becomes easier to understand.