Timeline for Driven to Abstraction
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 16, 2022 at 3:34 | comment | added | Scott Rowe | Your Answer is the only one that referred to levels. My whole question was about the point where one kind of thing links to another kind of thing, where "greenness disappears". That's what is meant by Science, everything else is just blithering. | |
| Jan 16, 2022 at 3:17 | comment | added | Rushi | @ScottRowe : Heh! An accept!! And for an answer that was not meant to be an answer. But maybe it can become one?? As I was musing above maybe I "CW it" (community wiki). And then everyone can express their "special level" from the place of their own passion? More at meta... | |
| Jan 15, 2022 at 21:42 | vote | accept | Scott Rowe | ||
| Jan 12, 2022 at 18:34 | comment | added | Scott Rowe | @BenI. Maybe the Frank Herbert quote "In lieu of red tape" should be applied to runaway development of computer systems. I did say that there is NO magic, and so any mysterious aspects should be explained. | |
| Jan 12, 2022 at 15:05 | comment | added | Rushi |
(cont) See this "old joke". OTOH what @ScottRowe does get better than most but communicates more emotively is that we are in a mess with all this ill-thought-through abstraction. Right now Ive spent half a day grappling with this: firefox refuses to open local files. And with a strange File not found error. Turns out ubuntu has moved firefox from apt to snap -- a new snazzy shiny abstraction which loves me so dearly it treats me as my own intruder! Dozens of such glorious progresses I - or anyone -- could recount...
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| Jan 12, 2022 at 15:03 | comment | added | Rushi | @Ben I guess the larger meta(😈) point Scott is making is that we teachers dont bother enough this sense of magic. In fact a teacher passionate about some level would/could convey the magic of that level for any/every level. What Scott doggedly does not get (as Buffy and others said) is that the "physical level" is only physical into-quotes: there are no gates, just transistors, no transistors/wires as the schematic shows, just a doped silicon wafer. I was actually contemplating making a CW answer with sense of magic(s) which I can imagine. And others fill others. 3 answers! A bit much😎 | |
| Jan 12, 2022 at 14:05 | comment | added | Ben I.♦ | My "special level" is at the digital logic level. Once I saw everything move to booleans, it all connected for me. And in particular, it was the carry adder that was my big a-ha moment. @ScottRowe's special level still left everything feeling like magic to me, because it didn't answer the basic questions about physicality. What was memory? How did a command happen? How could a computer even receive a "command"? How could a computer manipulate numbers when it only had wires? | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 18:06 | comment | added | Rushi | If @ScottRowe says modern computer (teaching) has taken away the fun the mystery, I have to agree ... somewhat reluctantly | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 18:00 | comment | added | Rushi | And that kinda proves ScottRowe's point @solomonslow. There is point where it's as though the rubber hits the road -- you can hear the scream, smell the sulphur. We are all explaining it away rather than conveying the magic. For me a giddy point was scheme when I wrote functions taking and returning functions. And used that to actually grade my students without variables | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 17:48 | comment | added | Solomon Slow | @ScottRowe, My "special level" was the gate level. I have an armchair understanding of what MOSFETs and relays do. BJTs are magic, but I understand how they can be combined to make logic gates. Once I dug down the the point where I understood how to build a rudimentary computer out of NAND gates, I felt like I "knew" how a computer worked. OTOH, modern, high-performance, multi-core, super-scalar, desktop/server/mobile-device CPUs are pure magic as far as I know, and I am content to write out magic spells (Python, Java, and C++ code) that summon them to do my dark bidding. | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 16:56 | comment | added | Scott Rowe | @SolomonSlow Thank you. For me the important point is where the program level affects the physical world level. The goal is to reveal how the magic works. Then it's not magic anymore. Above there are levels, yes, and below there are levels, but right at that interface is the part that really demands an explanation. How a computer is different from everything else. Didn't you want to know that somewhere early on? Did you wait patiently for someone to get around to explaining it? | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 16:13 | comment | added | Rushi | Also I dont know a fig about solid state physics; though I studied some quantum physics in college. ie the knowledge is usually scattered hole-y. And I add C++ with some reservations... Dont believe OOP is much good to anybody-- students, teachers, professionals -- but C++ gives some things independent of OOP | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 16:13 | comment | added | Rushi | @SolomonSlow Well one could add one more list upwards: Assembly, C, C++, Haskell, Idris, Lean. And (speaking for myself) my comfort zone ends below Idris. Between Idris (etc) and Lean (etc) the level gap is really special (IMHO) -- the Turing computable level. So its more like we inhabit a comfort zone neighborhood : lowest level I consider relevant to highest level grokkable to my wits! | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 15:57 | comment | added | Solomon Slow | Computers work by magic. The "special level" that you talk about is the lowest level that any given person understands. Everything above that special level makes sense, everything below it is magic. Most of us just ignore the magic and get on with our jobs. I think the OP's goal is to bring the student's "special level" down to match his own. They don't need to understand anything at a lower level than that because everything below that level is the magic stuff that he feels comfortable ignoring. | |
| Jan 11, 2022 at 15:46 | history | answered | Rushi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |