On Tue, 14 Jun 2016 17:35:52 +0200
Irrwahn <irrwahn@???> wrote:


> At the moment, at least to me, it unfortunately looks like he
> refuses to learn _anything_ of what he's being told, up to the
> point I am beginning to have doubts he's not simply trolling.

I can assure you he's not trolling, because I do what he does all the
time. Since I can't speak for Edward, I'll speak for myself for the
rest of this response...

You and I have a difference of beliefs concerning learning. You believe
in foundation-first learning, and I believe in just-in-time learning.
Either works, in the hands of the right practitioner.

How do you traverse a tree of five pointer nodes (parent, nextsibling,
prevsibling, firstchild, lastchild)? You could reverse sort them by
level and traverse deepest first. That's sort of like
foundation-first learning. You could traverse from the top, down before
across (like recursion). That's sort of like just-in-time learning. You
could even do recursion but skip the dive into (currently) uninteresting
nodes, postponing learning them til there's a need. That's how I learn,
and how I teach others to learn in my Rapid Learning books.

All these approaches, whether in code or in learning, are useful in some
situations. You have decades of C, and perhaps knew C would be your
major career, so you had time to learn the foundations. On the other
hand, I was always a hired gun writing the software the client wanted
in the language he wanted, so I had to learn quick. Also, I have a
feeling that your memory is both broader and longer lasting than mine.
There are only so many fundamentals I can remember.

It feels like Edward's trolling because his actions are completely
counter to your beliefs, but in my opinion it's just a different in
beliefs.

By the way, Edward, I've found that the most productive way to do what
you and I do is to use Google and man pages before asking, and when
people make suggestions pertaining to your current project, try them
out and get back to the list.

This is a pretty cool group, and I think discussions like this one make
us sharper every day.

SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2016 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb