thwak wrote:somehow i must have missed reading where you called me out.
actually that wasnt a reference to you at all-- the proof is i havent known you for a year (at least, i didnt think i have.) however, what follows is great stuff so lets put less significant facts aside for a moment.
FWIW across this past whole year i've tried to ease up and not be so dickish.
thats probably all it will take. getting older will either make that worse or better. im not going to talk about how it used to be for me, but i certainly could.
if you mean well but wind up rubbing everyone's fur the wrong way due to how you put across the message, that's obviously a self-defeating dynamic. That's what I tried to alter, soften, throughout the year after realizing that too often people were reacting as though I'm coming across as "trying to be right" or "trying to win some argument". Case in point: IIRC that's essentially what transpired during the initial thwak+fig bantering posts here in refracta forum.
to be honest, i enjoyed those-- but sometimes it left me wondering if you were indeed trying to win something. actually, it never bothered me if you were per se, it depended on what you were trying to "win." or whether you were being aggressive or just holding very tightly to a position.
We got past that though, or at least I thought so.
i think progress was made. ive been very slow to reply, but not deliberately so. i made absolutely certain to reply to your link, but i think it took two weeks. its been a very unusual month, regardless of the holidays.
Your mission is different from mine, but I sincerely respect your passion. It's sometimes tough to differentiate between 'passion' and emotion.
and it will be used against you sometimes. theres a logic/emotion dichotomy, because the two really dont coexist well (at any given moment,) however some of the most logical people in the world also fold in a great deal of passion. this doesnt stop people from piling on ad hom towards anyone with heart, trying to paint them as fools that cant use any other faculty. (this is really aimed at no particular person-- its just such a common ploy in internet debates.)
Here, my passion is fizzling out, like I'm moving beyond denial and realizing that the significant battle is over and that I've lost. My kids are non-techy icon clickers. In the wake of my refusal to get with the times, not using nor supporting winOS beyond win7, they've moved to using Apple/iphone with little use for any Mad Skillz I might have. "Hi, how's the weather? How's the garden? You haven't pitched any of my STUFFs, right? Good, can you do me a favor and box up ___ and ship it to me? Thanks, dad. Ok, talk to ya next week..."
yeah, i know what thats like. actually neither of the two pregnancies resulted naturally in kin, but i never wouldve been able to afford them anyway. i have a friend that is a teacher (i meet teachers regularly, my last long-term-relationship was with one and its partly why the increased interest in education-- not to mention fig may not have happened or gotten as far without her) and we debate the point of kids learning to code. she takes the old-fashioned idea that its new-fangled extra-credit stuff (but a nice idea, just not necessary to the curriculum.)
her argument is essentially that because she doesnt understand the key benefits of learning the subject, that they arent relevant to developing students. but she cant rate the relevance of what she doesnt know in the first place.
this isnt the thread for my counter argument to her, though i have refuted her timeline-- theres a clear benefit to getting to the subject before age 11, when many kids have (according to some studies fwiw) already started to self-identify as "computer/tech" people or "non-computer" people.
the 60s did a lot to show this dichotomy for what it is (hooey) though switching from literacy/futurism in the 80s to app-training in the 90s before getting back to literacy and furturism (rasp pi, hour of code, etc) has cost our country dearly. thats no exaggeration.
thanks for thinking i meant you-- i like this side of you, which is not to say i loathed the other one. the internet tends to draw bold lines between the techie side of things and the "feely" side. i like a mix myself, and its a refreshing if rare find.
as for your kids, do your best, but dont try too hard. your stuff is too advanced for them-- the required and missing interface is not the gui but the experience they havent had yet. those things arent linear; they could still surprise you later. you increase good odds by not picking your proteges from blood relatives alone.
and some of your skills wont translate, as you suspect. its worth asking which ones are the most essential, broadly speaking. in other words: is it just coding, or is it bit-shifting pointers in c? the stuff to pack in a desert island tutorial is probably somewhere in between. whether this is about code or something else, the point stands (however oversimplified or beside the other points.)