The Difference Between Learning And Training

[nemorathwald]

Forgetting frustrates me. I've forgotten more knowledge in my life than peasants in the Dark Ages ever learned. The point of taking a class is not about what I learn. It's about what I won't forget. Then I can move forward on programming projects with confidence that I don't have to waste a bunch of time catching up on what the keywords and punctuation mean. I refuse to cram for exams and just lose it all. I have to practice, practice, practice-- then I need to keep doing a regimen of projects to keep in the habit.

At an informational level, I've understood true-false logic, strings, variables, constants, conditionals, loops, iteration, and recursion for twenty years. But it was learning, not training. I can self-teach, but my life was too busy for self-training. There is a certain hump I must surmount.

I owe my desktop publishing proficiency to taking classes, with a set of practice exercises on deadlines. Now I can pick up a new program and not even think about it. I just get in the Zone. That is the hump I need to get over with programming, which is why I am taking a class.

blue_duck and ssanfratello will understand the concept of training, right down at the muscle memory level. It's not just what you learn about stances, balance, breathing, keeping your options open like water, when to commit to swinging the sword, and absorbing the universe juice. It's about what your body does from practice, just WHAM. If you have to stop and access the knowledge, you have been stabbed. With a sword.

That's what I'm interested in. When it comes to my daily Lojban regimen, it needs to be engraved in the brain at the level of instant linguistic connection between word and meaning. I know the vocabulary of Lojban, but most of it I still have to translate from English, which should not happen. Translation wastes valuable milliseconds, too long for comfortable speech. Fortunately I do not get hit with padded sticks when this happens.

When I program Karda, it will be for language training, not just language learning. Spaced repetition algorithms do training. I'm interested in software for self-training in various skills. As Napoleon Dynamite said, "You know, like nunchuku skills ... bow hunting skills ... computer hacking skills." The idea will be for the software to remind you to practice the skill again, get feedback on the result, and modify the interval for when it will remind you to do it again.

Comments

[anyaristow.livejournal.com]

Syntax and terminology is a very small part of programming. Some asshats that play God in interviewing think otherwise, but they'd probably fail their own test a few months after they finish interviewing, because they themselves probably had to look the crap up before they interviewed people. That, or they're pedantic assholes who probably can't solve actual problems.

Your projects will get far more complicated and you're going to spend a lot more time staring at code wondering why it doesn't work than you spend typing it in. Add in the time you'll spend designing and documenting and dealing with customers and management and team members and meetings, and the time you spend looking stuff up amounts to zero. It really won't kill your productivity if you have to look stuff up. It amounts to being stabbed with a sword only if one of those pedantic assholes is your boss, and he's watching you, and he doesn't like you.

The stuff you use a lot you'll remember. Keep a good reference on hand (and access to Google) for the rest.

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

You said "the stuff you use a lot", which is the key. Without training, I'll get frustrated and I won't start using anything a lot.

I misspoke when I talked about wasting time looking stuff up. My concern with looking stuff up does not involve the amount of time. What I meant was that having to start from scratch every time kills my motivation and forward momentum. So my pattern has been that when that happens, I get frustrated, and I change tracks onto requirements and documentation, which I enjoy. I've been doing requirements and documentation on my projects all my adult life. I just don't have code to show for it.

One of the main purposes of flashcards and classes is to remind me that I need to do some programming. They are some of the few ways that I exert discipline on my mind to put my butt in the seat and get some practice. I would not carry forward lessons about problem-solving, and I would not form fruitful habits of mind, without external reminders to practice with sufficient frequency.

I need an external regimen like that, because playing around with code is not something I do for recreation, for its own sake. I do it because all of the projects I want to accomplish require programming. You see the distinction I'm drawing.