To be more clear: I agree with this. But I was thinking that the parameter they called “old” was the thing that the old value (the thing already in the list) had to pass the test against. The test is meant to have two parameters, the thing already in the list and the thing it’s being tested against. They are acting as if, in order to pass the test, those things have to be the same. That cuts out lots of useful tests, but I think now that that’s what they mean to happen.
The last part of Chapter 8, with the collector functions (also called continuations), was significantly more difficult than the rest of the book so far. I ended up doing a lot of work on it. Some thoughts:
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I was slow to recognize that this part was more difficult and slow to change my strategies to match the difficulty. I think I wanted to feel smart and able to handle this book that I thought was supposed to be an easy review of Scheme and of recursion. Once I saw that other people found this section difficult, I was willing to see myself as having difficulty with it. I want to be able to judge difficultly directly, without being swayed by how difficult I think something should be.
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Some strategies I ended up using for the section:
- Re-reading the whole section, both before doing other stuff here and in between doing other stuff.
- Working through the programs with examples, writing out all the steps.
- Running programs with
trace, using examples. - Searching for what other people wrote about the section.
- Searching for ideas and terms I wanted to understand better.
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When I was working on a long, complicated example walk-through, I noticed I had this vague feeling that I was being foolish for spending so much time on something like that, like it was too nerdy or a waste of time or something.
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Sometimes when I read what other people wrote about the section, I found myself trying to compare what I did to what they did in order to help myself feel better at not having understood this stuff well. I wanted to show myself that I at least understood it better than some other guy did.
I may or may not read more on the topic before I move on in The Little Schemer.
I recall noticing the book getting way harder and complaining about it, and finding substantiation for this elsewhere.
I blame the book here. They didn’t give any kind of indication that the difficulty would increase massively and they didn’t really earn the difficulty jump. The earlier parts of the book mostly did a good job of breaking things up into lots of small easy steps. Hopefully my video gave some indication of how hard I found that chapter. I remember the vid being like three hours long? and that was heavily edited down from the time i spent (using automated tools to remove silences for thinking), so…
I don’t know how you handle that stuff, but I think people often don’t listen to internal objections like that. They decide that one side in an internal is rational/sensible/reasonable and that the other side is dumb/irrational/has hangups/is lazy/whatever. So they kinda just bully a part of their mind into doing what they want.
I think it’d be worth trying to get more detail on what the objection is. As in, what does part of you not like about being too nerdy, or why do you think the activity maybe a waste of time, and so on. Maybe that part of you has a point. Try to get details, think about counterarguments, and hear the internal dispute like an impartial judge.
It could be an issue like, maybe you think being a nerd is low status or something, you don’t want to be one of the uncool people. But that’s not something I could be confident about based on what you wrote, so I suspect you need to gather more information on what the exact issue is.
Maybe I was thinking it’s uncool to spend a lot of time working on something, because smart people should learn things easily, or if they don’t, they should pretend to. Maybe I was thinking that it’s uncool to spend a lot of time on something intellectual that doesn’t have a visible product. Maybe I was thinking that it wasn’t necessary to understand this section super well and I should have just noted that I didn’t really get it and moved on. Maybe it’s part of not being sure if I want to learn about coding.
I don’t understand it. It was a fleeting feeling. I don’t know how to look into it further now. Maybe I’ll just note it and look for that kind of feeling in the future.
I think this is the kinda thing meditation helps with … if you put ongoing effort into trying to notice your mental states, then I think that you’ll be able to catch stuff like this more easily in the future