Hacker News Reader

Comment by kharak | Hacker News Reader

I've always had excellent model building functionality for abstractions and got the "physics" of a subject rather quickly, be it economics, biology, certain mathematical subjects and more.

Then, I met software and computer science abstractions, they all seemed so arbitrary to me, I often didn't even understand what the recipe was supposed to cook. And though I have gotten better over time (and can now write good solutions in certain domains), to this day I did not develop a "physics" level understanding of software or computer science.

It feels really strange and messes with your sense of intelligence. Wondering if anyone here has a similar experience and was able to resolve it.

View on HN

I have the opposite experience. Goes to show the difference between people.

I've always had trouble internalizing the "physics" of physics or chemistry, as if it were all super arbitrary and there was no order to it.

Computation and maths on the other hand just click with me. Philosophy as well btw.

I guess I deal better with handling completely abstract information and processes and when they clash with the real world I have a harder time reconciling.

Chemistry in particular is just taught very poorly in USA middle/high school. If anything, it perfectly hinders building that internal understanding.

"Chemical bonds fill the electron shells, which is why we have CO2. But don't worry about why carbon monoxide exists."

"Here's a formula to figure out the angle between atoms in a molecule. But it doesn't apply to H2O, because handwavy reasons. Just memorize this number instead."

Students don't gain an understanding of the subject, because the curriculum doesn't even try to teach it.

This was kind of infuriating about high school chemistry. We were taught so much simply is and that's that. Gold and Mercury differ by one proton, so why is one a dense, yellowish metal and the other one liquid at room temperature? Carbon and Nitrogen sit right next to each other on the periodic table, so why are their chemical properties so different? Why are there so few elements that are ferromagnetic? We dove relatively deep into chemical bonds and isotopes, but glossed over fundamental things like why compounds with similar structures had seemingly random, unrelated properties.

your "physics" grounding is exactly why it feels so odd - software is by its nature anti-physicalist

math and logic are closer to a basis for software abstraction - but they were scary to business people so a "fake language" was invented atop them - you have "objects" that don't actually exist as objects, they are just "type based dispatch/selection mechanism for functions", "classes" that are firstly "producers of things and holders of common implementation" and only secondarily also work to "group together classes of objects"

I feel that is a bit of a false history. OOP was invented by people trying to simulate physical systems, e.g. Stroustup, the Simula people and their contemporaries not business people. Arguably it was popularized later by business people and enterprise Java developers. But that happened way later.

I do not think OOP ever really worked out well as can be evidenced by it no longer being as popular and people having almost entirely abandoned "Cat > Animal > Object" inheritance hierarchies.

This is also a bit of a false history. OOP was squarely invented with Smalltalk. The term was literally conceived for Smalltalk to describe its unique (at the time) programming model. While objects most certainly predate Smalltalk, it was Smalltalk that first started exploring how objects could be oriented.

OOP didn't really take off either, but mostly because it is hard to optimize and impossible to type.

I will have to just disagree with you here. Simula had OOP before Smalltalk existed and both Smalltalk and later C++ arose out of Simula.

fwiw "This paper has described ThingLab, a simulation laboratory."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Borning_1981_-_The_Programming_L...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com