On 5/8/2012 2:56 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
Isn't this simply a description of your "thought clearing process"?
You think in English... not Ruby.
I'd actually hazard a guess and say that really, you think in a
semi-verbal semi-phyiscal pattern language, and not very well formed
one, either. This is the case for most people. This is why you have to
write hard problems down... you have to bake them into physical form
so you can process them again and again, slowly developing what you
mean into a shape.
in my case I think my thinking process is a good deal different.
a lot more of my thinking tends to be a mix of visual/spatial thinking,
and thinking in terms of glyphs and text (often source-code, and often
involving glyphs and traces which I suspect are unique to my own
thoughts, but are typically laid out in the same "character cell grid"
as all of the text).
I guess it could be sort of like if text were rammed together with
glyphs and PCB traces or similar, with the lines weaving between the
characters, and sometimes into and out of the various glyphs (many of
which often resemble square boxes containing circles and dots, sometimes
with points or corners, and sometimes letters or numbers, ...).
things may vary somewhat, depending on what I am thinking about the time.
my memory is often more like collections of images, or almost like
"pages in a book", with lots of information drawn onto them, usually in
a white-on-black color-scheme. there is typically very little color or
movement.
sometimes it may include other forms of graphics, like pictures of
things I have seen, objects I can imagine, ...
thoughts may often use natural-language as well, in a spoken-like form,
but usually this is limited either to when talking to people or when
writing something (if I am trying to think up what I am writing, I may
often hear "echoes" of various ways the thought could be expressed, and
of text as it is being written, ...). reading often seems to bypass this
(and go more directly into a visual form).
typically, thinking about programming problems seems to be more like
being in a "storm" of text flying all over the place, and then bits of
code flying together from the pieces.
if any math is involved, often any relevant structures will be
themselves depicted visually, often in geometry-like forms.
or, at least, this is what it "looks like", I really don't actually know
how it all works, or how the thoughts themselves actually work or do
what they do.
I think all this counts as some form of "visual thinking" (though I
suspect probably a non-standard form based on some stuff I have read,
given that "colors, movement, and emotions" don't really seem to be a
big part of this).
or such...
On 09/05/2012, at 2:20 AM, Jarek Rzeszótko wrote:
Example: I have been programming in Ruby for 7 years now, for 5 years
professionally, and yet when I face a really difficult problem the
best way still turns out to be to write out a basic outline of the
overall algorithm in pseudo-code. It might be a personal thing, but
for me there are just too many irrelevant details to keep in mind
when trying to solve a complex problem using a programming language
right from the start. I cannot think of classes, method names,
arguments etc. until I get a basic idea of how the given computation
should work like on a very high level (and with the low-level details
staying "fuzzy"). I know there are people who feel the same way,
there was an interesting essay from Paul Graham followed by a very
interesting comment on MetaFilter about this:
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