Carl and others have made several good points...
What I think I'm hearing from Glen is that while it's nice to use
power-planers and router tables to shape wood, one should know how to
use the right type of hand-plane, chisels, and scrapers in case you
lose electric power.
Well, I dunno. Several points along these lines.
...
That said, yes, its good to know some hand drafting before you get
into CAD. But "fundamentals" and "foundations" can be slippery concepts.
I believe Marcus made some points about "paying dues" and other
references to expectations "the group" has on the individual for being
admitted into the "masters" category, as it were.
I tried to keep my own ideologizing down to "knowing the names of the
Turtles (who are all the way down)" because as Carl points out, the
fundamentals (acoustics in materials, material fabrication,
kinesthesiology, etc.) are *all* fundamental and for the most part, it
is possible to become "good" at the process without necessarily
understanding all of that stuff, even if it is extremely interesting and
useful to the geeks in the crowd.
Since Carl invoked Drumming over Programming which is overtly a more
sensorial and perhaps spiritual activity (at least the way Carl does
it?) it is worth noting that I believe there may even be some value in
*NOT* knowing the technical fundamentals of the drums and the
kinesthetics of the human body involved. It may *add* to the mystical
power of the experience to learn and practice it entirely "rote", coming
to insights about the underlying processes and materials entirely from
one's own direct experience without any formal explanations to draw from.
To be fair, there is probably a school of programming which is
parallel... I *do* remember a time for myself when the magic of code
was mystical... mostly as I learned the intricacies of debugging my own
faulty logic and code-generation and of profiling and then algorithmic
complexity, memory management, etc. Had I had *more* formal training
up front, it might have undermined that mystical experience of
discovering so many things "the hard way". So rather than "knowing the
names of the turtles all the way down", I got to/had to make up names
for them as I met them, and only later discover that they had been named
many times already.
- Steve
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