Or reading through a page or two and realizing your mind was wondering and you don't remember what you read. Turn back and read it again. 

Teaching people how to sing better on Youtube...

 

10 hours ago, Patco Lch said:

Or reading through a page or two and realizing your mind was wondering and you don't remember what you read. Turn back and read it again. 

Wandering, do you mean?

18 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Wandering, do you mean?

You rite Bo. Tank ye fer dat.

On 4/22/2025 at 4:25 AM, LHookins said:

Since I am, at the moment, far too lazy to go find a video to explain this to you ( 😄 ) I'll just tell you in words.

It is well known that some people learn best by being shown, others by being told, and others by reading. I'm like you, I prefer a written set of instructions. I also like to learn by performing a task, but you need a starting place.

I learned COBOL in a classroom, then FORTRAN from a self-teaching book (and writing a blackjack program). Almost all languages after that were from reading manuals and reading actual code and writing it.

Some people will always have a problem understanding written instructions. Imagine, for example, a new recipe that contains unfamiliar terms. It will be useful to see the recipe being made, especially intermediate steps. Many DIY projects can be like that.

There was a teaching method I learned in the US Army.  First you demonstrate a thing, explaining as you go. Then you talk the learner through doing it themselves.  Let the learner practice a while, then test them by having them demonstrate the thing. Pass/fail, and retrain as necessary. For the most part, anyone can teach anyone anything, at least as far as what we had to know in the Army goes. 🙂 This is how I learned to field strip and reassemble an M-16, and later they taught us this teaching method in NCO Academy.

Sometimes if you keep looking you can find a list of step-by-step instructions.  If not, create your own for yourself and others to use later.

Hook

I could have gone the rest of my life without someone mentioning COBOL.😂

 

Bill W

There is an old saying: "Those who can't do, teach".

I have always found the converse to often be valid too:

"Those who can't teach, do".

In other words very many of the really good developers have poor teaching skills. And maybe they should hire someone to do it for them. A very great product with a bad manual, is a bad package.

17 hours ago, Fielder said:

A very great product with a bad manual, is a bad package.

During my last year working as a non-degreed electronic engineer I found many new grad engineers could perform laplace transforms in their head but could not write a coherent paragraph.  I ended up writing proposals, reports and manuals for them.

Noel

On 4/24/2025 at 9:26 AM, BillW said:

I could have gone the rest of my life without someone mentioning COBOL.😂

How about SNOBOL then? I quite like COBOL, except for the excessively verbose structure of course!

I loved to screw with my professors by submitting my COBOL assignments having used FORTRAN4 sub-routines to handle any maths necessary, and RPG sub-routines for handling the I/O structure... 

🤣

35 minutes ago, n4gix said:

I loved to screw with my professors by submitting my COBOL assignments having used FORTRAN4 sub-routines to handle any maths necessary

This lets me tell one of my favorite "war stories" from my programming career.

A very good friend/co-worker had been hired from Washington D.C. to move to Houston, Tx by a bank to translate their software from COBOL to PL/1, estimated to take a year. Sure, why not? 

When he got there, he found out that the reason they were doing this was because they needed a square root in one place in the code, but COBOL didn't have a built-in square root function. PL/1 did. 

After scratching his head for an hour trying to figure out why they were willing to pay that much for a single square root function, he wrote an "exit" to PL/1 from the COBOL program to do the square root and pass it back. This completed his assignment to their satisfaction. They didn't need to keep a PL/1 programmer on staff to maintain all that code either.

He went in to work every day and basically read the newspaper for a few weeks. Eventually he moved back to D.C. and they kept sending him paychecks. He finally had to tell them to stop.

Seems to me they could have used Newton's Approximation and kept the whole thing within COBOL. 😄 

Hook

PS. He hated Houston. 😄 

H.

In HAL language, verbal English commands are supposed to be heard and obeyed.

40 minutes ago, Fielder said:

In HAL language, verbal English commands are supposed to be heard and obeyed.

The Real Technology Behind 2001’s HAL

 

1 hour ago, Fielder said:

In HAL language, verbal English commands are supposed to be heard and obeyed.

"No Nurse! I said 'Slip off his spectacles!'"

Hook

12 hours ago, LHookins said:

This lets me tell one of my favorite "war stories" from my programming career.

 

I once did some awesome programming on an Amiga machine, in Basic. It was designed to make a ball bounce across the screen. 

Needless to say, my awesome programing didn't work. 😧

It was boredom for no reward. 

It was then I realized that a few sets of bench-press and stroking my cats was time better spent. We had several at the time. 😺😺😺😺

Edited April 26, 20251 yr by martin-w

On 4/25/2025 at 5:08 PM, LHookins said:

Seems to me they could have used Newton's Approximation and kept the whole thing within COBOL. 😄 

I taught Intro to CompSci for several semesters at UofF Gainesville while in grad school there.

One of my favorite exercises was to have the students flowchart a routine to compute the square root of any number respecting the maths limitations of COBOL. Each of my classes always had at least one student who was successful at the exercise. 

The main point I was making is that if you cannot flowchart properly using plain language, you are unlikely to instruct the computer to solve the process step-by-step. Mostly it involved learning to think outside the box!

34 minutes ago, n4gix said:

flowchart properly using plain language

Structured programming.