Coding and Socrates
May. 5th, 2020 01:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitI've been learning command line, and also rereading fanfic.
One fic I've been reading features this quotation from Socrates: "You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise."
He's talking about reading in general, which I can't agree with in full-- I do think having access to information is important, however easy it is to misinterpret when you're teaching yourself. But I've been very focused on building my computer skills for about four days now, and I've been finding an interesting set of applications applied to that, because I started out with a big book on systems administration. I also have several people in my life who code for a living. I'm not even an entire chapter into the systems administration book and I've already had several things happen to me because of talking about what I'm doing with various other people who are willing to provide insight about it:
A long discussion about open-source ideology, sexism, racism, and classism, and the history of these things in the computing community
The man command exists
You'll probably wind up Googling everything anyway because the man command isn't informative
Bash is both a shell and shell scripts and you should know which one you're trying to learn (the first one is what you start with)
Some amount of "this is what a shell is"
A book on Linux command line that's explicitly a teaching book rather than a reference book
Scala is amazing and you should consider learning it / Scala is a niche language only occupied by very specific people so don't bother with it and definitely don't do it *first*
Rust is the first language to permit truly good code / Rust isn't quite that amazing but plays nicely with Scala / Rust is lower-level than Scala and so closer to system administration but still not quite "a thing you're likely to be using"
The entire structure of the internet prohibits genuinely good security practices
Python is an up-and-coming language; Ruby is on its way out
Lots of the recommended additional reading in the sysadmin book was written by people with Opinions and you should consider the authors before deciding to read them or take them seriously
Some history of GNU versus Linux
Linux distributions fall into broad categories of Debian, Redhat, and Other
Open-source has weird purity culture attached to it
As a result of the weird purity culture, some people don't like that Redhat makes money
A website with some silly zines and printable posters with Linux commands
Being able to speak both programmer and librarian is actually a valuable skill in some segments of the programming world
Vim is a hobby that happens to edit text, and text editors in general have a *really weird* Culture around them
All in the last FOUR DAYS, and I'm not even spending my entire day on it; I'm still spending a lot of time working at my currently-still-extant day job, reading, starting to look at apartment listings, and panicking. (And when I can pull it off, some writing fiction, as I am theoretically still doing that.)
And none of that would have happened if I were only working from the book I originally took out of the library! I'm not sure I would have necessarily come to a lot of this at *all* if I were *only* working from books, and certainly it would have taken longer. I'm sure my views of a lot of it will change and reform as I gain more depth of knowledge (right now I have cd, ls, file, and less, in command line, and 33 chapters to go in the command line book), but having other people of more experience around to discuss with is definitely valuable in helping form that depth of knowledge.
One fic I've been reading features this quotation from Socrates: "You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise."
He's talking about reading in general, which I can't agree with in full-- I do think having access to information is important, however easy it is to misinterpret when you're teaching yourself. But I've been very focused on building my computer skills for about four days now, and I've been finding an interesting set of applications applied to that, because I started out with a big book on systems administration. I also have several people in my life who code for a living. I'm not even an entire chapter into the systems administration book and I've already had several things happen to me because of talking about what I'm doing with various other people who are willing to provide insight about it:
A long discussion about open-source ideology, sexism, racism, and classism, and the history of these things in the computing community
The man command exists
You'll probably wind up Googling everything anyway because the man command isn't informative
Bash is both a shell and shell scripts and you should know which one you're trying to learn (the first one is what you start with)
Some amount of "this is what a shell is"
A book on Linux command line that's explicitly a teaching book rather than a reference book
Scala is amazing and you should consider learning it / Scala is a niche language only occupied by very specific people so don't bother with it and definitely don't do it *first*
Rust is the first language to permit truly good code / Rust isn't quite that amazing but plays nicely with Scala / Rust is lower-level than Scala and so closer to system administration but still not quite "a thing you're likely to be using"
The entire structure of the internet prohibits genuinely good security practices
Python is an up-and-coming language; Ruby is on its way out
Lots of the recommended additional reading in the sysadmin book was written by people with Opinions and you should consider the authors before deciding to read them or take them seriously
Some history of GNU versus Linux
Linux distributions fall into broad categories of Debian, Redhat, and Other
Open-source has weird purity culture attached to it
As a result of the weird purity culture, some people don't like that Redhat makes money
A website with some silly zines and printable posters with Linux commands
Being able to speak both programmer and librarian is actually a valuable skill in some segments of the programming world
Vim is a hobby that happens to edit text, and text editors in general have a *really weird* Culture around them
All in the last FOUR DAYS, and I'm not even spending my entire day on it; I'm still spending a lot of time working at my currently-still-extant day job, reading, starting to look at apartment listings, and panicking. (And when I can pull it off, some writing fiction, as I am theoretically still doing that.)
And none of that would have happened if I were only working from the book I originally took out of the library! I'm not sure I would have necessarily come to a lot of this at *all* if I were *only* working from books, and certainly it would have taken longer. I'm sure my views of a lot of it will change and reform as I gain more depth of knowledge (right now I have cd, ls, file, and less, in command line, and 33 chapters to go in the command line book), but having other people of more experience around to discuss with is definitely valuable in helping form that depth of knowledge.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-18 12:13 pm (UTC)