Nooby, my point was simply that the first step in doing anything is believing you can do it. If you define yourself as someone who can't do a particular thing, it's self-fulfilling prophecy. You won't be able to do it.nooby wrote: Dennis, I think you are wrong on this part:
If you decide (as you seem to have done) that "Oh, that's too hard. I can't deal with that. I'll use Puppy because it's simpler.", you'll never gain the knowledge you want.
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I had the opposite attitude that you guess. Nothing was impossible to learn I thought about me. I trusted the propaganda that anybody can learn anything if they really try and practice and are at it.
Not so. To be good at programming and structured thinking you have to have a brain that have that capacity.
Maybe 99% of all people does have that capacity and me trusted me to have it and I behaved as if I had and started early in the morning and gave up for that day at midnight and started again next day and trusted that if one really wanted to learn then it would take sooner or later.
Reality is not that way. some of us fail to live up to the myth that everybody can learn anything on that level.
We are not alike in our heads, some are more clever than others. I unfortunately belong to the low achieving when it comes to being structured in thinking. I am all over the place but none will get accomplished ever.
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But then you should not do computers, let those that can do such then.
Nope, we have the right to do computers too.
If you start out by believing you can do it, it may be difficult, but it's not normally impossible.
And no, I don't think 99% of the people are able to do this and you're one of the 1% of odd men out. We are all wired differently, with different capabilities. My SO, for example, has a facility for languages. She was once fluent in about a dozen. These days, she's essentially bi-lingual in English and Spanish, and fluent in French if it's related to cooking. She's lost the rest because she's had no occasion to use those languages and stay fluent.
But we perceive things quite differently. My primary sense is vision. I understand things in large part by being able to draw pictures in my head illustrating what the parts are and how they fit together. When someone asks me technical question, my first impulse is to grab a pencil and paper and draw a diagram to illustrate the concept. That doesn't work with my SO. Her primary sense is hearing. She makes nothing of my pictures on paper, and I have to find other metaphors to describe the concept.
The whole world won't intuitively grasp computers, and an awful lot of folks out there will never get beyond the "learned to do a particular thing by rote" stage. I've told various people in the past that the real accomplishment comes when you reach the stage where you can say "If I can do that, that means I should be able to do this. Let's see..."
As for inability to remember where things live or how things fit together, I have a simple suggestion. Keep a notebook beside your systems, and write things down.
My SO does a lot of that, because she has a poor memory. She's discovered that if she writes it down, it's more likely to stick, and if it doesn't, it's written down and she can refer to it.
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Dennis