On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 3:51 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote: > It is fine. Computers are tools. The sign of a good tool is that you > can pick it up and use it without having to read the instruction manual. > I can jump into pretty much any car, start the engine, and drive it, > without any learning curve. There's a lot of complicated organic > chemistry and thermodynamics going on inside the engine's combustion > chambers, but I don't need to know any of that to make use of the tool.
Err, I don't know that the analogy is really fair. Either you know how to drive a car, or you don't; if you do, what you really mean is that cars are sufficiently standardized that, even though you trained on an X, you can drive a Y without reading its instruction manual - but if you don't, then you're basically at the dangerous level of "hey look, I can type these commands and stuff happens", without knowing the rather important safety implications of what you're doing. Can you use a hammer without an instruction manual? Sure! Can you use a circular saw without reading the instructions? Quite probably, but will you know how to do it safely? The organic chemistry and thermodynamics are the car's equivalent of refcounting and garbage collection. They're absolutely critical if you're building a car, but in driving one, you almost never need to care about those details - and it's entirely possible to have a car that doesn't work the same way (electric, perhaps). I would expect the instruction manual to be more about things like how to check the oil, so you don't blow your engine up. (Caveat: I don't drive, so I might have the details of the analogy facepalmingly wrong.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
