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learning curves both flat and steep
Tuesday, February 10 2009
The futurecasters on the weathertron had pushed back the arrival of rain, inserting in its place an even warmer day than yesterday. So I went out to the tree I'd felled yesterday and cut up its topmost trunk and branches, yielding yet another cartload of firewood.
Later I shoehorned my Mac Mini apart and replaced its measly 512 Megabytes of RAM with two gigabytes that had only cost me $28. The new memory definitely made the computer more responsive. What it didn't do, however, was make the syntax of Objective C any less perplexing. I've been looking at the code and trying to experimentally tweak various forms of functionality out of it for days, but after about five minutes, my eyes start swimming and I feel sleepy. Plenty of people are writing Macintosh applications, so there must be some people who can fight these feelings and learn.
People speak of the relative steepness of various learning curves. For example, the learning curve for HTML was very gentle, equivalent to the contractor error in leveling a skating rink. I learned 90% of what I'd ever need to know in the first fifteen minutes of study. With Objective C, on the other hand, the learning curve is more like one of the high stone walls at Eastern State Correctional Facility. It feels like it is taking me all week to get my mind around the simple syntax of "Hello World!" Mind you, this is despite familiarity with the C programming language; I wrote 14 kilobytes of controller code for my Arduino solar sufficiency computer, which is in C.
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