Re: [Meta:]
Re: [Meta:]
- Subject: Re: [Meta:]
- From: Ruth Bygrave <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 05:37:18 +0100
I feel more comfortable now!
I bought a Pickaxe book and don't want yet another attempt to learn
programming that failed to add to the stack, please, although I'm
willing to try to put the work in. The stack is currently C, C++,
Delphi, VB, VBA, Javascript, and XSLT, plus my Applescript-specific
stack of Hanaan Rosenthal, and Adam Goldstein. The reason the stack
is so full of false starts is that I would hit Maths Fear in the
first chapter when it told me to start by calculating Fahrenheit/
Celsius, and feel that the problem was was 'I am too stupid for that
language so I need to try another one'.
Have been learning-by-doing for the past year with very little
support, although Applescript is a brilliant getting-started language
for me because the mental crutch I needed to start was 'pretend it's
language that does something' because I'm afraid I will never learn
to think algorithmically because it is Hard.
Now I'm just starting to fall over basic programming concepts and
feel it's time to step back a bit and train my brain instead of using
the try-something-I-want-to-do-and-look-it-up-in-a-reference-book
approach. After the 'spaghetti-and-apps-unmaintainable-code' thing,
I'm actually finding my beginner-simple-projects are involving more
text munging, regular expressions and XML (I just about get the point
of the DOM) than anything else, and I'm beginning to feel Applescript
may be a hard language if you're concentrating on those things.
I'm uneasily wondering whether Ruby is too Scary and where I should
have started is Matt Neuberg's book on Applescript in a Nutshell,
rather than trying to 'step back' from the Mac-specific stuff and
start from the ground up, but don't know who to ask about this,
because I feel it's too meta for the rip-and-shred-code contexts,
although I have been told by a few people from ruby-lang and
Applescript-users that the approach I'm trying will work if I stick
to it (but I feel they won't be my 'support network' as a beginner in
the non-rip-and-shred-code contexts, for why the hell should they?)
But the stick-to-it is failing because I've spent 20 years trying to
lever myself out of mild depression without quite succeeding, so I'm
scared.
Can somebody with a bit of time on their hands read the following
rambling-discursive-personal-experience stuff and tell me whether I
am finally learning to think after applying the wrong mental model
for 20 years? Because if my brain works as poorly as the past 20
years have taught me it does, I'm scared that this will be yet
another false start, and that may just-about break my heart unless I
can gain the immense courage needed to try again after a life made
entirely of failure.
I realise it's a bit selfish of me to ask this for entirely-
applicable-only-to-me reasons, but, please?
R
--------------------------------------------------
It's not that I haven't found Help & Support:
Adrian my boyfriend likes discussing programming with me in a meta/
theoretical/see if I can work out where I'm hitting a mental road-
block way that's sort-of-social), and the people on the lists are
friendly, but he's a professional OO developer with vast cross-
language experience (though Windows-y and that never worked for me),
and I fear that he's about an order of magnitude more intelligent
than I am, so I'm afraid that the first time I hit a Blimey This Is
Hard mental block I'll get stuck. Because Adrian finds it hard to
start from where I am!
What I want to do is just see if I can finish Just One programming
book, because I am taking the approach that it will give me a huge
personal boost from the 'I started with spaghetti code and worked my
way up and my god it stuck this time!' Whether or not it goes anywhere:
Personally, I have only just realised that after spending 20 years on
the dole feeling I am a waste of space, what was actually going wrong
was my feeling that where I started now that went wrong was, "lower
my expectations, set achievable goals, start lower" every time I got
a knockback, and that after increasingly-desperate alternations
between voluntary work and longer-and-longer periods on the dole, I
was feeling that I was a scrounger/slacker/consumer and going and
buying shiny things too much as a quick fix, and I didn't know how to
stop the depression thing apart from 'set achievable goals, try even
harder, focus on Getting A Job, Any Job, Even One I think is Crap but
Somebody will Pay For' to get rid of the 'worthless feeling', but
trying to get myself out of depression for 20 years has meant that
every time I try and slip back I'm training myself to fail.
And because of the mental tunnel-vision I could *not* step back and
see that I'd been working hard at solving my problems for the last 20
years and the failure wasn't entirely my fault.
Meanwhile my personal life was an exact analogy. I kept dropping out
and feeling miserable and getting tired of putting the work in
communicating online, because I was depressed, and *because* I was
depressed I tried to focus on 'set achievable goals, start lower,
find people who can stand to go out for a drink with me locally even
if I don't 'click' with them, online doesn't quite seem to be working
for me (because the effort of keeping the lines of communication open
kept wearing out), so focus on achievable goals and finding somebody
to go for a drink with locally to the exclusion of everything else'.
I have realised that what I need to do is not 'start lower and work
my way up' but find small goals that fit the way I think and stop
giving myself a hard time, and I have found that the people I wanted
to make friends with locally who aren't OS-wars parochial advocacy-
zealots and understand my 'Mac suits me as a consumer but I want to
start learning Posix-y stuff' viewpoint, are out there. They're just
in the local Linux/Open Source user-group, which I hadn't thought of
for the last year because I assumed I'd have to deal with another
Dumb Advocacy Zealotry thing...
Because of the 'discouragement' problem, I want to find myself a
'hobbyist code-light almost-language-platform-independent' social
context even if I have to build it myself as an LJ community or small
mailing list. I want this because: I want to find other 'past-
littered-with-failed-attempts trying to learn OO principles and apply
it somewhere' people. Because I am scared. I have got the Pickaxe
book, and I don't mind trying to learn to work on it myself, but I
want a code-light people-like-me social context where I can vent and
natter and say, how should I be thinking about this? or This Is Hard
without feeling I'm trying to force a 'hobbyist' social-context where
it doesn't fit. Even if I have to try to set it up myself as a
mailing list or LJ community.
Applescript-users and the ruby-lang stuff are friendly and welcoming
and beginner-friendly but they start from code rip-&-shred, and I'm
looking for stepping-back and meta stuff and social handholding and
How I Feel given that I'm trying and I've tried for n years and it's
beginning to click, but I want a leg up on the friendly-social-
context on the 'I Are an Idiot But, Willing to Learn' level.
My approach has been to look for a hobbyist user-group with monthly
meetings to find people like me, and then realise that because the
Apple stuff 'feels' Californian to me I can't find one in my country
(UK) and the UK Applescript community is full of people who learned
on their own in the back bedroom with no support, so I didn't know
where to start.
At least part of my problem is what drives me mad about Dumb Mac-
Ghetto Users is that they are so bloody rude in the bad-netiquette OS-
advocacy way, so my attempts to leverage my Switcher problems of the
'have been beating my head against Windows for 20 years, it's nice
when I stop, Mac is a 'better fit' for me personally but can people
hold my hand through the learning curve?' all ran bang into the There
Is No Learning Curve thing. Local Mac users are all Mac-ghetto and I
couldn't find one within 3 local user groups who wanted to talk about
my 'switcher' thing!
I completely get why applescript-Users and ruby-lang may be a poor
context for what I want socially, but I want to get a heads-up on
where to start building my own hobbyist-social-context.
And the reason why this way out of depression will work for me when
my other attempts failed is that a) the hobbyist-open-source people
think the way I think socially, which is a huge leg-up in the making-
friends department, and
b) I asked my boyfriend if, if I did the housework and learned to
manage money instead of lurching from little-shiny-thing to other-
little-shiny-thing, and applied myself to making friends the right
way and had another go at practicing Writing (after several failed
attempts to start), and gave a better shot at the Pickaxe Book than
my previous attempts at programming, he would be willing to buy me a
ridiculously-expensive Present for Christmas (because! Macbook and
because! Leopard), and he said, yes!
Whereas I had a *vast* problem with the thought that starting with
the built-up depression-housework-mountain would only take a
milligram off the guilt and despair mountain, and because I was
starting so far in arrears I could see no way to work steadily up to
something that would give me Fun & Joy, because the way I felt was
that I didn't deserve Fun & Joy until I learned how to do Hard Work
and Not Be Lazy.
Adrian has a minor empathy block and whenever I tried to tell him
this he would tell me not to be silly, and I would think 'I can't
even mention this and I *bloody resent* the fact he's so much more
intelligent than I am because it's Not Helping me start from where I
am'. He still won't really validate my experience now I'm trying to
vent, but it's less of a problem now he's not the only person-close-
to-me I talk to every day! (although the talking is mainly online at
the moment).
c) what I really needed was a step-back-from-the-immediate-problem-a-
bit approach.
d) What I need to do is kick-start my suddenly-creative-and-
functioning brain again before this turns out to be yet another
optical illusion, and see if I can stick to something giving myself
room for Play, Work, Making Friends, and waiting for Shiny
Consumerism until the end of the year.
Because what I needed to do was not set my goals lower which was
difficult since I was on the floor and couldn't figure out *how*, but
was to start giving myself permission to think, to play, to feel
halfway creative, and to deal with the writer's-block I was having on
creative writing caused by Misery and Resentment and 'writers write
about a) their job and b) their personal life, and I will never ever
have a job because I am too lazy and I only have two close friends,
one in Stoke on Trent (not east anglia) who doesn't answer his e-
mails and the other in California, so I don't know how to 'unstick'
myself'
This week is the first time I've realised that the problem wasn't 'I
am a lazy slacker who won't even try' but 'I've tried so hard for 20
years and can't Get Anywhere By My Own Unaided Efforts', and that my
brain works, because the narrowing-focus thing meant that I felt more-
and-more scared, depressed, constrained and resentful, and all the
false-starts-that-failed were teaching me to fail.
It is the first time I have realised that how I should deal with
depression is to (start to) deal with the things that give me most Pain:
1) I'm a slacker, I'm a consumer, I keep buying myself Shiny Things
to cheer myself up, and I feel I'm stealing, because I don't deserve
the Shiny Things until I start working a bit harder, and I will never
in my life even pay my way because nobody can get their first job at
over 40 and that's the only thing that counts in real-world terms.
And I'm trying not to realise I even feel this because it Hurts and
because if I ever tell the people close to me I'm still feeling this
way, they'll tell me not to be silly, so I resent being told I don't
know how to think and am not entitled to my emotions.
2) I have 2 best friends, and I feel isolated by distance, and I
didn't know how to make friends locally, which meant I kept starting
lower, again, and feeling resentful, and isn't 2 friends a low number
because Adrian has people he can go out with a drink with and keep in
touch with locally he 'clicks' with even if not all of them are best
friends and I feel so *bloody envious* I could weep. And I'm trying
not to realise I even feel this &c see above.
And a couple of times I'd tried to get myself out of depression by
admitting I Felt Pain, and it hadn't worked somehow, because all
people would tell me was don't.
(A good fit for me would have been some sort of cognitive-behavioural
therapy that could take its time with dealing with the step-back-from-
here approach I actually needed, because now I see it I can't believe
I didn't before)
All the false starts were teaching me to fail and feel more Guilt,
whereas what I needed to do was change my mental model of how things
worked and begin to deal with stuff.
R
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