TITLE: "Flying by Instruments" and Learning a New Programming Style
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 05, 2017 10:53 AM
DESC:
-----
BODY:
Yesterday afternoon I listened to a story told by someone who had
recently been a passenger in a small plane flown by a colleague.
As they climbed to their cruising altitude, which was clear and
beautiful, the plane passed through a couple thousand feet of
heavy clouds. The pilot flew confidently, having both training
and experience in
instrument flight.
The passenger telling the story, however, was disoriented and a
little scared by being in the clouds and not knowing where they
were heading. The pilot kept him calm by explaining the process
of "flying by instruments" and how he had learned it. Sometimes,
learning something new can give us confidence. Other times, just
listening to a story can distract us enough to get us through a
period of fear.
This story reminded me of a session early in my programming
languages course, when students are learning Racket and functional
programming style. Racket is quite different from any other
language they have learned. "Don't dip your toes in the water,"
I tell them. "Get wet."
For students who prefer their learning analogies not to involve
potential drowning -- that is, after all, the sensation many of
them report feeling as they learn to cope with all of Racket's
parentheses for the first time -- I relate an Alan Kay story that
talks about learning to fly an airplanes after already knowing
how to drive a car. Imagine what the world be like if everyone
refused to learn how to fly a plane because driving was so much
more comfortable and didn't force them to bend their minds a bit?
Sure, cars are great and serve us well, but planes completely
change the world by bringing us all closer together.
I have lost track of where I had heard or read Kay telling that
story, so when I wrote up the class notes, I went looking for a
URL to cite. I never found one, but while searching I ran across
a different use of airplanes in an analogy that I have since worked
into my class. Here's the paragraph I use in my class notes, the
paragraph I thought of while listening to the flying-by-instruments
story yesterday:
The truth is that bicycles and motorcycles operate quite
differently than wheeled vehicles that keep three or more
wheels on the ground. For one thing, you steer by leaning,
not with the handlebars or steering wheel. Learning to fly
an airplane gives even stronger examples of having to learn
that your instincts are wrong, and that you have to train
yourself to "instinctively" know not only that you turn by
banking rather than with the rudder, but that you control
altitude primarily with the throttle, not the elevators,
speed primarily with the elevators not the throttle, and so
forth.
Learning to program in a new style, whether object-oriented,
functional, or concatenative, usually requires us to overcome
deeply-ingrained design instincts and to develop new instincts
that feel uncomfortable while we are learning. Developing new
instincts takes some getting used to, but it's worth the effort,
even if we choose not to program much in the new style after we
learn it.
Now I find myself thinking about what it means to "fly by
instruments" when we program. Is our unit testing framework one
of the instruments we come to rely on? What about a code smell
detector such as
Reek?
If you have thoughts on this idea, or pointers to what others
have already written, I would love to
hear from you.
Postscript. I originally found the passage
quoted above in
a long-ish article about Ruby and Smalltalk,
but that link has been dead for a while. I see that the article
was reposted in a Ruby Buzz Forum message called
On Ceremony and Training Wheels.
Oh, and if you know where I can find the Alan Kay story I went
looking for online, I will greatly appreciate any pointers you
can offer!
-----