TITLE: Persistence Wins, Even For Someone Like You
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 11, 2020 1:02 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
There's value to going into a field that you find difficult to
grasp, as long as you're willing to be persistent. Even better,
others can benefit from your persistence, too.
In
an old essay,
James Propp notes that working in a field where you lack intuition
can "impart a useful freedom from prejudice". Even better...
... there's value in going into a field that you find difficult to
grasp, as long as you're willing to be really persistent, because
if you find a different way to think about things, something that
works even for someone like you, chances are that other
people will find it useful too.
This reminded me of a passage in
Bob Nystroms's post
about his new book,
Crafting Interpreters.
Nystrom took a long time to finish the book in large part because
he wanted the interpreter at the end of each chapter to compile
and run, while at the same time growing into the interpreter
discussed in the next chapter. But that wasn't the only reason:
I made this problem harder for myself because of the meta-goal I
had. One reason I didn't get into languages until later in my
career was because I was intimidated by the reputation compilers
have as being only for hardcore computer science wizard types.
I'm a college dropout, so I felt I wasn't smart enough, or at
least wasn't educated enough to hack it. Eventually I discovered
that those barriers existed only in my mind and that anyone
can learn this.
Some students avoid my compilers course because they assume it must
be difficult, or because friends said they found it difficult. Even
though they are CS majors, they think of themselves as average
programmers, not "hardcore computer science wizard types". But
regardless of the caliber of the student at the time they start the
course, the best predictor of success in writing a working compiler
is persistence. The students who plug away, working regularly
throughout the two-week stages and across the entire project, are
usually the ones who finish successfully.
One of my great pleasures as a prof is seeing the pride in the faces
of students who demo a working compiler at the end of the semester,
especially in the faces of the students who began the course
concerned that they couldn't hack it.
As Propp points out in his essay, this sort of persistence can pay off
for others, too. When you have to work hard to grasp an idea or to
make something, you sometimes find a different way to think about
things, and this can help others who are struggling. One of my jobs
as a teacher is to help students understand new ideas and use new
techniques. That job is usually made easier when I've had to work
persistently to understand the idea myself, or to find a better way to
help the students who teach me the ways in which they struggle.
In Nystrom's case, his hard work to master a field he didn't grasp
immediately pays of for his readers. I've been following the growth
of
Crafting Interpreters
over time, reading chapters in depth whenever I was able. Those
chapters were uniformly easy to read, easy to follow, and entertaining.
They have me thinking about ways to teach my own course differently,
which is probably the highest praise I can give as a teacher. Now I
need to go back and read the entire book and learn some more.
Teaching well enough that students grasp what they thought was not
graspable and do what they thought was not doable is a constant goal,
rarely achieved. It's always
a work in progress.
I have to keep plugging away.
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