Off On A Tangent

I am your home

A place for you to rest and be safe

I made my walls strong to hold your weight

You will never know loneliness

Every code abstraction that’s new to us is a hurdle we have to overcome before we get any value out of that abstraction.  Douglas Hofstadter wrote an interesting essay I once read but can no longer find that theorized that the reason we experience time as going by faster and faster as we age is because we’ve developed increasingly complex and encompassing mental “globs” of perception that allow us to assimilate more and more complicated ideas and sensory inputs at a glance.  A newborn doesn’t experience “bed” and “car” and “table” and “home”, but rather “darkness” and “light” and “line” and maybe soon “corner”, etc.  Taking in the same raw sensory input but at a lower level of abstraction - it takes longer to “see” things.  As we age, we begin grouping more and more things together, including time related groups, like days and weeks and years.  Our perception of the events of the day include fewer and fewer discrete chunks of larger and larger size, but maybe our subjective feeling of time is linked more to the number of chunks than their overall size.

A code abstraction is similar.  To the newbie (newborn), every method call looms large.  Every link from the current source code file to another source code file feels like “something you have to track down”.  Each class file is new, interesting, exhausting, virgin code to be tediously read through and grokked.  Every javadoc comment that refers to unfamiliar classes feels like a renewal of the dictionary problem of defining words with other words.  But as we learn a system of abstraction, a lot of the feeling of complexity begins to fall away.  We learn that the code we were trying so hard to understand isn’t relevant to an outsider just using the API.  We learn that class X just makes use of classes A-J underneath the hood and we can ignore them.   A set of methods clump together under a perception of common purpose, and the naming convention amongst them becomes part of our unconscious.  Soon the abstractions of the unfamiliar code become our abstractions in our head, and we have learned the lingo - and learned new abstractions that we might use elsewhere in our own code.

But everything new that uses significant abstractions will always seem “over-complicated” and “verbose”, and conversely, everything new that doesn’t use significant abstractions will always seem simpler and less “overwrought” by comparison.  Note that that doesn’t mean everything that’s verbose and over-complicated is using abstraction well, but it does mean that anything simple is not using much abstraction (though of course, there are many things that do not require much abstraction).

This past weekend, Vivi and I took Jaime for a Sunday drive out into the farmland surrounding Rochester. Our goal was to find Heiden Valley Farm from whom we’ve bought eggs and pork and chicken in the past at the Rochester Public Market. It was the second Sunday drive we’ve made to try to find the farm, and for a second time, we failed to find it. But along the way, we did find some interesting things. At one point, we passed a farm where a herd of Bison were grazing. The local zoo has a buffalo or two, but here was a farm with a whole herd, not 20 miles from my house. Ok, maybe 30 miles.

We also passed a farm with a sign that said “For sale: eggs pigs”. I still chuckle when I think about that sign that seems to consider buying eggs or pigs as equivalent decisions. We stopped and talked to the farmer for about an hour. He showed us everything he had on his 100% organic farm - eggs, chickens, pigs, goats, cows, sheep, orchards of apples, pears and peaches, gardens of garlic, onions, potatoes and more. It was great, and the price was quite low for his stuff. We bought eggs for $1.50 a dozen, and the chickens were very free-range (they were all around us). All the animals were free-ranging. The cows and goats grass-fed too. A side of beef would cost $4-5/lb from him, which is pretty cheap.

The weather has been unbelievable lately, sunny and completely clear for a whole week straight now. Very bright. Jaime loves to be outside, and seems to get easily bored inside unless someone is actively playing with him. Outside, he seems content to look all around him for hours on end. He likes grabbing fistfuls of grass, and he’d probably enjoy eating it too, if we let him. Next week, we’ll be taking him to the Y for swimming, which he is going to absolutely love. He already enjoys going to the daycare facility at the Y while Vivi exercises. He is extremely social with all strangers these days, and purposely smiles at people once he gets eye contact in order to elicit reactions from them. He’s gets everyone around him wrapped around his finger.

I can tell this is going to be a very fun summer.