The understanding dilemma
Remember the first time you heard about object-oriented programming? What was your first response? If you're like me (and most other people), your response was probably something along the lines of "What the heck is this?"
Yet, at one point, a lightbulb probably clicked in your head. All of a sudden, it made sense. Nowadays, I know objects like the back of my hand. It's just such a simple concept, is it not?
How many times has something similar happened to you? I'm willing to bet it's more common than you think. The thing about it is that we as humans have a tendency to assume something we don't understand is complex. And oftentimes that's true. But sometimes it isn't.
I think I've determined the root cause of this problem. You see, we programmers have to be masters of filtering out unnecessary data. There's simply too much of it. So how do we approach learning new things? We try to learn the bare minimum. Most of the time, this is necessary.
Here comes the bad news. This doesn't always work. You were expecting me to say this, weren't you? You see, there are times where we as programmers have to understand things. And by understand, I don't just mean extracting just the parts you feel are necessary. I mean you have to understand general concepts.
After all, only an idiot would claim that the only part of C you need to know to write a calculator are the +, -. /, and * operators. And yet, this is what we as programmers find ourselves doing on a daily basis. We momentarily ignore the fact that we need to know how to write a function and how to do I/O.
The point is this: just make sure you understand things before you pass judgement. And try to make sure that you spend time understanding general concepts and not just specific ones.
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