IUBio

Choice of PL for automatic programming (Re: Are we LISP machines?)

Curt Welch curt at kcwc.com
Thu Jun 17 13:05:28 EST 2004


erayo at bilkent.edu.tr (Eray Ozkural  exa) wrote:

> Yes, still it's an interesting question to me to find out how easy it
> is to train a random person to evaluate expressions in a formal
> language he has not seen before.

I think this is an interesting point.  I think we have a bad habit of
ignoring how hard it is for a person to learn a new skill.  We tend to be
blind to the skills we don't have, and take for granted the ones we do
have.  We feel as though we have had these same skills most our life.  We
may have gone to school for 20 years, but yet we don't feel we are all that
much different from what we were before we started school.  We feel we have
just picked up a few new facts along the way.

The truth however is that it takes humans forever to learn new skills.  Our
behaviors are constantly changing, and though the change is continuous,
it's fairly slow.  This is what gives us our ability to remember what we
did 10 minutes ago.  But to form new complex skill sets takes weeks,
months, or years, of "adjustments" to transform our old skill set into a
new one.

I think if we paided more attention to how behavior changes over time, and
how slow the change can be, and how hard it really is to learn something
truely new, we would have a better appreciation for how dumb we really are.

-- 
Curt Welch                                            http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt at kcwc.com                          Webmaster for http://NewsReader.Com/



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