Re:“Fun disabled by administrator” (2015)
by atoav on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:26AM
(#34135794)
I think it is a good skill to have, to know that sometimes the information you truly need might exist in a shape that you cannot appreciate (yet).
Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it".
For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path.
Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space.
It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow.
I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff".
Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.
Note that boring is subjective and it very often also means "this looks complicated I am not going to bother trying to understand it".
For example for a beginner when there is no programming tutorial for some library they wanna use, it might help to try reading the example code. This is something actual programmers do all the time, but to a beginner this might feel like a fruitless (and thus boring) path.
Being able to go into something without that dangling carrot of "this solves your problems directly" attached to it, is an immensly valuable skill. The reason for this is that a beginner cannot know what they don't know and going through "the boring stuff" might answer a lot of questions a beginner never knew existed and give them a feeling for the problem space.
It is essentially the difference between additionally reading the documentation and the source code vs just searching for answers on stack-overflow.
I don't say that one is better than the other, my point is that people are lazy and impatient so they often want answers that solve their problems without realizing that their question makes not much sense if they had read "the boring stuff".
Making the boring stuff less boring is always a good idea, but it won't solve this problem, because many people want answers and they don't want to learn the basics beforehand.