I’m involved right now in a very intensive programming task. As I go along, a part of my mind is monitoring which parts are easy and which parts are turning out to be hard.<\/p>\n
And I’m seeing a definite pattern. Programming requires a certain amount of energy minimization. I guess this is true of any task. For example, when your arm reaches out to pick up a glass of water, your brain automatically works out a trajectory that will result in minimum effort and least wasted motion for your body.<\/p>\n
When programming, much of this optimizing takes the form of redoing work you’ve already done, because when you first did it you did not yet know what you know now. A lot of what might look like backtracking, is really just necessary retooling.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I get impatient, and just forge ahead without taking the time to do all the retooling I should. And that’s often how I get into trouble and hit a dead end.<\/p>\n
But that’s also how lucky accidents occasionally happen, and how some interesting new stuff gets invented.<\/p>\n
I was just discussing this with my cousin, and he said “That’s how Teflon got invented.”<\/p>\n
To which I could only reply: “The path to Teflon did not run smooth.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m involved right now in a very intensive programming task. As I go along, a part of my mind is monitoring which parts are easy and which parts are turning out to be hard. And I’m seeing a definite pattern. Programming requires a certain amount of energy minimization. I guess this is true of any … Continue reading “The path to Teflon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14212"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14213,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14212\/revisions\/14213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}