Joan is mentioned frequently, she is a deep source of comfort, inspiration, and a voice of reason.
> _One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of
unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a fatherdaughter banquet, but our
father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother
(I'm nine years older, so it wasn't so crazy)._
> _During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the
paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying.
It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you
didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you
should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line
of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very
obvious and simple._
> _I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and
work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester Conference. After feeling
uncomfortable and behind, now I was in;_
> _Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent what's
happened?"
"I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent. . ." "Which way?"
"I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back."
I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing for an airplane,
and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just can't make it, when
somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but which way? You can't think in the
excitement._
> _During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily." I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple._
Can't help but think that has some relevance to programming.
I like to tell people that all learning is pain. It’s a sort of contrarianism that I picked up from Buddhism, I guess, where the first noble truth is that everything is pain.
A more careful restatement: we learn abstractions to organize experience, and we learn them only to the extent that they relieve a painful messiness in our experience. So the failure of the Haskell monad tutorial, to take one particular instance, is the failure of “look this was so hard for me that I must make it easy for others.” Let’s give pain relief before the problem sets in. Only problem is, “no pain no gain”: you needed to experience that messiness and confusion before your brain could find a way to understand the underlying principles and organize it. So someone reads your tutorial and has even less of a clear idea because they now pretend to an abstract knowledge which they do not have any concrete experiences to tie it to.
Caveat: this is how my brain works but I cannot be sure about others’.
It's why some people rewrite perfectly good code - because they don't understand the "theory" of the program unless they work through it for themselves.
You can discourage this by writing code that doesn't just perform the required task, but also makes its theory clear to the reader.
That is true for me as well. Read a lot of things from Richard Feynman, even saw some videos / interviews with him. Never saw him mentioning her. Maybe just an oversight.
Same here. I guess in a way by not mentioning her a lot in public he was protecting her from only becoming known as "Richard Feynman's sister". That way you leave the room for the other person to emerge on her own terms.
