Dividing up life into eras

This is just one of my silly "cocktail party" trains of thought (I've never been to a cocktail party). In short, more blog fodder I just felt like typing up without much careful thought or revision. It's simply amusing to me to try and divide up life, and indeed society at large, into small-ish eras focused around technological change, each suspiciously around 10 years long, with myself suspiciously placed at the start of interesting things.

The same sort of thinking drives the urge to divide up people based on their birth years, though the periods that have achieved greater consensus don't match up on neat decade boundaries. (On that front, I'd self-identify as a 90s kid, or even Gen Y, but not a millennial, a group I see as different though the consensus groupings lump both together. A friend born in 1985 disagrees with my self-identification because I have no memory of the early 90s. In any case, there's what majority consensus says, and there's also what is popular online. I think it's trendy to think of there only being 2 groups: boomers and zoomers. The divide used to be anyone over 30 is a boomer but it's getting lower.)

Anyway, I'd classify the 90s as an era of peace (I'm an American) with growing technological change. A transition is underway, by the end almost everyone has a PC in the house when they did not at the beginning. Those of us growing up in that decade are in some senses special for being at ease with both sides of low tech and high tech, for being able to see and understand and comfortably live in multiple worlds. This is in contrast to older generations who are uncomfortable with all the modern technology (and stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer), but it's also in contrast to the younger generations who are uncomfortable without all the really modern technology that hides away the details (and again stereotyped as not knowing how to operate a computer). The older generations have trouble when competent usage requires operating at a higher level of abstraction, the younger generations have trouble when competent usage requires working beneath the levels of abstraction. Only (conveniently) my generation of those born approximately between 85 and 95 seem to comfortably bridge the gap. (There are of course outliers, which include many of the pioneers of the technology in the first place going back to some of those born in the 1920s.)

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One of the beginner difficulties with programming

For some reason I occasionally think about programming pedagogy even though I don't teach anyone and I'm not in any hurry to write a book about it. I do occasionally give advice to beginners or even absolute beginners, though in the latter case it's usually "here are two book options that seem to be successful for that audience, even when or especially if you don't have a clear picture in mind of what you want to learn programming for". (The books are Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, and alternatively David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation.)

Anyway, there are many difficulties in learning to program. Programmers often like to say it's really easy, but if it were so easy, I think it'd be even more popular, and there would be other signs too, like students more frequently getting straight As in classes. The difficulty I want to talk about here isn't in logical thinking though, which may be the hardest part, nor syntax. (Syntax can range from "easy" to "hello APL"; I still remember it taking quite some time for me to get used to PHP's for loop syntax, it was my first language.) No, the difficulty is much more basic and something I think a lot of programmers don't think much about on its own, especially since it shows up all over the world in areas outside of programming: the concept of abstract mapping.

To put it another way: things standing in for other things. One of the simplest examples that comes to me is analog TV channels: I want to watch the Fox channel, say, how do I do that? Well I start going through the channels: channel 1, channel 2, channel 3, ... sometimes channels won't have anything but static on them and will be skipped. Eventually I might see that channel 13 is Fox. So now I associate in my mind that 13 is Fox, and if I want to watch Fox again later, I can remember that I just need to enter 13 on my TV remote and it'll take me to Fox. "13" maps to "Fox"; that is, I have a mental map where the label "13" is interpreted as a TV channel, just like a map of the US States has a label "Alaska" that is interpreted as a geographical region, population, culture, climate, etc.

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