Comment by sanderjd
12 days ago
This is so interesting. I've heard that the whole "learning styles" thing is basically bunk, but this really reminds me of that.
I don't find the kind of schematics you're asking for to be useful at all. When I do come across them, I see them as busy-work that people had to make to justify starting some project, or because it's a required artifact. But I never think "oh good, here's a useful thing".
Those are honestly my unconscious thoughts on these sorts of things. But I do realize, if I think about it consciously for a moment, that some people must find this sort of thing useful.
But it's just different strokes for different folks! What I want is a description of the goals of a piece of software - what should I expect to be able to do with this? - and an entry-point, and prose documentation on what each component of the code is and why it exists. But a visual birds eye view of what is connected to what is just not how I go about understanding things.
The thing that both of your goals have in common is that they require software which is architected and not just an interconnected mess of everything calling everything else.
If you do have such a mess, you can't really get a good visual overview (it's approaching a complete graph), and you also can't get prose documentation of code components because there are no clear responsibilities.
Well, I agree that better architecture is useful, but I don't think it's required by my "digging into what's going on starting from an entry point" process. I do think trying to write the prose documentation I described tends to drive better architecture. Trying to write the documentation on a module of spaghetti often what helps me realize there is no through line to why all this stuff is in this module.
Learning styles is bunk because it's effectively a practice effect that's self-reinforcing, not because we don't have preferences at all. So the fact that you have not found utility innately in those schematics (per this thesis, i'm just using it to illustrate the learning concept) would mean that you have not had as much interactive exposure with it, and you therefore decline to engage with them. The bunk aspect of learning styles is that you could deliberately engage with them and doing so (again, in a theoretical learning context, not doing work) in combination with other ways of engaging with the code stack would lead to better and deeper learning than just sticking with what you are comfortable with. Plus the added bonus of you improving your use of the schematics for future learning endeavors. So to your point, in learning, "different strokes for different folks" just reflects the methods of learning you have been most exposed to, and is quite malleable!
Maybe, but as I get older I find this sort of stuff increasingly unconvincing. I've had a lot of time to get a lot of exposure to a lot of different things now, and I have more faith in my own sense of my preferences than in "well you just haven't done the other stuff enough!" now.
I think people prefer different things because they prefer different things.