Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Knowing the words

One of the things I'm worst at is words. Terrible. I always like to say I'm good at talking to people. Silly contradiction. I believe both statements true, but I'm not really clear on how that works out. I think the "talking" I'm good at is actually called "making a connection"... not the kind of talking that conveys in real, solid data.

Anyway, it's hard to be good at something in a technical/work sense when you can't speak the jargon. So I've known of "closures" for a while. And I'm pretty sure I knew what a closure was even though if you had pressed me for a definition I'd have waved my hands about and said something about functions and private data and scope. Hacker news and some spare time at work resulted in me running through this:

What's a Closure?

Absolutely love it. Love it. It starts off slow (almost painfully so) but builds ever so nicely! I had a hiccup at #9 due to some typos/sloppy code and in #10 I forgot a return statement and failed to "see" that I had missed it for, like, 10 min.

Our... "PM"? McCool (yes, that's actually his real name) went through it as well. He has some minor programming experience from college but not much and he was stumped on a couple, but he worked through them. Which is awesome. Interesting how he actually read some things closer then I did. He raised (what I think is) a valid point about #7 which I didn't even see/consider. Relating to the fact that there's no guarantee the return value of f() is constant. Also, when he questioned me about a block of example code, my mind skipped around and was almost unable to process the code during the conversation. Very interesting.

Also, there's talk about doing an HTML5/JavaScript customer facing project at work, getting away from the sucking hole of hell that is Flex 4. Woot!

I still love Java the most :P

2 comments:

  1. I recently learned what closures are. I have no idea why I didn't understand them a few years ago, but I feel like my mind is still forming- not as quickly as it did when I was a child- but there are some things that would never have occurred to me a couple years ago, that have finally occurred to me or made sense to me this year.

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  2. Also- being a good communicator is not about having a wide vocabulary :) I often stumble across that same problem that you're having...

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