I’ve picked up some contracting work to help us through the lean times and I’m learning JQuery. Until this point I’ve never used Javascript or JQuery at all, which will become important later.
The JQuery ‘hello world’ equivalent is basically this:
$(document).ready(function() {
alert('Suck it.');
});
If you stick that in a file, stick the appropriate script tag in your .html code, and run it, it pops up a window that says: “suck it.” in your browser. Super duper, right?
What interested me was my own thinking process as I figured all this out. Remember, I don’t know Javascript or JQuery; I’ve never done client-side web development before. All of this is new territory. But when I read that little code snippet posted above, what I thought to myself was: “Okay, so I’m doing a selector at the document node in the DOM tree; and I’m installing an anonymous function into the ‘ready’ callback.”
Now, that needn’t mean anything to you; and in fact, it’s probably not exactly right. But it’s MOSTLY right, and this is the remarkable part: that I have enough experience in other languages to recognize, at a conceptual level, what’s going on here. And not only to recognize it, but to grasp it quickly and automatically. Having grasped this bit of logic — that there are apparently lambda functions (to use the lisp parlance) that can be created and passed around in this way, I can bring to bear a significant amount of expertise. It’s like downloading a bunch of knowledge from somebody’s else’s brain, except it’s from my own brain. From my past to my present.
I remember the first time I was trying to learn C, in tenth grade. Hello world in K&R C looks like this:
#include <stdio.h>
main(argc, argv) {
int argc;
char **argv;
printf("Suck it!\n");
}
I might have screwed this up, because K&R C got replaced by ANSI C sometime in the mid-90s, but the idea is the same. Right now this is as familiar to me as English, but at the time it was a complete conundrum. All these squiggly brackets and asterisks and shit. Huh?
Of course, in between then and now is god knows how much water — lots of experience, lots of education, lots of screwing around. And _this_, more than anything, is what is remarkable to me, this vast collected archive we’re all carting around in our heads, and that informs our current actions quickly and automatically, that not only colors how we see the world but which actually defines the objects that are perceived in the first place. (This is not poetic license, it’s literally true, but it would take too long to go into the neuroscience.)
It’s easy to forget how much has gone into the person you happen to be at the moment, at the deep well of your expertise no matter what you’ve been doing with your life. I would do well to remember this, and to more frequently consider the implications.