I am a humble Acolyte (I scarcely feel deserving of that rank) and often find myself wondering about the significance of the frustration I am feeling on the road towards True Perl Enlightenment.
I first touched the hem of the robe of Perl back in the mid-90s, when I initially tumbled out of a long side-journey into the arts. I didn't stick with it then, partly I guess because my crappy job did not require it, and I was not far-seeing enough at the time to conceive of learning Perl as a road out of that crappy job.
It is now ten years and many crappy jobs later. I am in my mid-40s and have grabbed hold of the hem of the robe of Perl yet again, and am doing my best not to let go, to make it stick this time.
But perhaps because I am no longer young or because concentration comes hard to me (I tend to be interested in lots of things) or ... I don't know, I am finding the road very difficult. I am doing my best to keep my head down, to ignore the voices in my head that shout "you're too old! you're too hard-headed and don't have the background!" and keep examining the holy fabric before me, trying to attain more understanding. I try not to get discouraged.
Today I was working through Chapter 5 in Intermediate Perl (the Alpaca book) and realized I had no clue how a code fragment before me was doing what it was so evidently doing. It worked -- I could see that clearly upon running it -- but I had no idea why it was working, and the data structure that was being 'autovivified' was opaque to me.
Often my first impulse is to walk away, to do something else, in the hope that somewhere in the back of my head my brain will be working through the problem and eventually struggle towards an "aha!" moment, but ... then again, sometimes I feel that I am walking away so much that something is wrong, that the truth I am too desperate to see (or admit to myself) is that I simply have no aptitude for this, or that the voices crying "you're too old!" are right.
The other thought I have had is that perhaps I need to slow down and be more self-forgiving: that I have not spent enough time writing relatively simple code with the stuff that can be learned from an introductory book (like the Llama), and that although I have big dreams of writing substantial Perl code, I should perhaps keep writing small stuff until I have internalized how the basics work (and don't need to keep looking them up). Perhaps (to launch yet another lame metaphor) I need to stop trying to gobble up the whole Road to Enlightenment, and get out of the car I don't yet know how to drive and exchange it for a bicycle, and learn again how to enjoy the landscape - savor it even.
I would like to hear from others who have gone through any of this and persisted and come out okay. I am maybe a tad on the grim side because of my age & the fact that my schedule can make persistent study a challenge.
Respectfully,
Your Humble Acolyte
UPDATE: This struggle is very much ongoing. In a way it is a return (eternal-style?) of an ancient fear: when I was young I dreamed of becoming a scientist, but was mortally fearful I didn't possess the right kind of curiosity - the kind of curiosity which resulted in knowing the right questions to ask. It was partly this fear of a lack, of a fundamental inadequacy that drove me into the arms of the arts (specifically, theatre). I remember the struggle well.
And now ... well, I read and reread the basic/canonical texts, perhaps in some kind of vain attempt to memorize everything, like I used to be able to do with the lines of a play, in hopes that if I can only reach some sort of critical mass of cold knowledge, everything else will sort of ... bow down.
Sum: I got a great deal of wonderful advice when I first posted this, for which I am extremely grateful, but I am still struggling to apply it. The solution lies -- and I know this -- in doing rather than in reading (though nothing is wrong with reading). I need to create interesting problems to solve, have a project/goal, because they emphatically do not come from my current job. They will come from astronomy.
UPDATE**2 06.29.07
I feel as though I have fallen somewhat off the wagon, back into my old bad habits of reading everything that comes to hand, as if in a way books are my escape from a routine and a job that have become a nightmare to me.
Gotta get back somehow. It's never going to get better if I don't concentrate.
In reply to Enlightenment and Frustration by chexmix
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