Learned and forgotten?

Something we though we’d left behind looks to become useful again.

We’d be the first to admit that we’ve been very inefficient at learning software.  It seems characteristic of our consultants that they conceive a project and spend time learning how to use the appropriate software for it, then move on to a different project for which different software is used.  It would make sense to be more specialized, or at least more consistent.  But that hasn’t happened, and as a sign of it we have a stack of manuals for software we no longer use.

Part of the problem was the era.  Our graduate school years seem to have been a time of rapid development and replacement of programming languages, some of them very good at one thing but not another.  It was also a time when a scientific programmer had to know a great deal about the operating system, sometimes at a very low level.  Nowadays it’s hardly necessary to know anything about a command line; in those days, it was how everyone worked.  So in addition to languages we’ve left behind, there is a great deal of half-remembered system detail lurking in the dusty corners of our minds.  It seemed something of a waste.

Until a week or so ago.  One of our tutor’s old students, now in college, will be taking a computer course in the fall.  She sent a course description and asked if he could introduce her to some of the concepts over the summer.  His initial reaction was a firm rejection.  The course involved much low-level detail that none of us ever learned, things like assembly language and hardware interactions.  Indeed, we’d like to know all that stuff.  (But if we did, our tutor wouldn’t be tutoring; we’d all be employed at much higher rates of pay in serious computing jobs.)

The student, however, was persistent.  And she is an exceptional student.  Now, any decent teacher will insist on giving each student the same opportunities and treatment, as far as possible.  But it’s true that some things are possible or impossible, depending on the student.  A great deal is possible with this one.  And there are things in the course description, like C and Linux, that were once very familiar.  So our tutor pulled out a stack of old manuals and did some research on what has changed since he was last active.  It brought back memories for all of us.

Finally he agreed to do something of a preview over the summer.  It is not, he hastens to add, anything like full tutoring support for the course, just an introduction to some of the areas and concepts.  But it seems like the old learning will come in useful after all.