Thursday, June 23, 2016

take the picture

photographthesurfacesinthismodel(camera,model)

coding is hard if, when trying to assemble a complicated machine, one begins by trying define all its parts. coding is easy if, and this is called the algorithmic approach, the first thing undertaken is to define, in as simple a set of terms as possible, what the machine does.

After all, there's no way to know what all the parts will be if we don't know what the machine is for. Discovering the algorithmic approach is very mysterious and amazing. The above code is an instruction the computer can actually run. If there were workable instructions in the curly braces and the variables camera and model were defined, the computer would follow those instructions, using information from camera and model.

Coding is hard if, instead of looking at a description of the thing itself, we try to look at descriptions of all the thing's parts. In the above function call, two things are referenced as parts of the one thing, and in a correct coding environment, clicking on one or the other of the two things would show us additional information about the thing we clicked on. This is a correct coding environment.