On 27/07/2010, at 5:47 AM, Kurt Anderson wrote:
"I read somewhere that people are happiest when trying something
new. The
happiest periods of people's lives is when they're successful in
trying
new things. Yet, their natural inclination is to keep doing what
they're already doing, and not to change at all.
Isn't that ironic?"
Maybe those should be the lyrics in the Alanis Morissette song.
At least that would be a reasonable example of irony ...
I found the comment interesting. The main thing to note is that they
are happiest when SUCCESSFUL at trying something new. Most people tend
not to be successful at new things and certainly not without lots of
effort. The difference between entrepreneurs and the hoi-polloi is
that they tend not to be as disillusioned by failure and carry on
trying new things--eventually they are successful (simple law of
averages).
Thus you have something like (view with fixed font):
------------|
/ ---------|| --------
/ / || / \
/ / || / \
Frustration |-------------/ / ||--/------------\-------------
Inadequacy |---------------/ |--/--------------\------------
Happiness |-------------\ / \-----------
\ /
\------------/
Status Quo New Thing Success at new Status
Quo
The best feeling occurs when you have success because the frustration
drops away and the happiness/euphoria increases at the same same time
time.
It is a combination of the increase in frustration and sense of
inadequacy, the corresponding decrease in happiness, and the extra
effort required to learn new things that causes people generally to
stay in the comfort zone of the status quo. My primitive graph doesn't
show what happens when people are unsuccessful at trying something
knew but generally that leaves them with a feeling of failure and a
desire to avoid that in future.
However, that's all a bit psycho-babble. To get somewhat on topic I
read Jon and Susan's blog on RPG OA and I was disappointed that they
found it necessary to state:
:quote.
Don’t worry too much if you don’t feel you fully understand how this
“pointer stuff” works. It will always be the same; just clone
something similar into every handler you write and all will be well.
:equote.
It's been over a decade since RPG got proper pointer support (V3R7
gave the ability to add and subtract an offset from a pointer) so
you'd think that this "pointer stuff" was at least understood
conceptually by RPG programmer's even if not used much in business
applications. I found it particularly odd because OA handlers will not
be written by the average Joe Six-pack programmer and those capable of
writing a handler should understand pointers. Handler consumers won't
need to know such things.
Since Jon and Susan think it's necessary to give a warm fuzzy gloss
over pointers I guess they've found RPG programmers don't understand
the concepts behind pointers and that fits with other comments in this
thread regarding the interest RPG programmers have in what they do.
Simply put, they're not interested in software development, software
engineering, or even programming per se. It's just a means to an end
and if it can be done with the minimum amount of effort then so much
the better. Mind you it would be unfair to target only RPG
programmer's in this way. Seems to me that human's in general are lazy
and will do the absolute minimum necessary to get by--hence shoddy
building, plumbing, welding, driving, etc. Once upon a time the
sloppy, indolent, shiftless, inattentive members of society would be
removed by predators or starvation. One might presume that employers
would weed out the dross (to mix my metaphors) but that seems not be
the case.
Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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