I code and I test, code and test and code and test, and my programme keeps on growing safely! No matter how complex the programme is, I start by programming a simple programme.
void main (void)
{
cout << "It works"; //atleast I know that the compiler is working fine
//today
}
Therefore I always know the point where my programme works fine. And I usually finish programming before the rest.
To learn how to learn sounds recursive, but it is'nt. Why it sounds recursive? How do you learn how to learn how to learn. You can do that because you know how to learn. But its useful to know strengthen your learning process.
The rule is simple just like my paranoid programming. Any new skill (like swimming, playing tennis, programming), identify all the components for that skill (this is the only hard part), with a lot of imagination. Strengthen each of that component absolutely independent of the other components (almost forget the whole big objective, and focus on the small objective one at a time). Once all or atleast the important ones are good, focus/strengthen the relationship between each of them. The road towards mastery of the bigger objective. Very similar to object oriented programming.
I always think is it every possible to feel what others feel. Does the other person see the same Red as I do. What if someone like you sees it blue, what I think is red, yet we both call it red because we were told so since we were kids. The question which intrigues me can I everr verify that you see the same red as I do?
Let us suppose that your and mine brain is a big drum and let us assume that every body has the same drummer inside his head. When ever I see a colour the drummer hits n number of time on my drum to tell it that the I saw a certain colour. If I see Red he drums 4 times, If I see blue he drums twice etc. But in your brain the drummer hits 4 times on seeing a blue, and twice on a red.
If it were to talk to your drummer his drum count for each colour, I can know what colour you see when I see a red.
To summarise if I could understand the biology of your brain (i.e. voltage for each sensation), I can feel inside you.
I think learning is organisation of memory. There is gluey thing in our head which sticks to the events as they occur to us sequentially. When the blob gets too big either we start to forget or there is an inherent desire to preserve this knowlege. We resort to refactoring (strictly a programming concept of removing smells from code), by making a model in some scratch area in our head. We modify the idea my going to and fro about that blob. When we have the model we can afford to throw away the blob (which is taking up to much space in our head) and preserve the model. If we remember how we learnt to recognise an apple, we compare and apple to the bare skeleton apple model in our head. The process of making the general model is thinking.