[agumonkey]

It was the final nail in the coffin. Linalg was a limit cas of something that was "hard", foreign and serious. The book itself was not all, that would be dishonest, I must say that reading FP for years also brought my mind up. It took me off the material side of things, no more thinking about setting memory with bits, and looking at abstractions instead (doesn't really matter how functions and types are done below, the semantics and algebra is the focus). That said the difference in mindset and perspective in that book (Gareth Williams Linalg 5th edition) told me that a topic can be approached in many different ways. What group A say about a domain may not speak to your brain, while group B perspective will fed your brain just the right way. What is hard is mostly "impedance mismatch", not a limit in the reader.

[alt2501]

Makes sense, thanks. Hard thing for me is finding the texts that match my impedance.

[agumonkey]

Slightly related, when doing the first coursera proglang mooc, I remember newbies crying on IRC because meta evaluation made no sense to their mind. Some of the dudes that had gone through this before and could discuss it without trouble. I remember the odd feeling of being completely incapable of explaining that "simple" thing to the newcomers. Some actual mathematicians say that math makes no sense, you just get used to that, so maybe don't run from one book to another and try osmotic learning. Read some, think about it. At times I just note what eludes me without overthinking it and I come back to it later. Maybe my lower brain made sense of that overnight. One thing is that newbies were very impatient that's another thing to avoid. It's just odd to balance between patience and boredom vs impatient excitment and pain.