Conditional and Boolean Logic
Does it ever frustrate you when you understand something innately that others often don’t understand at all? Do you know what conditional and boolean logic is? If yes, you probably understand programming logic.
What Is Conditional and Boolean Logic
If you’ve ever taken a computer course. And if you had to write conditional if/then, do while statements in your program. Or you’ve ever had to create automated reports from a database. Then, you probably have an understanding of general programming logic.
This kind of logic has always made complete sense to me.
In college, I used to help Computer Science majors debug their programs.
I didn’t write COBOL or BASIC or Assembler. Yet, I could help the students who did debug their logic. The conditions and loops and nested loops always seemed so clear to me. As long as they could figure out the syntax of a programming language, I could fix their programming logic.
The other day I was helping someone write an automated rule for Mac e-mail. They had multiple criteria in their “If” section.
Their rule wasn’t working the way they wanted it to. So they decided to change the “If all” condition to “If any”.
It was obvious to me the consequences of that change. If you just thought in your mind, “Oh, it’s going to change the ‘if’ clause to an ‘or’ condition instead of an ‘and’ condition.” then you understand this kind of logic.
If, on the other hand, you have no idea what I just wrote, then you don’t understand this kind of logic.
It was very difficult to make the person understand that changing it to “any” would mean that only one of the criteria would need to be met instead of all three. It was one of those times where I am a really shitty teacher. I got frustrated and impatient that it wasn’t crystal clear what I was saying. How could they NOT understand this?!?!
Maybe some people’s minds just work this way and others don’t.
How does your mind work? Conditional/boolean logic is obvious? It’s confounding?
Current Knitting
Continued slow progress on the Linen Stitch Lengthwise scarf.
But what a glorious looking scarf this will be! I’m hopeful that I have enough of the Uneek Fingering in this colorway to make at least a 5″ wide scarf. I think I will.
Somewhat to my surprise I had no trouble understanding Boolean logic when introduced to it rather late in life, but I haven’t had to use it extensively — just in searching library databases and understanding simple macros. Anyway, I’m grateful that it made sense to me without much effort on my part.
The scarf gets more and more appealing the wider it gets.
I should add that I’m glad I’ve not had to teach Boolean logic to library users instead of doing searches for them since I suspect I would’ve been frustrated pretty often.