Ben Casnocha Quotes

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Maybe I'm just a slow learner or something, but I like to have things laid out as plainly and simply as possible.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

I tried to explain as much as I could," Poppet says. "I think I made an analogy about cake." "Well, that must have worked," Widget says. "Who doesn't like a good cake analogy?

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Transparency doesn't mean much if the consumer doesn't understand what they're looking at.

You can't get your head around something if you're yelling.

I want people to make sense of what I'm talking about.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

Did all this make sense?

If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better.

In a discussion, the difficulty lies, not in being able to defend your opinion, but to know it.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.

Any effort... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality.

All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this.

One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having your say on the subject. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it.

The more a subject is understood, the more briefly it may be explained.

If something can't be explained on the back of an envelope, it's rubbish.

It is not at all simple to understand the simple.