Thinking about iterators
Tonight I ended up putting together a visual aid for the each and select array iterators in Ruby. I was thinking, how do you show what is happening when you have called each, or select, on a collection? Suppose you are new to programming, or respond more to visual or visceral example than text-based ones? Brief code is elegant and can be beautiful on the page, but there are times when that's not enough, or doesn't match a particular learning style.
I've had a project like this in my head for a while -- doing an in-depth visual guide for each of the Ruby enumerables and array methods -- as a way of "owning" my own knowledge on each method (as well as getting better at information-design).
Translating shows where you mis-understand the original language, and finding metaphors helps you make connections that are strong and rooted in your own way of understanding. This was a quick sketch and it's rough, but it was pretty fun to do so I wanted to put it out there. We'll see if more comes out of this. (P.S. The day I can do a good one for inject will be a good day, indeed!). Feedback welcome!
