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The phrase "You are Not Expected to Understand This" is probably the most famous comment in the history of Unix.
And last month, at the Systems We Love conference in San Francisco, systems researcher Arun Thomas explained to an audience exactly what it was that they weren't supposed to understand.
Computer science teacher Ozan Onay, who was in the audience, called it "one of my favorite talks of the day," writing on his blog that "Nothing should be a black box, even when Dennis Ritchie says it's ok!"
The code comment originally appeared in the Sixth Edition Unix operating system, describing context switching — or, as Thomas put it, "the mechanism that allows for time-sharing and multi-tasking ... essentially how a computer is allowed to be shared by multiple concurrent users and concurrent applications."
Thomas reminded the audience of Unix co-creator Dennis Ritchie's own "Comment about the comment" web page on the subject:
It's often quoted as a slur on the quantity or quality of the comments in the Bell Labs research releases of Unix. Not an unfair observation in general, I fear, but in this case unjustified... we tried to explain what was going on. 'You are not expected to understand this' was intended as a remark in the spirit of 'This won't be on the exam,' rather than as an impudent challenge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @03:17PM
Yet, I use it on myself sometimes to see if I have understood it... and it works very well in that case.
As for "simplifying" things, they don't need to be lies. Just keeping details out, can help sometimes. The details can be filled in again at a later time when the person feels more comfortable with the subject. I've used this method on students a few times and most of the times it worked as intended.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday January 23 2017, @03:37PM
I understand (and agree to) the sentiment. I.e. I agree, that knowledge comes usually in three stages.
1. Understand the principles of the theory
2. Being able to apply the knowledge in practice (where the setup usually slightly varies)
3. Being able to explain
I also try to explain some things to some peers to test if I understood it, and sometimes even rehearsing an explanation to a puppet can help detecting inconsistencies. But that does not mean that really everyone (or even only every average person) must be able to understand a theorem for the theorem to have merits.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum