Tom Stuart: A Lever for the Mind

One of the most powerful and important ideas in computer science is abstraction.  (At least, that’s what they told me when I took 6.001 at MIT 20 years ago, and I’ve believed it ever since…) The power of abstraction isn’t that you can do new things, but that you can think about existing things in new and different ways. In this talk, Tom Stuart introduces the idea of abstraction, and demonstrates how and why it’s so powerful, and why it allows to reason in new ways. This talk isn’t about one language, or even specifically about programming, although it does include some Ruby code to demonstrate the ideas.

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