The joy of theory (and Clojure)

I've written before about the impenetrability of some cultural theory, and the spurious assumption that anyone should be able to read these texts and understand them, an assumption no one would make about, for example, chemistry. They wouldn't make it about software engineering either but that's what I do so it's been a long time since I encountered a sentance that approached baffling, or one that required decoding beyond the usual everyday parsing of meaning from words. But here's one I just read:

Destructuring allows us to positionally bind locals based on an expected form for a composite data structure.

I don't think I'm supposed to understand this. I think it's sort of a challenge: you won't get this now but if you've been listening you'll appreciate that understanding will come given time.

I have faith that it will, because the authors are so encouraging and appreciative of the graft involved in coding. For example, they were discussing nil punning. What that is doesn't matter as much here as how they described it:

Clojures empty sequences are instead truthy, and therefore to use one as a pun for falsity will lead to heartache and despair.

The mention of 'heartache and despair' shows they understand how frustrating coding can be, and that give me leave to not immediately grok everything they're describing. Including destructuring. I wonder what Derrida would have had to say about that?