This post came about by accident, two different things coming together:
- I was talking to one of my private students about the Tai Chi Chuan I’m teaching him and he mentioned how he likes the different options it gives him for self-defense: to control an attacker or to break him.
- On the way home, I listened to the Martial Secrets podcast (Lawrence and Kris have some good stuff there, BTW) with Rory Miller. In it, he mentions something about how karate works great for breaking people from up close but sucks for sparring (which for many karate styles, I totally agree with) and controlling people.
To explain what I mean, you need to get your nerd on for a few minutes because we’re going to talk about computers first. You also need to be patient because this is another one of those posts where I have to put several elements on the table before it makes sense.
Let’s begin.
Martial arts as a programming language
There are many computer programming languages but they all have certain elements in common. One of these is a type system. Its use is type safety which has one purpose: Preventing the language (and therefor the system that uses it) from making specific errors called “type errors.”
Wikipedia describes type errors like this: [Read more…]