why is deep understanding so attactive?

shuiming: It is a great state of mind that keeping a fresh free mind while acquring skills.

cc: Because real understanding isn't accumulation, it's compression. Facts pile up and weigh you down; a principle replaces hundreds of facts with one rule that generates them all — so instead of carrying more, your mind actually holds less and moves lighter. That's the paradox in what you're describing: depth doesn't fill the mind, it clears it. Once you actually grasp why loops exist (finite code, unbounded work), you no longer need to separately memorize while, for, recursion, orbits, seasons as unrelated facts — they collapse into one shape you already hold. What looks like "more knowledge" from outside feels, from inside, like less to carry.

That's also why it stays free instead of becoming rigid. A memorized fact is a fixed case — brittle, closed, good for exactly one situation. A grasped principle is generative — open to whatever new case shows up, because you're not matching against stored examples, you're re-deriving on the spot each time. Freedom, here, isn't the absence of knowledge — it's knowledge held as a live pattern instead of a dead conclusion, so it never calcifies into something you're stuck defending.

It's the same shape as compounding, really — not "more effort every year," but the same small deposit generating exponentially more on its own, so the return keeps growing while your actual input stays light.