Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#281

Post by LyndsySimon » Wed, May 09, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

owenversteeg wrote: post #61

LyndsySimon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a father of two girls, ages four and nine. Explaining things to them and seeing the dawn of understanding in their eyes in easily my greatest joy in life. As a parent, I basically get to relive this xkcd[0], over and over, every day. We take it to an extreme - we unschool[1]. We do our best to treat our daughters as any other member of the family, expecting to act as adults to the extent that they're able to do s…

Huh, that's the first time I've heard of unschooling, it seems like a really cool concept. If you don't mind me asking, where do you live and what are the laws like around unschooling there? How are people's reactions?

We're in Arkansas now, having moved from Virginia at the end of last year.

Virginia requires a Notice of Intent to be filed with the local school district and periodic standardized testing - there are some way around each of these things, but that's the course that the vast majority of homeschoolers take. It's annoying but not onerous.

Arkansas basically requires nothing at all.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#282

Post by LyndsySimon » Wed, May 09, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #116

LyndsySimon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a father of two girls, ages four and nine. Explaining things to them and seeing the dawn of understanding in their eyes in easily my greatest joy in life. As a parent, I basically get to relive this xkcd[0], over and over, every day. We take it to an extreme - we unschool[1]. We do our best to treat our daughters as any other member of the family, expecting to act as adults to the extent that they're able to do s…

My problem is unschooling is that just because you’re not interested in something (as a kid) doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it. It’d be nice if traditional school had a better balance where personal interests could be explored in a structured and formally accepted way.

> My problem is unschooling is that just because you’re not interested in something (as a kid) doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn it.

I was initially concerned about this as well, but my experience so far is that it's not really an issue. We test regularly, both formally and informally, which I feel is very important so my wife and I have a good understanding of where she is relative to her peers. With the exception of the "sight words" portion of language testing in K-3, she has continues to be far ahead of them.

"Child-directed" doesn't mean "no parental involvement". Where a traditional school manages the things that she would be taught, we manage the things that she's interested in. We take care to do things as a family that expose her to skills that we think she needs to know.

If that sounds time-intensive... well, it is. My wife doesn't work outside the home and I work remotely. It's substantially less time-intensive than building a traditional curriculum and teaching it daily, though.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#283

Post by insensible » Wed, May 09, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #265

insensible wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies of scale. The kids work together, play together, teach each other, and parents facilitate (often leading to interesting conversations like the one in the article). It's actually probably a little easier than having 5.

A coworker keeps telling me (I'm a parent of one, and intend to stay that way) that having a big family like his is easier, since the older kids can take care of the younger kids. Which sounds totally plausible and correct, 'cept it'll take you awhile to get up to that sort of economy of scale :P

This being Hacker News, we can talk about it in terms of graphs, right? Let's look at the sociogram when one parent is present.

The transition from zero to one is of course world-changing. But at one child, 100% of the connections in the sociogram connect to a given parent: zero economy of scale.

At two children they have each other, but that is only 1/3 of the children's connections when one parent is present.

At three, we're up to 50% of the connections that are child-to-child. At this point the sociogram is rich enough to become interesting.

Four => 60%. Eight => 77.8%.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#284

Post by virtuabhi » Wed, May 09, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

minor3rd wrote: post #224

ams6110 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an immense amount of effort to do it consistently. And it gets harder with each kid, at least for me. One of the things you figure out is that some kids aren't interested. And if your kid isn't interested in thinking about prime numbers, you're going to be hard pressed to change that. Conversely they will have interests that you don't share, and it's going to be harder for you to participate meaningfully in that…

> One of the things you figure out is that some kids aren't interested. And if your kid isn't interested in thinking about prime numbers, you're going to be hard pressed to change that. Conversely they will have interests that you don't share, and it's going to be harder for you to participate meaningfully in that beyond being generally supportive. They are individuals that way. I grew up in a family with 7 kids and…

> how much of their personality is ingrained in them from their DNA

Is this really true? I hope not!

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#285

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, May 09, 2018, 7:37 PM UTC

hycaria wrote: post #279

pavel_lishin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker keeps telling me (I'm a parent of one, and intend to stay that way) that having a big family like his is easier, since the older kids can take care of the younger kids. Which sounds totally plausible and correct, 'cept it'll take you awhile to get up to that sort of economy of scale :P

How fun that must be to take care of siblings, wow, youth enjoyed for sure.

Yes, of course, having younger siblings is exactly the same as being a full-time live-in babysitter.

Did you know older siblings don't even get paid for the work they do?

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#286

Post by nothis » Wed, May 09, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

bonesss wrote: post #208

nothis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that would have stumped me, expecting a trick/trap. What if my birthday is tomorrow? By the time my teacher checks it, it's wrong. "Your birth year" would have prevented that. This is a problem I have with certain parts of computer science and math education. Everything is encouraged to be exact, then, suddenly, variable names are used inconsistently, niche cases are ignored arbitrarily and explained with essent…

Isn't that more or less what happens in the real world? Software engineering is all about mapping dirty nuance to formal systems.

But general purpose education isn’t „the real world“. I think the opposite argument is often made to justify teaching theory when it doesn’t seem to have many real world applications.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#287

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, May 09, 2018, 8:38 PM UTC

insensible wrote: post #283

pavel_lishin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker keeps telling me (I'm a parent of one, and intend to stay that way) that having a big family like his is easier, since the older kids can take care of the younger kids. Which sounds totally plausible and correct, 'cept it'll take you awhile to get up to that sort of economy of scale :P

This being Hacker News, we can talk about it in terms of graphs, right? Let's look at the sociogram when one parent is present. The transition from zero to one is of course world-changing. But at one child, 100% of the connections in the sociogram connect to a given parent: zero economy of scale. At two children they have each other, but that is only 1/3 of the children's connections when one parent is present. At th…

> At this point the sociogram is rich enough to become interesting.

But the family is poor enough to become boring!

(I can't resist a good pun.)

Anyway, kids aren't raised in isolation with their parents. Our two year old tot already has two kids that I would consider her friends; she mentions them when she's home, and she prefers spending time with them to spending time with other kids.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#288

Post by sulZ » Wed, May 09, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

When I was working as a math tutor I would sometimes have to explain composition to a student for an introductory algebra class. When it finally clicked to them that you could pass functions into other functions many other concepts seemed to come to them more easily. Those were some of my favorite moments at that job.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#289

Post by steamer25 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 2:47 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #225

steamer25 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gist of music theory: It sounds interesting when sounds with simple frequency ratios are played at the same time. E.g., playing a 440 Hz tone at the same time and 660 Hz tone has a 2:3 ratio. Some combinations of frequencies, when played before or after other combos can establish an expectation and then either fulfill it or negate it. E.g., if you take the ratio above and then play 440 + 587, it'll sound like it'…

That's the gist of music theory as much as "radiation in the order of ~100nm excites your retina and you see colour" is the gist of photography or painting. x) It's the fundamental physical explanation, but there's a world of complexity and subtlety that eludes such a "first principles" explanation.

I agree that to fully appreciate musical qualities, you have to play around with sound and that text alone won't suffice. On the other hand, your description of radiation hitting the retina might be a decent primer on color theory which has about as much to do with photography and painting as music theory has to do with playing an instrument. My goal was to demystify the jargon by showing that it has very tangible definitions which can be understood by even analytical audiences like HN (of which I include myself).

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

#290

Post by khedoros1 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:00 PM UTC

virtuabhi wrote: post #284

minor3rd wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the things you figure out is that some kids aren't interested. And if your kid isn't interested in thinking about prime numbers, you're going to be hard pressed to change that. Conversely they will have interests that you don't share, and it's going to be harder for you to participate meaningfully in that beyond being generally supportive. They are individuals that way. I grew up in a family with 7 kids and…

> how much of their personality is ingrained in them from their DNA Is this really true? I hope not!

I don't think that personality is completely hard-wired, but different people will strongly tend toward different traits, and two people raised in an identical environment will react differently to that environment.

Interests can be encouraged because there's some flexibility in someone's natural tendencies. It's the old "nature vs nurture" discussion, about which one dominates the other.