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Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

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Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#81

Post by impendia »

Scapeghost wrote: post #60

The most key point of this is right at the start: "I decided to just answer straightforwardly" That can make all the difference in your interactions with your child and how they learn about this world. Too many problems are caused by parents not being honest with their kids. Be straightforward, no matter how awkward the explanations may be. Avoid patronizing simplifications and saying things like "you'll understand w…

I remember, when I was a kid, that I had a toy piano where the notes C, D, E, etc. were labeled 1, 2, 3, etc.

Later, I tried to get a computer to play a simple melody and assumed that 1=A, 2=B, etc. The result sounded wrong, and eventually by trial and error I figured out that if I put C# in place of C, then everything sounded good.

I asked my father why, and he gave me a version of "you'll understand when you're older". My father was a wonderful man, but this is still one of my sadder memories from childhood.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#82

Post by jerf »

jpz wrote: post #47

"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…

"Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight?"

Also possible is that what the kid actually understands and what the parent thinks they are understanding are two different things. The kid is quite likely still wrong in some critical way.

But that is where we all start with new things. I've got two boys in 3rd & 5th grade right now and I'm actively fighting with both of them the idea that "learning" is a matter of being told the correct answer and then they forever after know the correct answer in its every nuance. (Not just since the lockdown. It's been a theme for the past six months with me.)

The older one has just started learning Spanish with school... well... nominally with the school, that's actually going very badly, but I started him on Duolingo in the meantime... and that's been a very good doorway into the idea that you can't just be exposed to a single isolated fact once and then have it just magically be internalized, you need to be re-exposed to it over and over, use it, practice it, and discover how your initial impressions were wrong over time.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#83

Post by dmux »

yboris wrote: post #70
bspammer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught at a programming camp one summer, and my favourite example of this that I drove several kids crazy with was "above the line, below the line". Given any input word, I would tell them whether it was above the line, or below the line (which corresponded to acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in camp-speak). I think only two kids figured it out on their own, and each time I challenged them to write a program t…

In college a friend had about 10 of us dumbfounded for an hour as we tried to figure out what "The land of Nodd" was. The land of Nodd has floors, but no ceiling. It has grass but no lawn. It has no animals but there are teeth. Etc. The game is we asked him questions about whether it has something or does not, and we had to figure out what "The land of Nodd" was :P

I'm guessing Nodd has a lot of bookkeepers!

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#84

Post by surajs »

jpz wrote: post #47

"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…

That the child was able to access insights into something new is dimmed in no way by your causal understanding of implicit empathy. This is partly a failure of the writer to convey with precision, what the kid went through in that exact moment. That the kid was genuinely receptive towards the subject because his dad is into it has little bearing on the micro-epiphany he must have gone through. If only we could all retain that sense of wonder with age.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#85

Post by dmlorenzetti »

\lambda x. 6 was also surprisingly difficult for him to guess... It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the machine might not care about the input.

One Christmas when my whole family got together, I made a "stink detector" which consisted of a USB cable stuck inside a ziplock bag. My nephews were invited to put anybody's sock in the bag, then enter some parameters (like sock color, how long since it was washed, and, crucially, the name of the sock's owner) in a GUI.

Under the hood of the GUI was a grep engine that checked for a whitelist of names and titles ("uncle" among them to be sure), and assigned those names the lowest possible stink number. Whereas my nephews of course were guaranteed to get a high value. That result was fed through a random number generator, to produce a fuzzed-up normal distribution for display on the screen.

They spent a long time varying the parameters, trying to figure out how they affected the "analysis" before figuring out it was all driven by the name.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#86

Post by shultays »

jpz wrote: post #47

"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…

Either that or this is a blog post about `Things that didn't happen.`. If OP is claiming a 6 years old understands what `He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines` means then he is lying.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#87

Post by mrlala »

Scapeghost wrote: post #60

The most key point of this is right at the start: "I decided to just answer straightforwardly" That can make all the difference in your interactions with your child and how they learn about this world. Too many problems are caused by parents not being honest with their kids. Be straightforward, no matter how awkward the explanations may be. Avoid patronizing simplifications and saying things like "you'll understand w…

Definitely great advice! I have always felt the same with my kids. Be honest and try to answer your best even if you know they won't fully understand.

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#88

Post by fortran77 »

jpz wrote: post #47

"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…

"He cried when I told him about typeclasses and monads"

Re: Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

#90

Post by wrsh07 »

jpz wrote: post #47

"He gasped in astonishment at the idea of putting function machines into function machines" "He gasped in astonishment as I carefully explained the results of the double-slit experiment." Surely more like that this describes a 6yo kid being excited about something their parent is excited about and a product of implicit empathy, than any significant insight? I hate to lose reputation with downvotes for sounding negati…

I'm not going to downvote you but this is pretty joyless

Just because the writing is not up to your standards doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function. Kids love meta stuff (there's a book my niece & nephew were talking about and they were like "it's so weird!!" -- it was meta)

Also it's not that hard of a concept. Give kids some credit.

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