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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)

#141

Post by marviel »

bspammer wrote: post #72
marviel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Spoiler?) I think it's called "above the line" "below the line" because the characters in each of the accepted words don't travel below the "character placement line" that runs along the bottom of every word. I've forgotten the "real name" for this line. Thus, toothpaste -> below the line, because of "p" tooth -> above the line, no characters pass below it. Generally, if the word contains a y,p,q,g, or j, then it's…

This is the right answer! I think it was made harder in the camp due to "above the line" and "below the line" already having semantic meaning in the context of the camp, most kids didn't expect that to literally be the answer.

yeah that makes sense, thanks for sharing it with us!

I'll likely use it to mystify kids someday soon.

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

#142

Post by dmurray »

secondraft wrote: post #123
jerf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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. So there is a difference between insisting on being right and acknowledging the possibility of being wrong. However, this reminds me of the book "Factfulness" where Hans Rosling shows…

I think he goes further than that: even young people have outdated knowledge in accordance with some predictable biases. We rely on the information because it fits some narrative we believe about the world, not because we learnt it when it was correct 30 years ago.

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

#143

Post by soared »

Ive always thought an under appreciated point in this story is the word “machine”. A function doesn’t mean anything to a kid, but a machine is so easy to visualize and understand. I’d imagine that with calling it a function “machine” it would be much harder to understand, since you can’t imagine a factory doing work to an input to get an output with the word machine.

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

#144

Post by darkerside »

JadeNB wrote: post #106
darkerside wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies

> Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies Could you be swayed to the more optimistic "Education is a series of decreasingly incomplete truths"? I'm a math professor, and we do tend to be able to tell our students the truth, nothing but the truth, but very much not the whole truth, at least in every part of the curriculum that I've seen. (That we're able to do so doesn't mean no math teachers lie, but it's…

This was certainly meant to toe the line, but mostly tongue in cheek. I don't attribute malice to educators. I respect the hell out of the good ones. But at the very least, lies of omission are common.

It's more of a commentary on how humans think and learn, not a judgement on how they teach. I think there's an interesting philosophical debate to be had around whether it's ethical to bootstrap knowledge through a lie, later discarded, if that results in more efficient knowledge transfer than the straight truth.

It's parallel to what I've heard about the trouble with history bring. You just never know exactly where to start.

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

#145

Post by JadeNB »

darkerside wrote: post #144
JadeNB wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Education is a series of increasingly smaller lies Could you be swayed to the more optimistic "Education is a series of decreasingly incomplete truths"? I'm a math professor, and we do tend to be able to tell our students the truth, nothing but the truth, but very much not the whole truth, at least in every part of the curriculum that I've seen. (That we're able to do so doesn't mean no math teachers lie, but it's…

This was certainly meant to toe the line, but mostly tongue in cheek. I don't attribute malice to educators. I respect the hell out of the good ones. But at the very least, lies of omission are common. It's more of a commentary on how humans think and learn, not a judgement on how they teach. I think there's an interesting philosophical debate to be had around whether it's ethical to bootstrap knowledge through a lie…

> It's parallel to what I've heard about the trouble with history bring. You just never know exactly where to start.

Mathematics offers an opportunity here that history doesn't: there is a definite starting point, namely, the axioms. Not every course can or should start at the axioms, but it is there as an option, as it isn't with history.

Even so, this point is a very interesting one. I hated history in grade school, but then stumbled upon Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while browsing the shelves one day. It hooked me, but made reference to a lot of WWI history that I didn't know, so I started reading about WWI history. But, to understand the antipathies in WWI, you have to go back even further in European history ….

This hunt backwards for first causes has led me to Wilson's Heart of Europe, which traces the history of the Holy Roman Empire. It's a struggle, because it's much more on the scholarly than the popular side of things to which I am accustomed, but I'm engaged in it because it's helping me answer questions that I posed, rather than ones that my history teachers both posed and, all too soon, answered.

I think that the best education, lies or no, is the one that both leaves students asking their own questions, and equips them with the tools to seek out the answers to those questions themselves.

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

#146

Post by heretoo »

gowld wrote: post #139
impendia wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, no question about that. When I was a kid, I tended to assume that my parents always were available to drop what they're doing and engage with you. (And which, incidentally, is surely a reason why many parents are finding working from home during quarantine to be so difficult.)

Your question may have touched a nerve, if he was getting older and no longer could see sharp.

Or he just wanted to be flat on the couch, without being disturbed.

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

#147

Post by wrsh07 »

thebigshane wrote: post #100
wrsh07 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you recall the name of the book?

Story Thieves: The Stolen Chapters

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

#148

Post by daotoad »

shultays wrote: post #86
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.

As a parent, I can tell you with 100% certainty that kids can get this kind of concept.

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

#149

Post by thisiszilff »

dmux wrote: post #83
yboris wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I'm taking this comment as evidence that I've succeeded in figuring it out.

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

#150

Post by copperx »

shultays wrote: post #86
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.

Why is it so hard to fathom? I'm pretty far from smart but I understood functions at that age, and going a few steps further is not that hard. Besides, this is a child of a brilliant CS professor we're talking about, not your average kid.
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