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Rarely do math and science instructors teach material the way it is discovered. Also, math and science courses are typically taught the way history or English
by vlad 18y ago
Rarely do math and science instructors teach material the way it is discovered. Also, math and science courses are typically taught the way history or English is taught--you have some topics, you have things to memorize, you're given questions that are very similar to those you've seen in school or on your homework. I can imagine that only top schools teach this material in terms of tools and knowledge, versus learning and writing down the right equations on a test.
- kalid 18y agoThat's exactly it. We show math as this complete and perfect system, whereas it was discovered, often times, through trial-and-error. Retracing the steps can help show why certain decisions were made. For example, why does C have a separate short and long data types, but javascript just has "var"? Because when C was made, memory was at a premium. When javascript was invented, everything could be a 4-byte value.
- a-priori 18y agoActually, the reason was more that C was designed for systems programming, and that sort of code often has to interface with hardware devices through memory-mapped registers. To do this, you need to be able to write code that uses variables of the correct width. This is why C has all the various sized variables in signed and unsigned variants.
- kalid 18y agoGood point -- C was designed to interface with hardware ("high level assembly") whereas javascript was designed to interface with web pages & browsers. Either way, the history helps understand the design decisions.