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The mental blocks can be totally unrelated to the difficulty of the concepts, too. My wife is also smart and totally capable of learning to program. I've seen

The mental blocks can be totally unrelated to the difficulty of the concepts, too. My wife is also smart and totally capable of learning to program. I've seen her self-learn subjects (e.g., how email headers work or basic SQL queries) just to scratch a particular itch, though she didn't think of it as learning a technical skill. But she'll never bother learning to program, because she's "not a tech person". It all goes back to her being a young girl in school and having one bad computer teacher who made her feel stupid and inadequate. She's completely averse to "learning to program". Her block to learning is entirely emotional, acquired from a stressful event.

Verdex 8y ago
Type theory and lambda calculus? It's like, here's some neat math concepts. Oh look we can use it to prove statements about addition and stuff. Psyke, now you know haskell.
- DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
  > Psyke Well that's a new one for me haha. It's just "psych". Like "Here's a million dollars. Oh, PSYCH!" An older (more complete) phrasing is "to psych someone out", meaning you mess with somebody (psychologically). I've also seen it spelled "sike", but never "psyke". I wonder if your spelling is common too.
  - Verdex 8y ago
    Not sure. I have a hard time spelling any word where I don't have a good grasp on the etymology involved. Also there are some words that I can't spell AND pronounce, but if I have a hard time with one I can do the other (they change places several times before I get used to them). Finally, I almost always spell snake when I really mean to spell snack (including this time, I had to fix it). Psyke came up on the google search, so I guessed it was good enough even though it looked a bit funny to me. Of the two, warhammer 40k and psychology, my last thought was of warhammer 40k, so I'm guessing that's why I ended up spelling it the way I did. Psychology, physics, and psychics all give me trouble as well. (Hard core research into etymology and linguistics are on the list of things to learn. I'm guessing I'll continue to have these sorts of issues until I start making headway.)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
naveen99 8y ago
My 8 year old daughter wants nothing to do with programming, but loves math. This morning she asks me in the car for a math problem: “papa give me another hash to calculate!” :). ( I had taught her a simple hash function that just calculates a 1 digit hash by adding all the digits together repeatedly until you get 9 or less.)

Verdex 8y ago

Type theory and lambda calculus? It's like, here's some neat math concepts. Oh look we can use it to prove statements about addition and stuff. Psyke, now you know haskell.

DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
> Psyke Well that's a new one for me haha. It's just "psych". Like "Here's a million dollars. Oh, PSYCH!" An older (more complete) phrasing is "to psych someone out", meaning you mess with somebody (psychologically). I've also seen it spelled "sike", but never "psyke". I wonder if your spelling is common too.
- Verdex 8y ago
  Not sure. I have a hard time spelling any word where I don't have a good grasp on the etymology involved. Also there are some words that I can't spell AND pronounce, but if I have a hard time with one I can do the other (they change places several times before I get used to them). Finally, I almost always spell snake when I really mean to spell snack (including this time, I had to fix it). Psyke came up on the google search, so I guessed it was good enough even though it looked a bit funny to me. Of the two, warhammer 40k and psychology, my last thought was of warhammer 40k, so I'm guessing that's why I ended up spelling it the way I did. Psychology, physics, and psychics all give me trouble as well. (Hard core research into etymology and linguistics are on the list of things to learn. I'm guessing I'll continue to have these sorts of issues until I start making headway.)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

naveen99 8y ago

My 8 year old daughter wants nothing to do with programming, but loves math. This morning she asks me in the car for a math problem: “papa give me another hash to calculate!” :). ( I had taught her a simple hash function that just calculates a 1 digit hash by adding all the digits together repeatedly until you get 9 or less.)