4 ms·

And? My solution? Let the kid grow up and learn.

by gitonthescene 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago
- pygy_ 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I taught my children numbers starting from zero with a similar routine, based on cardinality. They immediately got it. My kids' school also uses zero-based tables. "Natural" is a very loaded and ambiguous term, best avoided if you hope to have sane discussions.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Teaching kids about zero I have no issue with. I do not believe for a second that you taught them to count by holding up one finger for zero, two fingers for one etc. Reminder that we're specifically talking about array indexing.
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    The index is the distance away from the first element. So index 0 is the first element. Index 3 is 3 away from the first element, so the fourth element. It's the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers. In other words, counting and indexing.
    - pygy_ 4y ago
      Well well well... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888459 (quoted here for convenience) ————— Formally, ordinals start at zero too :-) [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but AFAIK, the former definitions were similar. [...snip...] -- [0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism. - The layman counts from 1 - The uptight programmer counts from zero, because Dijkstra said so (or so he thinks). - The meta-contrarian (I used to be one) says fuck it, ordinals start at one. - The meta-meta-contrarian reads Wikipedia[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0]. That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number [0] Help! I'm stuck in a Boolean algebra[1][0]! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de... [0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...

And? My solution? Let the kid grow up and learn.

anigbrowl 4y ago

pygy_ 4y ago
Anecdotally, I taught my children numbers starting from zero with a similar routine, based on cardinality. They immediately got it. My kids' school also uses zero-based tables. "Natural" is a very loaded and ambiguous term, best avoided if you hope to have sane discussions.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Teaching kids about zero I have no issue with. I do not believe for a second that you taught them to count by holding up one finger for zero, two fingers for one etc. Reminder that we're specifically talking about array indexing.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  The index is the distance away from the first element. So index 0 is the first element. Index 3 is 3 away from the first element, so the fourth element. It's the difference between ordinal and cardinal numbers. In other words, counting and indexing.
  - pygy_ 4y ago
    Well well well... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888459 (quoted here for convenience) ————— Formally, ordinals start at zero too :-) [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but AFAIK, the former definitions were similar. [...snip...] -- [0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism. - The layman counts from 1 - The uptight programmer counts from zero, because Dijkstra said so (or so he thinks). - The meta-contrarian (I used to be one) says fuck it, ordinals start at one. - The meta-meta-contrarian reads Wikipedia[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0]. That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number [0] Help! I'm stuck in a Boolean algebra[1][0]! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de... [0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...