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> the Middle Ages. > total intellectual stagnation Wrong. > Instead of teaching 2 + 3 = 5 , the hideous arithmetic operator "plus" is carefully disguised by c

> the Middle Ages. > total intellectual stagnation Wrong. > Instead of teaching 2 + 3 = 5 , the hideous arithmetic operator "plus" is carefully disguised by calling it "and", and the little kids are given lots of familiar examples first, with clearly visible such as apples and pears, which are in, in contrast to equally countable objects such as percentages and electrons, which are out. The same silly tradition [...] This guy would make a terrible elementary school teacher and getting this wrong leads me to believe he's also wrong about the point he's trying to make afterwards. > Unfathomed misunderstanding is further revealed by the term "software maintenance", as a result of which many people continue to believe that programs —and even programming languages themselves— are subject to wear and tear. If your software interacts with a changing external world, then software does rot. Security vulnerabilites, new protocols, etc all require a change. Your webserver can't serve insecure http in 2024. At least not if you want to build a business on it.

knallfrosch 2y ago
> To further sever the links to intuition, we rename the values {true, false} of the boolean domain as {black, white}. This is indeed sensible. However, you don't have to start with this and you don't have to stick with the easy {black, white}. You could rename the values to "banana" and "left" for increased, although needless, difficulty. My proposal: Have students write a simple correct program first and then show that it still works even if you rename all "user" variables to "comment" variables. Now "comments" have a "favorite pet", but the software still works. Magic! That shows how semantics and syntax are different, plus how "stupid" computers are, even if you "tell" them "what you want."
- nullc 2y ago
  I was teaching an adult friend some programming-- this was someone who could program "a little"-- mostly smashing stuff copy and pasted from the internet with some brute force until it kinda worked, so I started our exercise at perhaps somewhat of a too advanced level. At some point I realized that he was ascribing all kinds of meaning to variable names and also felt totally lost at how I "knew" what to call various things. I first tried to explain that the names were just labels but he wasn't getting it. I immediately changed every single variable name to the most profane and insane random junk I could think of then showed the program still worked the same way. Making it obscene was important; simply changing from one set of reasonable names to another would just leave the impression that there were alias in the list of Magic Words. He was enlightened. From there we were able to get into what things actually were Magic Words (like language keywords)-- or close enough (variable name set by system or library code that we were using, arbitrarily set by their authors but obligatory for us users). Knowing not everything was magic made a big difference. It's not just AI that carries the risk of overfitting. Sometimes you need some "out of distribution" material to separate convention from the underlying truth.
DiggyJohnson 2y ago
My reply is borderline so I understand any perceived hyprocrisy, but it's so weird reading a response that starts with > quoted text Wrong. > additional quoted text. It's such an off putting way to start an interaction.

knallfrosch 2y ago

> To further sever the links to intuition, we rename the values {true, false} of the boolean domain as {black, white}. This is indeed sensible. However, you don't have to start with this and you don't have to stick with the easy {black, white}. You could rename the values to "banana" and "left" for increased, although needless, difficulty. My proposal: Have students write a simple correct program first and then show that it still works even if you rename all "user" variables to "comment" variables. Now "comments" have a "favorite pet", but the software still works. Magic! That shows how semantics and syntax are different, plus how "stupid" computers are, even if you "tell" them "what you want."

nullc 2y ago
I was teaching an adult friend some programming-- this was someone who could program "a little"-- mostly smashing stuff copy and pasted from the internet with some brute force until it kinda worked, so I started our exercise at perhaps somewhat of a too advanced level. At some point I realized that he was ascribing all kinds of meaning to variable names and also felt totally lost at how I "knew" what to call various things. I first tried to explain that the names were just labels but he wasn't getting it. I immediately changed every single variable name to the most profane and insane random junk I could think of then showed the program still worked the same way. Making it obscene was important; simply changing from one set of reasonable names to another would just leave the impression that there were alias in the list of Magic Words. He was enlightened. From there we were able to get into what things actually were Magic Words (like language keywords)-- or close enough (variable name set by system or library code that we were using, arbitrarily set by their authors but obligatory for us users). Knowing not everything was magic made a big difference. It's not just AI that carries the risk of overfitting. Sometimes you need some "out of distribution" material to separate convention from the underlying truth.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago

My reply is borderline so I understand any perceived hyprocrisy, but it's so weird reading a response that starts with > quoted text Wrong. > additional quoted text. It's such an off putting way to start an interaction.