3 ms·

I've never heard this characterized so well. There was a <something> that I had always been trying to put my finger on when I'd read these sorts of articles and

I've never heard this characterized so well. There was a <something> that I had always been trying to put my finger on when I'd read these sorts of articles and the top-down/bottom-up description is right on the mark. My own feeling is something like this. Before Newton there was Kepler. Now Kepler was no dummy and he used the exacting measurements of Tycho Brahe to arrive at a very accurate model of planetary motion. He found that planets traveled in ellipses not circles, and he knew that they swept out equal areas in equal times (among other things). In short, he had a very firm "top-down" grasp on what planets did. Then along came Newton, a "bottom-up" thinker if there ever was one (calculus was invented in what was perhaps the most supreme feat of yak shaving ever http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html ). He found that there was an underlying and unifying idea, gravity, that explained why the planets behave as they do. So to cap off my analogy, I've found that if I've worked in a sufficiently bottom-up way on something then sometimes what seems complex or intricate collapses down into some small and elegant solution that I wouldn't have seen if I were coming from the other direction (or at least it would be much more difficult).

lincolnq 17y ago
Great analogy. I guess the answer is "people should be able to apply both ways of thinking". So how do you impart both in a curriculum? I have observed that for great hackers, it doesn't matter what method they are taught -- they'll learn both and apply them appropriately. This was probably true for Newton. It's certainly true for one of my best friends, an excellent hacker, who is as much a bottom-up thinker as anyone could ask for and yet he took the top-down class. He was going to learn how to think about problems in the optimal way no matter how, or what, anyone taught him. I'm not sure what this means for how the intro course should be taught. Certainly it seems to suggest you won't be ruining anyone with great potential by teaching them the wrong stuff. So maybe MIT has realized that it doesn't matter for the best students, and they've been doing the same thing for 30 years and it's time for a change. What the hell. See how it works, and then maybe change back or learn something new. They're going to have to run this experiment for a long time, though, in order to figure out whether it's actually better. I'm quite interested to watch.

lincolnq 17y ago

Great analogy. I guess the answer is "people should be able to apply both ways of thinking". So how do you impart both in a curriculum? I have observed that for great hackers, it doesn't matter what method they are taught -- they'll learn both and apply them appropriately. This was probably true for Newton. It's certainly true for one of my best friends, an excellent hacker, who is as much a bottom-up thinker as anyone could ask for and yet he took the top-down class. He was going to learn how to think about problems in the optimal way no matter how, or what, anyone taught him. I'm not sure what this means for how the intro course should be taught. Certainly it seems to suggest you won't be ruining anyone with great potential by teaching them the wrong stuff. So maybe MIT has realized that it doesn't matter for the best students, and they've been doing the same thing for 30 years and it's time for a change. What the hell. See how it works, and then maybe change back or learn something new. They're going to have to run this experiment for a long time, though, in order to figure out whether it's actually better. I'm quite interested to watch.