jfarmer

21 ms·

181.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Yeah. Andrew probably write something once every few months about why he prefers to interact with readers this way vs. comment threads. He's even polled his audience in the past and the _audience_ overwhelmingly favors interacting in
182.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Have you actually read his blog? Readers email him all the time. He typically posts 2-3 of those emails every day and responds to them publicly. Often, he'll go back and forth with multiple readers in this way. Here's a post fro
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by jfarmer 12y ago
> it doesn't matter though. It does matter if it means otherwise qualified contributors stop contributing or, more likely, never attempt to contribute in the first place. Linus doesn't know how to act any other way, but that d
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by jfarmer 12y ago
I've had good success teaching Lua with https://love2d.org/ . Super easy to create click-and-run executables that work on OS X and Windows. Mobile's a different story (obviously), but as a teaching language + env
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by jfarmer 12y ago
The title music is awesome. I could listen to it all on its own. The in-game music is tedious and I had to mute it after 5 seconds. :(
186.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Worth mentioning that the "Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection" was proposed by R.A. Fisher who was responsible for developing the following techniques and theorems (among many other things): - Analysis of variance (ANO
187.
by jfarmer 12y ago
I was agreeing with you while simultaneously pointing out that you, like the folks you're criticizing, are conflating a constructivist model of learning with a handful of specific approach to teaching derived (mistakenly, IMO) from th
188.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Beep beep. Back the truck up. I am a dyed-in-the-wool constructivist and I think the theory of "Learning Styles" as it's used today is rubbish. It's a mistake to think they're attached at the hip. By "the theo
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by jfarmer 12y ago
If your goal is to learn those two languages, I'd instead pick a problem/domain you understand very well and then express the various aspects of that problem in both F# and JavaScript rather than implementing some aspects in F# an
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by jfarmer 12y ago
I think it's wrong to think of "learning how to program" as "learning a specific programming language." This is difficult to see as a beginner, if not impossible. IMO it's better to think of each particular pr
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by jfarmer 12y ago
GitHub and LinkedIn do this, I believe.
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by jfarmer 12y ago
For programmers familiar with Ruby or Python, my experience is that the main points of confusion are all around what is happening in memory. What is a Ruby String/Array/Hash/etc., _really_? That sort of thing. It might seem
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by jfarmer 12y ago
Over the last three years I've personally taught hundreds of developers how to program, either directly on indirectly. I've written curriculum at all levels. I co-founded Dev Bootcamp ( http://devbootcamp.com ) and am
194.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Welcome to HN!
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by jfarmer 12y ago
He means "algebra" in the "universal algebra" sense of the word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_algebra That probay doesn't clarify the connection, but at least you'll be pointed i
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by jfarmer 12y ago
If you like this, you'll also like Wiio's laws: https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html
197.
by jfarmer 12y ago
The author of the article buried the lede, which is in the last paragraph: > So the tension around types comes from the fact that if you want to program in a style that turns effects into explicit things that get passed around, sophisti
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by jfarmer 12y ago
No. There's someone out there who probably just learned he has been the butt of an ongoing joke among YC partners for the last 4 years.
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by jfarmer 12y ago
I've heard that from friends raising outside Silicon Valley, Seattle, and NYC, too. "Shark Tank" terms, so to speak.
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by jfarmer 12y ago
> In that case, what would be the key difference between a clean term vs a messy one? In my experience, terms with lots of if-then conditionals are the most common flag. The last "messy" term sheet I saw had an unusually long
201.
by jfarmer 12y ago
Thanks! That's just the first instance I spotted — there were a few dozen similar things I saw after skimming for 2-3 minutes. I'll post an issue if I find time.
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by jfarmer 12y ago
Disclaimer: I've been writing programming curriculum professionally for the last three years. I do agree that it falls into the pit you describe, but I disagree that it's the style that's doing it. I think the style is fine,
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by jfarmer 12y ago
The best introduction to monads that I've read is the original paper that discussed them in the context of functional programming: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/marktoberdorf/ba...
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Teaching Novice Programmers How to Debug Their Code(blog.codeunion.io)
5 points by jfarmer 12y ago|0 comments
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by jfarmer 12y ago
It means they believe in the idea of learning styles and that whatever they're currently experiencing is accounted for by that belief. As for how I translate that sentence into something useful for me as a teacher, I choose to hear it
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by jfarmer 12y ago
Happy to dive in, but that's not much to go on! For starters, can you define what you mean by "style of explanation" and give me a few examples? For each example, give me examples of students with whom that style clicked, ex
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by jfarmer 12y ago
No, I didn't say that. I only said that students believe (very strongly) in the "reality" of learning styles and as evidence of this statement they say things like the quote I gave. I do think students sometimes use the idea
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by jfarmer 12y ago
You'll note that I didn't say they were rubbish BECAUSE students use them as an excuse. What's more, I didn't say that students use "learning styles" as an excuse, only that they believe whole-heartedly in the
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by jfarmer 12y ago
The concept of "learning styles" is something _we_ invented. It's not as if it has any intrinsic reality as a category, at least until we demonstrate it does. This article is arguing (rightly) that it's not a useful way
210.
by jfarmer 12y ago
That's not what people mean when they talk about "learning styles" and I'm pretty sure you know that. Heck, it's even right there in the first sentence of the article: > Learning styles — the notion that each st

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