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From: Nick Keighley on 16 Mar 2010 08:46 On 12 Mar, 15:11, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > On 2010-03-12 06:02:54 +0000, Ron Garret said: > > You're kidding, right? Are you seriously questioning the claim that C++ > > is harder to learn than Scheme? > > Yes. > > > The reason C++ is hard to learn is not that it's big per se. Common > > Lisp is big too, but it's vastly easier to learn that C++. The reason > > C++ is hard to learn is that it burdens the programmer with remembering > > endless minutiae, all of which are essential to producing working code. > > Google for "C++ coding standards" and compare the result to "Scheme > > coding standards." There's an entire industry devoted to reminding > > people of the myriad things they must keep in mind while coding in C++. > > This of course means rather little: there are a lot more C++ guides > than Scheme ones because there are a lot more people programming in C++ > than in Scheme. > > But even so, I think it turns out that many people find it a lot easier > to learn a large number of relatively easy things than a far smaller > number of hard things. you're confusing "people" with "computer programmers". > I know someone who, at the age of about 12, > could recite apparently endless data about Pokemon, and he was in no > way unusual - many of his friends knew all this stuff as well. > > Similarly, people find it fairly easy to learn, say, entire plays or > entire large pieces of music - actors and musicians do this all the > time. And, significantly, it's not this ability which is interesting: > no one says "gosh, it's amazing that they managed to *learn* that > concerto", instead they talk about how sensitively they played it or > what have you. The ability to learn vast amounts of stuff is just > assumed, because people are very good at that. I hated rote learning. This is why drumming a foreign language into my head was doomed to failure. I never understood why anyone could find pre-university maths hard. You just derive stuff from first principles. Physics is easy. Chemistry is hard (too arbitary). / Physical/ Chemistry is easy though (it's physics in disguise). Anyone who learns an entire play by heart is borderline insane. I'd much rather learn structured data than unstructured data
From: Tim Bradshaw on 16 Mar 2010 10:10 On 2010-03-16 12:46:46 +0000, Nick Keighley said: > you're confusing "people" with "computer programmers". No, I'm not: I said what I meant. > I hated rote learning. This is why drumming a foreign language into my > head was doomed to failure. I never understood why anyone could find > pre-university maths hard. You just derive stuff from first > principles. Physics is easy. Chemistry is hard (too arbitary). / > Physical/ Chemistry is easy though (it's physics in disguise). Anyone > who learns an entire play by heart is borderline insane. OK, so you're the sort of peron who finds that sort of thing easy but other things hard. Not all people do, not all computer programmers do. Your last sentence is fairly revealing about the problem underlying this argument: you seem to regard people who have significantly different characteristics than you as "borderline insane". That's kind of sad, in a way.
From: Nick Keighley on 17 Mar 2010 08:09 On 16 Mar, 14:10, Tim Bradshaw <t...(a)tfeb.org> wrote: > On 2010-03-16 12:46:46 +0000, Nick Keighley said: > > you're confusing "people" with "computer programmers". > > No, I'm not: I said what I meant. > > > I hated rote learning. This is why drumming a foreign language into my > > head was doomed to failure. I never understood why anyone could find > > pre-university maths hard. You just derive stuff from first > > principles. Physics is easy. Chemistry is hard (too arbitary). / > > Physical/ Chemistry is easy though (it's physics in disguise). Anyone > > who learns an entire play by heart is borderline insane. > > OK, so you're the sort of peron who finds that sort of thing easy but > other things hard. Not all people do, not all computer programmers do. > Your last sentence is fairly revealing about the problem underlying > this argument: you seem to regard people who have significantly > different characteristics than you as "borderline insane". That's kind > of sad, in a way. said slightly tongue in cheek. But also a rail against enforced rote learning. my mother can recite the rivers around the British coast in order. About the only use I can see for that is as a mnemonic tag for learning something else.
From: Tim Bradshaw on 17 Mar 2010 09:00 On 2010-03-17 12:09:42 +0000, Nick Keighley said: > said slightly tongue in cheek. But also a rail against enforced rote > learning. I wasn't trying to say that's a good thing, rather that people can ingest enormous amounts of stuff so easily (think of musicians and actors, say) that this is not even regarded as remarkable.
From: Nick Keighley on 17 Mar 2010 09:08
On 15 Mar, 23:23, RG <rNOSPA...(a)flownet.com> wrote: > But FWIW, there are sound theoretical reasons to believe that Lisp > programs are easier to debug than Perl programs, mainly because Lisp has > a REPL and Perl (normally) does not. why would the presence of a REPL theoretically make debugging something easier? Whose theory? Ive debugged small Perl and Scheme programs. |