In my opinion, the focus on beauty of the language is simply inappropriate for a teaching language. An experienced programmer or mathematician might enjoy transforming a ten line function into a simple one with only one line, but I think for many students, it won't be so interesting to transform one working program into a nicer one. Not all people see simplicity of math as a beautiful thing, for them a simpler formula is not much more interesting than an equal more complicated one. I believe that you need some experience to appreciate simplicity and elegance.

Just my two cents,
Benno


Nicola Gigante <nicola.gigante@gmail.com> schrieb am Sa., 29. Aug. 2015 11:49:

Il giorno 28/ago/2015, alle ore 22:17, Alberto G. Corona <agocorona@gmail.com> ha scritto:

Exactly Mike,

The destruction of pedagogy and innovation by Rationalism:

http://nocorrecto.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/the-destruction-of-pedagogy-and.html

Wright brothers and Watt were tinkerers, not scientists? Well, maybe they were not
_formally educated theoretical_ scientists. Science is every bit about trial-error experimentation
as is about rational thinking. Science lives on the curiosity of a human being that wants to
know what happens if he does something of which he cannot anticipate the effects.
So 19th and 20th century pioneers were scientists, and good ones indeed. 
That post misses it.

And talking about formalism, I’d like to ask the author of that post who he thinks has
brought humanity from Wright’s flying patch of metal pieces to the Apollo 11 mission,
and from Watt’s experiments to 15nm intel CPUs. Certainly not other tinkering, but 
engineers that do hard physics backed by a strong mathematical background. 
It is true that naked formalism is not pedagogical, but even when you start learning 
at young age you have to learn that to do new things, _in this century_, you have to
understand how things work.
Easy tinkering things have already all been discovered, we missed that train.

Anyway I’m sorry, this was a bit OT, so I promise to not talk further about it.

Bye :)
Nicola
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