BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
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User ID: 1535
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
2yr ago
I don't want to comment on the neo-pronouns, but I have a question about this bit:
That one offends me more on grammatical grounds than any feelings I have about gender identities.
The singular they goes back to at least the 1300s, at least according to Merriam-Webster. What kind of pedigree are you looking for in your english words above and beyond a word usage that literally predates modern english? Is it just that the same word can refer to singular and plural? Does the word "deer" bother you in the same way?
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
2yr ago
but if you never hear about it and none of the zealots try tracking you down, it's small harm.
I'm not sure this is necessarily obvious. Can you really be harmed if you don't realize it?
If the victim feels no distress, what actually determines if someone has been harmed?
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
2yr ago
Maybe this is because I'm self taught, but I don't think either of your two options are how I think about intro to coding.
The order I learned languages (so far) was perl -> python -> C -> common lisp -> JS -> Kotlin -> Scala -> Go (with a smattering of others in between when I needed them for specific things). I don't think explicit data structures/data types came into (as opposed to them being an implementation detail) that until I hit C, but by the time I did, they were quite intuitive.
Maybe this is just me being solution oriented, but the way I've always looked at it (and introduced people to programming when I teach them) was to start with a problem they were solving, start with a blank page (I've not found giving them starter code to produce good results), and walk them through each of the relevant tools, being careful not to tell them the combinations that they need. For synthetic problems, stealing music from the internet is usually a good place to start. People like music, and getting it is a quick way to go from the "I don't know what I'm doing" to the "I'm a god" adrenaline rush that hooks people on programming. They build up a toolbox of solutions to problems, and later combine them into bigger solutions for bigger problems.
But having the power and agency to solve my own problems (real problems, not synthetic assignments created by an academic) myself is what got me into this, and it's what keeps me doing it every day.
I will, however, agree that the (often quite useless) abstractions do get in the way more than they help, and leave people in a nebulous "I have no idea what's going on" state of mind. Maybe that's the benefit of going through C at some point? It strips away almost all of the magic. Maybe I'm being hard on abstractions here, but library specific abstractions (as opposed to the ones built into the language itself) tend to be poorly done and make my life harder rather than easier.
It was not immediately clear that the new definition was the point of contention. People railing against the "singular they" is much older than the current gender debate (including my 8th grade english teacher), and the OP specified that it was more on grammatical grounds than gender.
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