Re:A Gentle Introduction To Learning Calculus
by vlad on Friday May 02, 2008 @06:07PM
(#179969)
Rarely do math and science instructors teach material the way it is discovered. Also, math and science courses are typically taught the way history or English is taught--you have some topics, you have things to memorize, you're given questions that are very similar to those you've seen in school or on your homework. I can imagine that only top schools teach this material in terms of tools and knowledge, versus learning and writing down the right equations on a test.
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That's exactly it. We show math as this complete and perfect system, whereas it was discovered, often times, through trial-and-error. Retracing the steps can help show why certain decisions were made.
For example, why does C have a separate short and long data types, but javascript just has "var"? Because when C was made, memory was at a premium. When javascript was invented, everything could be a 4-byte value.
Actually, the reason was more that C was designed for systems programming, and that sort of code often has to interface with hardware devices through memory-mapped registers. To do this, you need to be able to write code that uses variables of the correct width. This is why C has all the various sized variables in signed and unsigned variants.
Good point -- C was designed to interface with hardware ("high level assembly") whereas javascript was designed to interface with web pages & browsers. Either way, the history helps understand the design decisions.