It's not about whether a programming language is simple or not. (I actually think LISP is not as simple to understand as imperative languages, unlike most nerds think) It's about what you can build with it.
For example, my first experience with programming was to build a game. If someone had tried to force-teach me LISP, it would have actually had opposite effect on me because then it would be no different from someone trying to force teach me some boring subject I have no interest in. The best way to teach something is to provide gratification. LISP is only gratifying to nerds who marvel at its "elegance", but it has no ecosystem which has tons of cool projects like fancy graphic engine or fancy game engine. It's just a "cool" language to nerds.
DON'T teach your kids LISP if you want them to love programming. Teach them JavaScript or Python, or anything they can build something tangible with which they can show off to their friends.
My go to language to refer people who want to learn is Processing though. Easy to use, and the documentation is fantastic (and Dan Shiffman is IMO the best programming educator out there for kids and adults alike, whether or not you like his high-energy style).
Lisp should be forbidden to young programmers, precisely so they'll go seek it out.
This provides a 2D and 3D NetLogo installation. The 3D version blows my mind. You can spend days going through the samples. When you look at the code after you watch a simulation, it's a bit of a shock how compact and readable it is. It's definitely a whole lot more than what they taught you and I alike in middle school.
> Lisp should be forbidden to young programmers, precisely so they'll go seek it out.
Unless it comes with a turtle, of course. Then they might end up writing the next greatest flocking algorithm.
Examples of educational languages would be Alice and Logo, and they're both pretty bad at actually doing anything.
I started by typing in listings from a book (101 Basic Games). Then I'd start modifying the games. Then I'd write my own. It's how people learn.
For a famous example, look at the Beatles. They started by copying other tunes. Then they modified the copies. Then they wrote their own.
Lisp is an imperative language. The order of execution is defined and you use side effects.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?...
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/racket-users/yjRuIxy... (Make sure to look around in this thread; he has a few comments.)
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/635839636754038784?...
In most cases, people who are masters at something tend to be the worst teachers because by becoming the master they have forgotten how to sympathize with complete newbies.
It is possible to teach someone Lisp, or something like it, without teaching them all of it at once... if ever. There are lots of people who use CAD systems like AutoCAD, or Emacs, or the various Lisp based/inspired Expert Systems shells, etc. who wouldn't consider themselves 'Lisp programmers' who learned just what they needed to be productive. If people were exposed to it a bit at a time, rather than the fire hose with minimal direction, I suspect a lot of complaints could be addressed. For example, the reason people think all the parens are bad is because it's become a meme and it's different than what they're used to. If they had started with Lisp and never learned ALGOL-inspired syntax, semicolons would likely look very strange to them.
Of course this process could be done in an advanced language that grows with the user, but most modern languages are not that - even Python expects the user to understand at least the rudiments of structured flow and objects almost immediately. Lisp (Common or Scheme) isn't it, either - lambda calculus is already far too abstracted from the "series of instructions" model which is a critical foundation for computing in the real world. C, my next step after BASIC, has quite a good balance of available abstraction and a tractable mental model; but the amount of boilerplate (the requirement for main() always seemed baroque to me) and hand holding of the computer (total lack of even trivial type inference) is not ideal for a beginner language.
See "Not in our Genes" by Lewontin, Rose, Kamin, for a thorough discussion.
In practice, it is a result based on twin studies, but with very low standards: for one thing not double-blind, definitions were let swing arbitrarily by the interviewers, and so on.
Definitions of intelligence are themselves questionable, techniques to measure it, even more so. The history of IQ has been tainted by plain fraud... And the whole field is too a succulent target for ideological warfare... truth is too easily a collateral casualty. This should not be considered science.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8zVXDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT138&lpg=...
You didn't pick very good evidence to support the idea that picking a LISP is a great way to get kids to love programming. This only supports the idea that Carmack thinks that learning a LISP is good for his son's development.
If the goal is for a beginner (whether child or adult) to be able to make cool things fast, Lisp is a great choice. The interactivity and the simple syntax makes it very easy to get up and running compared to more mainstream languages.
The best motivator is recognition. Kids don't care if a language has books and whether there "exists" a game development kit. They only care about how much satisfaction they will get by learning something and building something with it.
If you want your kid to learn programming, the best approach is to teach them Swift or Java, or Javascript, so they can build a mobile app or web app and show off to their friends. And they will get the joy of building something that is actually used by others. That's how you get people to be interested.
LISP won't get you anywhere in that sense. Sure you may learn some programming concepts, but the ROI is not worth it. Kids might as well spend a bit more effort to learn languages with more exposure and actually feel the satisfaction of having real users.
That's basically child abuse.
Do you want your kid to learn actual computer science, or do you want him/her to basically be able to create a cookie cutter mobile app?
This is exactly the point I was making in the ancestor thread. If you want your kid to learn computer science, you don't force feed him/her things they will have no interest in immediately. Instead you teach how to build a "cookie cutter mobile app", and they will get interested and go from there and teach themselves racket or lisp or whatever you originally wanted to force feed them.
But that Tactix GUI took me two months of sustained effort, lasting longer than any of the actual class projects. Most of the students struggled to draw a circle. It took weeks for us to get to "implement a method that takes an argument".
If you're looking at teaching programming concepts to elementary school children, i.e. to most kids, building applications doesn't seem very likely to me. It takes a long time and small children have poor memories for long-running projects.
If the programming is supposed to support elementary math and logic for kids who are getting used to the notion of "variable" in both programming and math contexts, teaching the kids to write the sieve of Eratosthenes or Babylonian algorithm really does seem like the way to go. Not because it teaches them to be good programmers or to like programming, but because it teaches them to think, and they're mostly not going to grow up to be programmers.
If, however, you want to entertain the minority of schoolchildren who do like computers and want to learn to program, then using an easy graphics library with good deployment tooling makes sense. Those kids do want to spend two months or so making a game. But that doesn't, to me, seem to be in the spirit of 'proximitysauce's comment.
most of us!
we have made it difficult to show our games and stuff to friends. except for minecraft and game mods. that's why kids gravitate towards those.
as a side note, i was thinking last time that programming is difficult to teach nowadays because when you boot your computer or phone, it doesn't drop you into a shell or command prompt.
so few people nowadays know that you can actually give commands to your computer or phone. so the concepts is not familiar to most!
I have no doubt about what you say. I had a really broken laptop that my 3rd grader happily tookover as his laptop, a linux machine mind you, about which he knew nothing about. I showed him how to open a terminal and use some bash commands, and how to invoke the Python interpreter and import a turtle graphics module. He was hooked and had lots of fun moving the turtle around (along with the incentive to learn some math at his level). I remember the day he walked to school with this duck taped laptop on a show and tell day, which ended up with the school's IT departement making Python available on all computers in that elementary school lab. I don't think he could have pulled this off in lisp. Beautiful language Lisp,but I don't see how I could have helped with graphics programming within an hour or so -- which was all what he was interested in.
Don't fall into the trap thinking lisp is just functional.
There were some later small implementations (e.g. for the Apple II) that were written from scratch and didn't need to implement all of Lisp (e.g. lambda, plists, etc).
Logo is a bare-bones Lisp disguised as an educational language.
Really makes you think what kind of fun programming was about back then and its potential. Frankly speaking you begin to feel programming has kind of lost its way.
I also picked up that book. What are you using to work through the exercises?
? tanne.print tanne.output tanne.shift tanne.split 19 3 3
The file with the procedures is on github:
- it is completely possible to build cool things with lisp, as highlighted by some other people who answered your message.
- your pejorative use of the word "nerd" above is really annoying and doesn't bring anything to your argument.
I am doing a rearchitecture of the game's code.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/569688211158511616?...
Ariely said there are actually better ways to get people interested, which is to show them something meaningful.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1yNGapZbZElKj (see minute 15 and ahead)
Also Clojure can use all of Java and JavaScript, so there's lots of tangible thing you can build. That said, here I'd mostly agree with you, the barrier to entry should be as small as possible, you just won't find the amount of tutorials and guides, and tooling that JS or Java would have on its own.
https://github.com/arcadia-unity/Arcadia
Build on top of Clojure's CLR support, obv.
I mean, this isn't true for everyone of course, but I began learning to code at around 8 or 9 years old because I was heavily interested in math and numbers, and precisely because I didn't have many friends (or brothers or sisters) to occupy my time with when I was very young.
I agree with the premise that the majority of folks learn better with a practical goal in mind, but I disagree with you that there exists only one kind of curious child.
I had a second-hand IBM XT from my fathers' shop at first, and I wanted to learn how to do things with it.
That equipment being available, in my opinion, was the biggest motivator in learning how to use it.
It was there for me to use, the limit was simply my knowledge of how to use it, and that was a very enticing proposition.
My first project as an 8 or 9 year old was a prime number generator (a naive sieve). I had read a book about patterns, and primes had been mentioned. I took a trip to the city library (another rarity statistically?) and picked up a guide to Pascal that was written towards small business owners and non-CS college students to help them with simple automation, and got to work looking up terms.
A week or two later I had a CLI program that spat out primes as fast as my computer (or my poor implementation..) could make them.
I then tried to use those primes to draw trippy pictures, which began another foray into programming topic that were new to me, necessitating more work looking up terms and generally haunting the library.
Years later, when I was a teenager, when I ran into like-minded computer folks and we'd get to talking, that same prime generator got spun into a small benchmarking suite that my friends and I toyed with before the multi-core trends.
so.. I guess that the "show it off to friends" thing still happened, but knowing myself and how I learn, I doubt that i'd have ever been interested in a hobby that was pushed towards me by authority figures as being useful.
I have a hard time conceiving how I would become a 'computer person' now-a-days, in fact. I was so anti-social and actively hostile towards teachers that the idea that one of them could have tutored me in the hobby , quite counter-intuitively, may have been the exact reason I would have avoided it as a child.
really, my grand tl;dr : "There is no one teaching method."
Python is great because of the massive ecosystem and the language is really simple. JavaScript is great because websites.
Last year Clojure made it to #1 (2019), improving from #3 (2018) in the SO salary cahrts.
(https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#top-paying-te... vs https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#top-paying-te...)
I certainly agree with the comment that what matters at an early age is what you can do with a language. I wanted to make GUI applications or games, and Java and Javascript hadn't been invented yet.
However if you dig deeper geometry is just the beginning eventual goal is to teach you to simulate movement of insects around light, predator-hunted scenarios etc.
My daughter took her first programming course in college and used the excellent book (HTDP), see [1], intended for beginners that used Racket as the programming language. By the end of the semester she was able to make a simple graphical game. I thought the course was very good and she liked it and still has a fondness for Racket although I believe that she has only used Java, C++, and Python since that class (she is now a CS major).
Learning Racket (which is Scheme and very closely related to LISP) worked out well for my daughter, so why would I say that LISP in elementary school isn't a good choice? Several reasons:
• Lisp isn't a popular language, ranking 28th on the TIOBE list of programming languages so there is far less opportunities to make use of programming ability in LISP than in other languages.
• Lisp isn't easy. The Common Lisp Standard is well over 1000 pages long. It lists over 1000 functions. Take a look at the basic iteration constructs, the most general is LOOP and has a whole chapter, see [2], in Peter Seibel's excellent Practical Common Lisp, but even the simpler DO construct is no cake walk[3].
• Recursion for elementary students... LOL
• Smart people have tried introducing LISP based programming to youngsters already and it didn't seem to take off. See Papert's LOGO language from the 80's. I've actually written some programs in it, but I don't remember where I got to use the language. (Perhaps it ran on the PLATO system?). I agree with a number of his insights[4].
Elementary school children don't understand functions and they really don't even understand basic math. The problem with LISP is that while it has an abstract simplicity that I find appealing and really quite beautiful, it's abstract nature is going to make it difficult for children. Less abstract systems like ALICE or SCRATCH seem a better fit if we insist on teaching kids to code.
I personally don't see the need to teach kids to code. Why not teach them math first. Why would programming come before understanding how to divide fractions or how polynomials work or what simple logical operations mean?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Design_Programs
[2] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/loop-for-black-belts.html
[3] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/m_do_d...
[4] https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsd...
If I were to design a language matching that name, I guess it'd be basically Logo written backwards. This might be interesting for a live programming environment, because in Lisp you type a whole expression and and nothing happens till you hit enter; but on e.g. an old HP RPN calculator you see the state of the data change after every keypress. You could design an "RPL" to work that way too, though after every word instead of every key.
I can't say the documentation / tutorials that I've found are the best but it's definitely something.
With parental guidance, a 7 year old could totally do this. Figuring out how to handle the stack will be the trickiest part, and there are a few examples online of this, so if you nudge them in the direction of others' work, they should be able to get it pretty quickly. They'd finish it by the time they're 8, at least.
> Logo is a multi-paradigm adaptation and dialect of Lisp, a functional programming language.
A summary of the language: http://wla.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa11/61a-python/content/secti...
Or the guide for grade schoolers http://www.educa.fmf.uni-lj.si/logo/doc/Apr.96/chpt8.pdf
And yes, I remember making the snowflake back in the early 80's on an Apple ][+ in the grade school computer lab.
If you know folks learning programming for the first time and maybe struggling with Java or whatever they're using, these references may help. Sometimes you just need to see things like recursion or currying in a different way for it to click.
[1]:http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html
[2]:http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[3]:https://www.worldcat.org/title/schemers-guide/oclc/24430531
[4]:https://schemers.org/Documents/ (more Scheme resources)
They used to... LOGO is a LISP.
There are only five memes to make educational curriculum decisions.
1) Most arguments for programming are from programmers who had fun learning to program and if the purpose of K12 is fun, then all kids should have mandatory enforced fun time which means learning to program. Which will not work for maybe 99% of society, although they will be subject to the curriculum. I had fun playing kickball; the purpose of school is to create an entertaining daycare like environment; therefore all kids should be forced to spend lots of time playing kickball. What about learning, or kids that don't enjoy kickball (or lisp?)
2) We have to prep our 5 year olds by teaching solely vocational skills because nothing will change in programming for the next 12-16 years. I'm old enough to remember "vocational training" that amounted to memorizing ancient versions of already obsolete Excel menus and keystrokes. Utterly useless. We like to think "Clojure K12" would be teaching Clojure, we all know its going to degenerate to drill and kill multiple choice tests about emacs keystrokes. A giant scantron test of multiple guess questions asking what C-X C-C does in emacs or what does M-f do, isn't going to help kids in the real world 30 years later. Better off teaching them welding, industry trends seem to imply TIG is a forever skill?
3) We teach critical thinking skills and frankly kids that can't conceptually understand and solve X+1=2 for X are not going to get anything out of programming that they wouldn't get better out of algebra or geometry. And what do we drop from the curriculum to add Clojure? Sorry kids you're not going to learn Trig?
4) We'll do what the cool kids do. If the cool kids district buys ipads, we need ipads. We had millions invested involving no further reasoning. Is the cool kids district using LISP? No? Well at least a third of districts won't even consider it, then.
5) The school board makes all curriculum decisions and they got and keep their job based on religion and/or politics and LISP isn't hitting the election issue hot buttons quite like a nice argument about creation science in biology class or sex ed or the new stadium for the football team.
Industry does not like LISP because is its very expressive and the programmer has the freedom to express any crazy problem solving idea they have in their head. The problem is the human condition of education for the last couple millennia shows its really kinda hard to take a hyper-customized brain dump of ... anything ... from one head into the other. So, it can do anything, any way you'd like, is too much anarchy for any shared work. How this applies to K-12 is if you think grading essays is a PITA imagine trying to grade large LISP projects.
https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...