Re:Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programmi...
by fao_ on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:49AM
(#22946113)
> This is where my credulity was stretched. It's interesting and exciting when you first learn about it only if it breaks a rule you've long had in your mind and enables you to do more interesting things.
It's still a new way of using a new idea. People (including children) pick up all kinds of assumptions along with the information that they obtain. If you describe something with certain examples, and then do something that isn't seen as possible or covered in those examples, that can be very surprising.
Different children are different people and therefore have different expectations and blindspots.
Agreed!
> doesn't mean the kid wasn't astonished when they realized you could put a function in a function
This is where my credulity was stretched. It's interesting and exciting when you first learn about it only if it breaks a rule you've long had in your mind and enables you to do more interesting things.
A 6-year-old child hadn't spent years assuming you can't put a function in a function, and they'd have not the slightest idea what you could now do with it.
Generally, very small children have very flexible ideas about the structure and rules of the physical world, so showing them "math tricks" often earns you a, "Duh, of course you can do that!" reaction when you instead expect astonishment. The exception is when they've been doing painful work the slow way and you've given them a shortcut.