Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming (2018)

Re:Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programmi... by JadeNB on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @11:48AM (#22946826)

To be sure, there is a habit to make the teacher's life easier by lying, and I certainly believe you when you say that you were lied to; but all of these can be rescued, as a sequence of decreasingly incomplete truths, just by adding quantifiers. Since the human brain is (excessively) good at ignoring quantifiers, a skilled teacher (not me, in this context—I'm a college teacher, so am not claiming that this is the right language for primary schoolers, just that it's true) can speak truthfully without impairing the pedagogy:

Q. how much is 3 - 5?

A. taking 5 out of 3 does not give a whole-number answer.

Q. how much is 2 divided by 3?

A. dividing 2 by 3 does not give an integer answer.

Q. what are the roots of the quadratic function ...?

A. this quadratic function doesn't have real roots because you can't take a real square root of a negative number

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Re:Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programmi... by Viliam1234 on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @01:57PM (#22948325)

> A. this quadratic function doesn't have real roots because you can't take a real square root of a negative number

This one is actually true. If someone tells you they have a square root of a negative number, just laugh at them and tell them it's just imaginary.

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