This, exactly. People learn not only when they are forced to, but naturally from observing their environment too. The more opportunities to "spontaneously learn" you take away from them, the less they will learn.

Here's a comment I made from several years ago when Chrome tried to do before what it's trying again now (it's not the first time): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7678729

Maybe this next point is starting to go into the realm of conspiracy theory, but I see far too much evidence of it every day: companies are doing this because they don't want users to learn. They want to keep users naive, docile, and compliant, and thus easier to "herd" for their purposes. They don't want people knowing the truth behind how things work; they would rather "developers" (and only those who explicitly chose to be one --- probably for monetary reasons) learn from their officially sanctioned documentation (which does not tell the whole truth), and not think or discover for themselves.

(I've memorised most of printable ASCII because I did a lot of Asm programming decades ago, so I instantly understood what you mean.)

Not sure how much actual conspiracy is in there, but I've definitly noticed that the gap between "consumer software" (highly optimized for ease of use but also highly limited and designed with a specific intention how users should interact with it) and "professional software" (powerful and flexible but only usable after extensive training, often command-line only) is widening instead of closing.

There are also definitly conscious design descisions how "cryptic" a particular feature should appear to users. I remember several bugzilla threads with discussion whether a config option should be exposed as an "ordinary" field in the settings or only as an option in about:config, so that normal users won't find it.

Coffee hasn't kicked in yet, took me a while to figure out you were saying '[' url encodes to 5B and ']' url encodes to 5D

I read that sentence 10 times. Wow.

This is how I learned them too (though about:… in IE5).

Is that a meaningful piece of learning, though? I’ve been doing webdev since the 1990s and still look up character codes if I need them.

I think the value is not in memorizing such trivia; for a 7 years old it might be discovering the pattern of data encoding and its why and how. It opens all sort of paths of discovery in future for understanding software.

You'd be surprised how often veteran developers fail to grasp intermediate Unicode concepts (surrogate pairs, for instance) probably since they skipped over (or was not curious enough about) implementation details of such abstractions.

Sure, but it's the curiosity about how things work under the hood that matters. If he sees [ being replaced with %5B,he'll ask why it does that. And that leads to learning.

Are you gatekeeping a 7 year old? Learning about character encoding from first principles is an awesome accomplishment.

I’m saying learning character encoding doesn’t support this:

> Needlessly hiding technical details from kids is going to limit their learning.

I watch kids learning circuitry via redstone in Minecraft on iOS and Xbox - walled gardens, yet impressive learning nonetheless.

I agree kids can learn useful stuff in Minecraft, no doubt.

But when I was his age, all I had was MS-DOS 3.3. And I had to CD around to various directories, DIR *.EXE to remember the names of executables, etc. It was an environment that exposed more technical details, and kids who are predisposed to learn technical details learn a lot just by using it. Windows 10, doesn't promote the learning of technical details to anywhere near the same extent.

(I try to make up for it a bit. I introduced him to DOSBox.)

Wouldn’t it be better to be able to devote limited learning time to more useful things than locating oddly named executables, though?

It is a mistake to conflate “it was harder for me” with “I learned more”.

My kids can program more complicated stuff in Minecraft than I could at their age. Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.

> Part of that is having a tool that’s fun and abstracts away the boring bits.

What is "boring" varies from person to person.

I know, when our son plays Minecraft Java Edition, he likes to play it with the debug screen (F3) on.

He doesn't understand what most of the details on that screen mean, although he is learning a few. (He was asking me to explain what X, Y and Z coordinates were.) But, even if he doesn't understand most of it, he still likes it, and probably sooner or later he'll ask me more questions about it.

When he told me this, I thought he was talking about ASCII, but I had to actually double-check with "man ascii", because 5B/5D sounded familiar but wasn't 100% sure he was right.

But the point is not that he memorises the ASCII table. The value is that he learns that computers internally represent letters/punctuation as numbers. The underlying concept is what's important, and the learning of specific values is mainly useful as a way of learning and reinforcing that underlying concept.

Yep! Kids learn by observing.