> Personally I wish *I* could be insulated from more of this; leaky and > imperfect systems make this impossible at the moment. A strong > abstraction is great -- at some point you may need to understand what > that abstraction is built on, but even then it is nice to be able to > retreat back into the abstraction so you can focus on what's really > interesting and new that you are doing. >
That's nice if you're not just into escapist fantasy. Great to bliss out in a well-designed and productive environment, no one arguing with that. But that's no excuse for keeping kids clueless too long. > There's a bunch of examples of this which I think are uncontroversial. > Things like GC, pointers, characters (which are missing in Python), > TCP/IP (which few people access directly anymore), the underlying > mechanisms of threads and processes, and a bunch of other things that > are so basic I have a hard time remembering they exist. > We use 'Warriors of the Net' (a movie) to introduce TCP/IP (by "we" I mean the Silicon Forest based educators I work with). It makes as much sense to start with TCP/IP as it does with RAM and CPU in some ways. It's easy to look at processes through any kind of task manager (bash or Windows, doesn't matter). Learning to kill a process is pretty basic. I'll have kids start 'em just to kill 'em. They enjoy the sense of power this gives them. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
