> > This question makes me wonder... why is explicit recursion taught first? > [...] >
Perhaps also because teachers, being older than their students, are often mired in outdated thinking. On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Jake McArthur <[email protected]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Jonathan Cast wrote: > | You know, this might actually need to be looked into. > | > | You need to know recursion and pattern-matching to *write* re-usable > | higher-order functions, but how appropriate is that as the first thing > | taught? > > An excellent question! > > Coincidentally, I was just having a conversation with my girlfriend > about programming with "building blocks." She described her main hurdle > with programming at the moment, which is getting over the fact that she > is used to working with tangible objects that you just put together in > the appropriate way and her mind expects programming to work the same > way, but it doesn't, at least in the languages she has looked at so far. > I hypothesized that a language emphasizing combinators might be more > intuitive to her than a language emphasizing loops and imperative steps > for precisely this reason. I'm not entirely sure that she bought it, but > she seemed to agree that it at least sounds nice in theory. > > Now I just have to convince her to become a willing subject in this > experiment. ;) > > This question makes me wonder... why is explicit recursion taught first? > I can't help but think now that it may be because those coming from > imperative languages are used to writing loops, and recursion is the > closest to loops that we have. > > - - Jake > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org > > iEYEARECAAYFAknJYC4ACgkQye5hVyvIUKkExwCeLmejblGHyjdGsEkMykJ5bAJY > pZ0AniaEpdgHCZzz2AALFYQ7X9WYEzws > =R0qo > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >
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