Terry Hancock wrote: > Of course, since children are vastly better at learning > than adults, perhaps adults are stupid to do this. ;-)
Take learning a language. I'm learning Swedish. I'll never have a native accent and 6 year olds know more of the language than I do. But I make much more complicated sentences than 6 year olds. (Doesn't mean they are grammatically correct, but I can get my point across given a lot of time.) > Quantum mechanics notwithstanding, I'm not sure there > is a "bottom" "most-reduced" level of understanding. It's > certainly not clear that it is relevant to programming. I agree. That's why I make this thread branch. I think learning is often best taught from extending what you know and not from some sort of top/bottom approach. I'm also one who bristles at hierarchies. Maybe that's why I like Python and duck typing. :) Some learning works by throwing yourself in the deep end. Languages are sometimes learned that way. The Suzuki method extends that to music, though that's meant for kids. > Python is actually remarkably good at solving things in a > nearly optimal way. Have you read Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay? http://www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html Section "2.2.4 Totally Inappropriate Data Structures" relates how knowing the data structure for Lisp affects the performance and seems relevant to your point. Andrew [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
