22 May
2013
22 May
'13
3:13 p.m.
>> This is not the case with a lot of the
'toy' programming languages
>> and environments where you do have to re-learn things when you move
>> on to other languages and systems.
> Yes and no. [...]
Jsut as nobody tried ot learn the entire vocabularly
of a human
language at the start :-)
Not quite, but a few kids come remarkably close. There are some who
don't go through the usual babbling stage and remain silent for longer
than usual, but once they do start talking, they're _talking_: complex
sentences, compound sentences, two-sided conversations, a reasonably
rich vocabulary....
Case in point. Compare the classic Philips
'EE' series of kits with
'Snap Circuits'. [...]
The later Philips EE kits included a circuit for an FM
radio
receiver. You got to wind the tunig coils, they were resoianted with
a varicap diode, etc. You got to understnad how such sets owrk. The
Snap Circutis one seems to consist of an 'FM radio module', an 'Audio
Amplifier module', a speacker, and not much else.
Now, if I might take a bit of a devil's-advocate position for a moment,
in what essential way does this differ from building something out of
74xx TTL? You have the "AND gate" module, the "XOR gate" module, the
"J/K flipflop" module, etc. Yes, you can build complex things with
them, but you can also build simple things, on the order of the
three-module radio you sketch - and I daresay you can build complex
things with Snap Circuits, too; while I am not familiar with them, I
have trouble imagining anything that provides an "audio amplifier"
module that you can't use to build interesting oscillators and such by
pasting them together with feedback, gain control, phase shift and
suchlike.
Indeed, I've been playing with ICs for at least thirty years, and it's
only in the last month or two that I finally understood how op-amps get
a differential amplifier out of a long-tailed pair, or why/how a BJT
current mirror works. Have I been committing some heinous sin by using
them all this time without understanding how they work? If not, why is
it any worse to build stuff out of those Snap Circuits you mentioned?
Reminder: I said this was a devil's-advocate position. While I agree
with you, I don't understand why. Perhaps I could put it this way: I'd
like an answer to the question I ended the previous paragraph with, but
I find I don't have one.
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