21 May
2013
21 May
'13
2:23 p.m.
As I understand it (never having ridden a bicycle),
you learn with
the training wheels, when you are able to blanace the machine on your
own, you take them off and ride without them.
Yes. Training wheels just mean that when you do lose your balance you
don't fall over; the training wheel prevents it.
The point being that when you take the training wheels
off, you carry
on with essentially the same skils you were using before.
Yes.
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.
You have to relearn details. To pick a simple example, going from
Pascal to C, you have to relearn syntax ({ } instead of begin end, for
example).
But, if the toy language/environment has done its job, that's all you
have to relearn. To continue with the Pascal->C example, you don't
need to relearn what a variable is, how an if statement works, etc.
Furthermore, you don't have to forget the old way. Learning C doesn't
necessarily involve forgetting Pascal.
My views are totally opposite to most teachers (on the
other hand
they have worked well for me) in that uyou should _never_ learn a
simplified viersion that had to be un-learned later..
As phrased, I agree with that. But the last six words are very
important. (Seven, if "un-learned" counts as two.)
I learnt BASIC long before I learnt C. But I didn't have to unlearn
BASIC when learning C. At most, I had to unlearn "this is the only
way" mindsets (and possibly not even that - it's been long enough I
don't recall whether I had such issues or not).
I learnt TeX by reading The TeXBook. It deliberately introduces a
simplified TeX first, gradually explaining additional details as it
goes. But the only things there are to unlearn are the "these are the
only possibilities" limits; the simplified description is correct, just
incomplete.
As a somewhat contrasting case, I learnt Newtonian mechanics before I
learnt relativistic mechanics. Newtonian mechanics _are_ incorrect,
yes, but they are not to be unlearnt; rather, they are to be recognized
as an approximation, useful in many cases, as long as you know the
limits of the approximation's applicability. (I was also taught from
the beginning that Newtonian mechanics _are_ just an approximation.)
All to say that I don't think learning simplified versions necessarily
means unlearning later. When it does, then yes, I agree with you - but
I also think it usually is possible to teach a simplified version
without necessitating unlearning upon graduating to something less
simplified.
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