Books on FP, lambda calculus, closures - Re: teaching programming to kids

On 26 January 2012 01:20, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I was not saying the concepts are hard. I was saying that I'd not previously found any explanations of them that were comprehensible to me. I suggested 2 possible interpretations for this & have been offered a third: [1] the concepts are really really hard or [2] the explanations are all rubbish or [3] I'm really stupid & ignorant. It appears that maybe there is a #4: They are moderately hard concepts but the key thing is that they require a fair amount of prior knowledge to build upon; so if the reader *has* that knowledge, they can be conveyed by a relatively simple, step-by-step explanation. But if they don't have it, then the concepts are probably too complex to get across. They're only really meaningful to someone with at least some moderate level of programming knowledge. (E.g. named functions, local versus global variables, and the passing of named parameters - not necessarily a comprehensive list!) The problem with the explanations is that either they assume lots of expert programming knowledge, so aim too high, or that they assume none but only mathematical knowledge and use an entirely different, separate vocabulary, impenetrable if the reader does not know maths. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884