Per the log entry below, I've been rubbing elbows with Portlandia's "intelligencia" again (comic book allusion), thanks to Chairman Steve (and Elizabeth). Steve is walking towards my place as I write this, having just met with the latter, the event organizer. Methinks "digital math" is gaining on "discrete math" as what to decry as not being taught (the ongoing media campaign I've been updating y'all about). The latter has the disadvantage of sounding like "discreet", whereas "digital" has these nice reverberations with "analog" -- and that's precisely the distinction "discrete" was trying to make in keeping it quantized, as in "not continuous". People already know "analog vs digital" from popular media. HDTV is digital. Shows like 'The X-Files' get recorded as files, on magnetized disks keeping ones and zeros, or in flash drives. Analog records still sound good though; worth keeping a turntable and watching video clips about how they work. However, the reason this is probably not an important argument is zip codes (e.g. 97214) are free to vary as to what they adopt (or don't) in terms of nomenclature. We might tell parents: "the Silicon Forest is amazed and agog at how plugged up the STEM pipeline has become, like why won't schools share more digital math?", whereas in a neighboring state we might say something about how the lack of "computational thinking" is quite stunning (and stunting). Why Johnny Can't Code is still a classic, though I don't know why the author bothered to take an ill-informed swipe at Python. Someone's partisan agenda I suppose **. http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/01/why-johnny-cant-program.html There's no need to standardize on "the one right way to talk" -- a sure way to get bogged down in nonsensical little arguments. OK, back to mathfuture. Oh yes, and the log entry: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2011/02/open-secrets.html Steve will be joining you at Pycon soon. I'm too booked up this year. I forget if Michelle will be going, I think she said yes. Ah, Steve is here, Kirby Urner 4dsolutions.net Martian Math Digital Math Pythonic Math "Gnu" Math ** "The "scripting" languages that serve as entry-level tools for today's aspiring programmers -- like Perl and Python -- don't make this experience accessible to students in the same way. BASIC was close enough to the algorithm that you could actually follow the reasoning of the machine as it made choices and followed logical pathways. Repeating this point for emphasis: You could even do it all yourself, following along on paper, for a few iterations, verifying that the dot on the screen was moving by the sheer power of mathematics, alone. Wow!" ... sounds to me like this author doesn't have clear concepts, is getting this fed to him 2nd hand, not through personal experience. Since when is Python "entry level" (compared to what? -- every language has its newbies) and since when did we stop "following along on paper, for a few iterations"? OK, maybe not literal paper.