[Edu-sig] A fact on the ground

[Dirk-Ulrich Heise]

Dirk confirms he intended this for the list, suggested 
I could redirect...
=============
BvR:
> >Let me confirm that there is a difference between aptness for math and
> >for programming!  While I have a math degree, it became clear to me
> >that I wasn't a math-head about halfway my second year in college.
> >Around the same time it was also abundantly clear that I loved
> >programming! :-)
> >
> >--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
> >
>
KU:
> I think any fork in the road between being a "math head" or a
> "programmer" could/should come later in life.  In K-12 at least,
> we don't want to overspecialize.  Synergy, integration, making
> connections, is what's good for young and growing neural nets.
>
> You'll have all the time you need to specialize and narrow your
> focus later in life.  But lets start with more of a commitment
> to well roundedness.

Here's how i came to computers: In the age of 15 or so, i started
soldering together some synthesizer modules. They sounded terrible,
very noisy, and every circuit knew just one trick. As the first
sound samplers appeared on the scene, i built my first 8080-
based computer in order to make sound. Instead, it turned out to
be much more fascinating to build computers and do systems
programming.

In school, math was easy for me, but i *never* used my homebrew
computers or the then-arriving CBMs and C64s for solving math
problems.

It was always two very distinct things for me. Computing and outputting
a sine wave in real time is nearly no math but a lot of assembler
language.

I understand that it seems natural for math teachers to associate
computers with math.

They would make just as much sense in music (if music teachers
were not so conservative about what is music and what is noise
in their ears), natural sciences etc.

Using computers is usually a meta-activity, or it starts as a meta-activity:
you want to improve the electronic sounds you can make, so you
program a computer to produce sounds.You want to visualize
a geometric shape, so you program a computer to do that.
You want to synthesize natural language, so you
build a program for that. Whatever. It has nothing to do with math.
Maybe it has more to do with languages than with math. Okay,
i use simple arithmetic all the time, like
  return x[i]
is some address arithmetics (at least, it would be in C.).
Well, what a lot of complicated math
that is!!! You really want to convince me programming and
math are related??? Insofar buying a loaf of bread and counting
the change is a very math-related activity!

Python is quite good for doing math programming, and bad
for realtime I/O control, so no wonder that on a Python-centric list
people associate "CP4E" with "math". The language you use
determines what you can think about.

Dipl.Inform. Dirk-Ulrich Heise
business: hei@adtranzsig.de
private: dheise@debitel.net