Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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I remember, in maybe 9th grade, after learning Newton's Method in a pre-calc course, writing a TI-83 program to do N iterations of Newton's Method for me. I showed it to my math teacher. He wasn't much of a nerd, and this was the early 2000s so technology wasn't quite as prolific as it is today; he was blown away.

Come exam time, we were allowed to use our calculators. I asked if I should clear mine out given I had a program which could "cheat" (I was a teachers pet). He said something to me (privately) along the lines of, "don't worry about it. the way I see it, you've already proven to me you know the content." Ironically, today I could probably piece together a TI83 assembly program from memory, but I couldn't even tell you what Newton's Method does, let alone how to do it. Not sure what lesson to glean from that.

I remember eating lunch one day, maybe a year or so later, in his classroom with some friends, and he was browsing around the internet trying to find a job I'd like in math. Looking back, I find it funny that he was landing on things like "actuarial science" and "accounting" instead of the obvious. I think that was his way of trying to make up for the piss-poor guidance counseling in my school of 80 people in the middle of nowhere. I ended up wasting a semester in Computer Engineering doing CAD and coding MatLab before a professor took me aside and basically said "you're finishing these matlab assignments faster than my grad students would. Are you sure you don't actually want to do Computer Science?"

It sucks to see this. The accessibility of coding today has never been better, so I'm not going to pretend like this is a doomsday thing for helping kids get into the field, but it did have power in its ubiquity. Teaching computer science in high schools isn't a tenth as effective as students coding up a program to make their math classes easier, or modding CounterStrike after hours, or "hacking" the school computer labs to play Halo with their friends. Technology, and the ability to shape it to help us, should be ubiquitous. It shouldn't be thrown out the window just so one teacher can more easily proctor a hundred tests instead of twenty.

I think you have articulated something I've been thinking of for some time. Most of what I learned on the PC was in a furthering of my own interests. I learned how to interact with IRC bots and use the shell because I wanted to get shared files. Learned about compression because everything I downloaded was in winrar format. I learned about memory addresses because I wanted to cheat in a particular video game. I learned about audio formats because I wanted to listen to mp3s, had to learn how to rip CDs.

So much of what many of us did back in the day is now just available out of the box. No need to learn how to use IRC, all the music is on Spotify. You no longer need to be resourceful, you just need to consume.

I agree, and this scares me more than any one product dropping its support for assembly.

Apple tries to earn credit for putting Swift Playgrounds on the iPad. Its a coding environment aimed at students, they're trying to help the pipeline. No. Its a cute little sideshow activity that offers its users nothing of actual value. It teaches its users to complete exam-like puzzles, get a gold star, and then close the sideshow and return to the garden where they can watch Netflix.

And Jesus, Swift?! If you want a quicker way to turn kids off of programming, go right ahead and start them on Swift. The first good thing anyone says about Swift is "at least its not Objective-C". Fine language; but not a learning language.

Assembly... now that's a learning language. It may not seem it at first, from the perspective of a professional. You can't build huge apps in Assembly. Its not maintainable. All true, and that means shit all when you're learning. There's basically no syntax elements. This means, there's no syntax to learn. Its just legos. The program starts at 0, goes line by line, you get a list of like 100 types of legos to combine, and you make it do things. Starting on assembly is underrated.

Modern computing would suck to get into. I'm grateful that, despite all the shit of "modern web development", a basic HTML page is still pretty damn simple, and you can build from there. Could you imagine trying to build a basic Android or iOS app nowadays as a High Schooler? Could you imagine getting into game development, reaching for Unreal or the modern Source engine? Try modding a game you play on iOS or Stadia. Try installing Linux on your family's "what's a computer" iPad. These were the hooks that built the people that built our industry, and the hooks are slowly disappearing.

When we were younger, the best tools in the industry were at least accessible to younger people, because the tools were simpler. Today, the tools are either locked behind $99/year paywalls, or so horribly complex that even professional engineers struggle with them (most often, both). So, we build cute little learning tools to help get kids interested, like Swift Playgrounds or toy game engines or Glitch (no disrespect intended to the people behind these projects; they're making the best of a bad situation).

I don't know how to fix it, beyond relentlessly supporting open source and open computing, and continually pushing for fucking simplicity above anything else in the tools we build. Its not an easy battle.

To activate a kids imagination a program has to do something useful, hopefully magical. That’s a really high bar for assembly.

Xcode is free, as is building Swift UI programs that actually do things. $99/year is only required to sell your app to the $20B App Store market.

> I'm grateful that, despite all the shit of "modern web development", a basic HTML page is still pretty damn simple, and you can build from there.

This 100%. Even though modern webdev has grown to be a very complex field with many layers of tooling, I still think it's by far the best way for young developers to get started building things that people can actually use.

Your IDE comes pre-installed with your web browser, your app runs on any computer or phone, and there are more resources for learning HTML, JS, CSS, etc. than pretty much anything else in software development.

I have an iPad 2 which I jailbroke and downgraded to iOS 6.1.3, and I think with some work I can get it to do whatever I want... Install programs remotely over ssh? I sure hope so.

newtons method is mathematically informed binary search

Close, and a good intuition for well-behaved problems. Unfortunately, Newton's method only remembers the location of the current point, rather than of two points surrounding the target value. This can result in some pathological cases where Newton's method fails to converge, or gets into an infinite loop.

An example of mathematically informed binary search is "regula falsi":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Regula_falsi&oldi...

When I think of Newton's method, I think of the picture in James Gleick's Chaos demonstrating the fractal boundaries between attractors:

https://images.app.goo.gl/cR37V4ft1A9NFLCo8

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