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Comment by aastronaut | Hacker News Reader

i think the discussion style of the "the little" series is quite nice to introduce concepts. it feels like i'd observe a discussion between two experienced people.

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I don't like it. If you have a concept worth teaching, explain it properly. Then we can discuss it afterwards, where I can ask the questions myself.

I mean, two pages to discuss what an Atom is?

“Properly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your post. What’s proper? The Little Typer does a fine job at explaining the concepts in my opinion.

Plato would disagree with this! Learning is the forming thoughts, not the copying them over.

I prefer to form my own thoughts, though, instead of being presented some meal cut into tiny bites to make it better digestible.

The concepts in the "Little" books are essentially math, and the best way to explain math is by showing formulas.

The "Little" books do exactly this, except a person has taken the painstaking time of breaking everything into digestible, bite-sized portions to optimize for learning.

I don't think that the best way to explain math is to show formulas. If that were so, then the best way to learn math would be to look at mechanised formalisations of math, which is clearly not the case.

It's exhaustive, concrete, logically ordered, and pedagogically consistent. It has its virtues. You explain by enumerating the maximal compact extension of cases rather than providing an intension and making your reader generate all that work. Maybe it's good if they do, but how would a book give feedback if they fail? By providing an instance in the extension to compare to...

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