On: The Curse of the Excluded Middle (2014)

[lelanthran]

> but a little lightweight notation often pays for its cognitive cost quite quickly.

While I broadly agree in principle, it appears in this particular case, all the explanations that start with Haskell syntax never gets the point across, while a single explanation in mainstream syntax did on the first attempt.

I think Haskell syntax is just too far off from mainstream to serve as a vehicle for teaching.

[Twey → lelanthran]

It would be really interesting to see some empirical data on this!

I think there's a continuum on which one can position a piece of writing, from ‘starting from a prerequisite of the piece, jump directly to the target concept’ (Feynman style) to ‘provide a long winding path of semi-related ideas each building on the last, such that by the time the reader has grasped them all the target concept is obvious’ (Grothendieck style). My intuition says that the ideal point on that continuum varies from person to person, but there's probably an optimal average. Maybe it's been studied in didactic theory?

I notice there are different cultural norms, as well. In the mathematical world it's very common to start by introducing a bunch of new notations that make the concepts in the rest of the paper easier to discuss, and the designing of those notations is an art that people spend a lot of time on. The equivalent in the programming world, I guess, is the ‘language-oriented programming’ style propounded by Lispers (and, to a lesser extent, Rubyists) in which you write a program by first defining an EDSL for your business domain, and then directly writing down your business logic in that language. I notice this syntactic approach hasn't survived very well, even though the philosophy behind it (e.g. ‘programming as theory-building’) is still largely in vogue.