Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming

Brent is one of the greatest teachers I've ever experienced. I used to take classes from him (and TA some others he taught) and was consistently blown away by his enthusiasm and capacity for sharing concepts. He has a great essay on pedagogy as well (https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...) If you're interested in learning some of the beautiful foundations of functional programming, I highly recommend checking out the lecture notes and assignments from his Penn CIS 194 class…

\lambda x. 6 was also surprisingly difficult for him to guess... It simply hadn’t occurred to him that the machine might not care about the input. One Christmas when my whole family got together, I made a "stink detector" which consisted of a USB cable stuck inside a ziplock bag. My nephews were invited to put anybody's sock in the bag, then enter some parameters (like sock color, how long since it was washed, and, crucially, the name of the…

As a kid, I liked arithmetic function machines that "magically" force a particular output or allow one to quickly deduce the input from the output. These are usually based on non-obvious (to a kid) identities. I would invent my own and then ask family members to play along. I'm not sure if this sort of puzzle game has a name? A simple example: - Multiply your number by 2 - Add 10 - Divide by 2 - Subtract the original…