[Edu-sig] Re: Edu-sig digest, Vol 1 #205 - 8 msgs

[Dorothea Salo]

> programming are a natural fit because they primarily center on
> problem solving.  Music, government, and humanities do not have=
>  this
> focus, and I think it would be difficult to conceptualize a=
>  problem
> 'solved' by music (and I certainly can't think of one solved by
> government!).

    Er, please insert a polite way of saying "bovine excrement" here.

    Have you ever actually taken a music theory class? It's all *about*
problem-solving. Here's a figured-bass line and a starting chord. Write the
rest of the chords. Here's a chord progression and a starting chord. Write
the rest. Here's a piece of music. What's the chord progression? Oops, key
change -- where's the pivot chord, and how does it fit into both keys?

    Back when I was taking music theory in college, we used to practice
these things on HyperCard stacks. Really. Would've been way cooler to be
able to program 'em ourselves.

 Kidding aside, the ability to take a problem=
>  stated in
> a natural language, decompose it into more abstract concepts,=
>  apply
> some basic logic to those concepts, and then present the results=
>  in a
> manner consistent with the language the problem was stated in is=
>  a
> skill that has traditionally been taught through math, and is a
> necessary skill for programming.  Perhaps a language-oriented
> approach would also be valid, but natural language contains a lot=
>  of
> ambiguity and context-sensitive information that I think would=
>  only
> make the task of problem solving even harder.

    Depends on how you approach it. A lot of serious language study is
precisely about figuring out how ambiguity and context-sensitivity work.
(Same for text markup, which may be of slightly more interest to the
tech-heads here.) If you approach natural language as an icky-nasty horrible
thing that should be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible so that
the real work can take place -- which is, I hope I need not say, exactly the
approach to mathematics that rightly annoys so many people here -- then of
course the task of problem solving is harder; you're making it harder
because of your attitude toward it.

    If, however, you approach natural language with an awareness of its
beauty, variety, and power of fascination, there's no reason on earth that
computers can't fit nicely into the picture. Just like math.

Dorothea
--
Dorothea Salo
Impressions Book and Journal Services, Inc.
phone: (608) 244-6218  fax: (608) 244-7050
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