[Edu-sig] recent curriculum writing (Urner)

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:51 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
<< cool lore snipped>>

> and the Esoteric Languages page
>
> http://esoteric.sange.fi/orphaned/obslang.html
>
> Sadly, the Random Languages/Obfuscated Languages page is no longer
> online, but you can still see it through the Internet Archive's
> Wayback Machine.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://esoteric.sange.fi/orphaned/obslang.html
> http://web.archive.org/web/20080417042236/http://esoteric.sange.fi/orphaned/obslang.html
>
> These last are where you find the weird languages, such as Fromage,
> Intercal, Befunge, Unlambda, Malbolge, and many more, some designed to
> be fun, some just to prove it could be done, and some to be evil.
>

<< thanks! >>

> On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 13:36, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What do we mean by "computer language"?
>
> What do we mean by "computer"?
>

Right here we could fork off a discussion along these lines:  do we
care more about the single computer or computers in the plural?

I think we'd be better off with a minimum of two computers right from
the start, so that we might talk about cooperation over a network,
later to morph into a cloud.

When I collaborated with Jerritt, a brilliant hacker, on teaching open
source through the Hillsboro Police Department, he dove into tcp/ip
the very first day, as the most important thing to start thinking
about, over and above RAM, ROM, CPU or anything else.

Given you have to dive in somewhere, I don't fault him for making that
choice and pursuing it wholeheartedly.  I was pleased to bring
'Warriors of the Net' to the table, which I don't think he'd seen.  We
projected it, used decent speakers.

http://www.warriorsofthe.net/

This is an example of where ontogeny need not recapitulate phylogeny
i.e. just because we geezer-senior-boomers think in terms of
mainframes later splintering out into workstations (dumb terminals) in
a time sharing environment (IBM 360/370 era, birth of Unix), doesn't
mean a child today needs to learn it in that order.

The very first day you might write "Hello World" and make it like a
coiled spring of DNA encapsulated in a virus (icosahedrons a lot of
'em).  That's called a packet, this being a cartoon version, check out
this to/from IP address, this TTL, start alluding to postal service,
mail routing, connecting to earlier institutions where package routing
is the name of the game.

Watch old black and white documentaries about the post office, as a
way of making computers come alive why not?

Kirby

PS:  for those who made it this far:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2009/10/from-lyrik.html
(shows a screen shot from SugarLabs in the context of yesterday's
webinar -- click picture at bottom for larger view).