[erlang-questions] Erlang for youngsters

[Ulf Wiger]

On 16 Jun 2014, at 10:50, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED> wrote:

> But I suspect that the Erlang
> way, which is hard enough for very seasoned programmers to grok, might
> be a bit ambitious for these young learners.

It doesn’t have to be.

Two data points:

- I once knew a woman who taught logic programming at a South American university. She said that they had successfully taught it to 7 year-olds, and that it was in some ways easier as they had fewer preconceived ideas about what programming was supposed to be.

- Frank Huch talked at the 2007 Erlang Workshop in Freiburg about using Erlang to teach programming to high school girls. With no prior exposure to programming, the girls were writing a distributed chat program after one week of study. They had no problem understanding recursion.

When I came across Erlang, I was in a bit of a vacuum - couped up as I was in a house in pre-WWW Alaska. I spent 2-3 months trying to ‘unlearn’ C++ and accept the concurrency-oriented paradigm as at least equally powerful as OO.

Thinking back, I can be fascinated by how stuck I was in the OO paradigm, and how extremely well I’ve been able to unlearn it by now. ;-)

BR,
Ulf W

Ulf Wiger, Co-founder & Developer Advocate, Feuerlabs Inc.
http://feuerlabs.com