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Comment by cocktailpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

This is because people who are really great at something have already forgotten what they used to be like when they first started out. They just tend to think everybody would be excited about the cool thing they themselves are excited about.

In most cases, people who are masters at something tend to be the worst teachers because by becoming the master they have forgotten how to sympathize with complete newbies.

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Or they remember all too well. Another way of looking at it is that people who have gotten good at something can look back and see the things that hindered their progress. Like many here, my first exposure to programming languages was BASIC and 6502 assembly language. In retrospect, I can see that they were horrible languages to start with because they taught me some very bad habits that I had to unlearn.

It is possible to teach someone Lisp, or something like it, without teaching them all of it at once... if ever. There are lots of people who use CAD systems like AutoCAD, or Emacs, or the various Lisp based/inspired Expert Systems shells, etc. who wouldn't consider themselves 'Lisp programmers' who learned just what they needed to be productive. If people were exposed to it a bit at a time, rather than the fire hose with minimal direction, I suspect a lot of complaints could be addressed. For example, the reason people think all the parens are bad is because it's become a meme and it's different than what they're used to. If they had started with Lisp and never learned ALGOL-inspired syntax, semicolons would likely look very strange to them.

I credit my earlier exposure to BASIC as a very good introduction to programming, because of its bare-bones nature. Too much abstraction would have been overwhelming, to start with - I didn't even understand the purpose of GOSUB for a long while (I knew, mechanically, what it did, but I did not grasp why one would use such a construct instead of just putting all code inline). The simplicity made it an easy outlet for creativity, and pushing the language to its limits and finding the complexity more and more difficult to manage was key to my eventual enlightenment - advanced language constructs felt like gifts, rather than burdens.

Of course this process could be done in an advanced language that grows with the user, but most modern languages are not that - even Python expects the user to understand at least the rudiments of structured flow and objects almost immediately. Lisp (Common or Scheme) isn't it, either - lambda calculus is already far too abstracted from the "series of instructions" model which is a critical foundation for computing in the real world. C, my next step after BASIC, has quite a good balance of available abstraction and a tractable mental model; but the amount of boilerplate (the requirement for main() always seemed baroque to me) and hand holding of the computer (total lack of even trivial type inference) is not ideal for a beginner language.

He successfully taught his child Lisp, in a way that caused that child to release a video game. He didn't forget anything.

I think this only proves that you should teach your kid Lisp if you are John Carmack.

Or that you should teach a kid Lisp if he is a descendent of John Carmack (or probably Paul Graham).

Maybe descendants of Paul Graham should be taught C if Carmack's kids are learning Lisp.

If he was given a chance to go back in time and teach his younger self to learn whatever language he wanted to make himself learn, I'm pretty sure he would have NOT Picked LISP and picked exactly the same language he used to build his first game.

A kid of John Carmack is likely to have a cognitive capacity that is a standard deviation or two to the right of even the "smart" kids in class. Genetics isn't everything but it's not nothing.

Intelligence is inherited from the mother, not the father. That's standard content on the United States Medical Licensing Exam ("USMLE").

This sounds like a myth, as I have never seen such a thing suggested by any expert on the subject.

Well I sat through quite a bit of USMLE prep and it's there.

I don't know how this ended up in the USMLE but AFAIK, it has long been debunked... unless for "inherited" you mean something other than "genetically transmitted".

See "Not in our Genes" by Lewontin, Rose, Kamin, for a thorough discussion.

In practice, it is a result based on twin studies, but with very low standards: for one thing not double-blind, definitions were let swing arbitrarily by the interviewers, and so on.

Definitions of intelligence are themselves questionable, techniques to measure it, even more so. The history of IQ has been tainted by plain fraud... And the whole field is too a succulent target for ideological warfare... truth is too easily a collateral casualty. This should not be considered science.

That's a poor paraphrase of "recent studies suggesting [testable IQ]'s mostly from the mother".

https://books.google.com/books?id=8zVXDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT138&lpg=...

People who are very good at things are the ones you want mentoring you, regardless of the subset who are bad teachers.

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