Comment by vaughan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaughan | Hacker News Reader

History is such a great way to learn anything.

It’s interesting - like a mystery revealed, but also provides the why - why things are the way they are.

I was looking into accounting the other day, and you can go back to the first document that mentioned credit and debit and introduced modern accounting. There are so many topics like this that seem confusing and arbitrary but it all began extremely simply and pragmatically. Music theory is another example of a fun topic to study historically. And programming languages and operating systems.

It’s important to use two learning paths though: historical and modern scientific. Historical usually explains terminology and legacy aspects of such topics, but then topics can also be explained by using modern technology to experiment and observe.

Think about unix - it was primarily designed for very low power low memory environments. And databases too. You can learn a lot poking at an existing system, but when you watch the early content on it, you see the why.

> The present is the past rolled up for action and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. — A&WJD

> A&WJD

Who's that?

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization

Ariel and William James Durant, authors of "The Lessons of History", where the quote appears on page 12, itself a quote of their earlier volume 6 from "The Story of Civilization", specifically "The Reformation", page viii.

Agreed. This is why often reading a Wikipedia page is the worst way to learn something. The best way is to get a teacher to tell you the relevant history leading up to the thing, and it makes much more sense.

CS teacher here. This is my preferred way to teach stuff. Way easier to remember and understand knowledge if you know its origin story.

Do students respond well?

When I was in school, a lot of teachers did a little tidbit of history at the start of topics, but I never latched onto it and found it boring. It was only after my studies that I started to really love going back to the origin.

Well, you can make almost any subject interesting if you do it right. In my experience it's mostly the teachers fault if students are bored.

That said, some students cannot be activated whatever your do. We're all people.

Though many Wikipedia pages have a History section doing exactly that. (More should have one.)

Well, they have a history section, but I don't often find it does exactly that.

This is so true.

Most of math starts to make sense once you know the history behind the concepts.

I was able to do calculus when I first learned it, but it didn't really click until I studied Newton's Principia, and was like, oooooooooh I see what he did.

Similar with Euclid's Elements vs the modern "Cartesian" view of geometry.

What was that first accounting document?

For double-entry accounting, Luca Pacioli's Summa. The history of accounting is a bit more complex and unknown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_de_arithmetica

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