Back to our old friend Fibonacci, poised precariously between human conversation and computer programming. The more I think about the Fibonacci sequence as a way in to the question of a lingua franca<\/i> for introducing people to ideas about how to program, the more intriguing it gets.<\/p>\n
In this post I’m going to write things mathematically, foregoing the wordy english versions, since I think we’re all agreed that the concepts are what ultimately matter here, not the syntax. Once we’ve worked out the best conceptual approaches, then we can go back and make things more “natural-language friendly”.<\/p>\n
One question that comes up is how soon you should introduce variables. When you say:<\/p>\n
F(n) ← if<\/b> n ≤ 1 then<\/b> n else<\/b> F(n-1)+F(n-2)<\/p>\n
you are assuming your student is ready to understand and use variables like “n”.<\/p>\n
In contrast, here is a description of the Fibonacci sequence without variables, stated as two “production rules”:
\n
\n F ← [ 0 , 1 ]<\/p>\n
F ← F append<\/i> Flast<\/sub> + Flast-1<\/sub><\/p>\n This doesn’t just return a number – it builds the whole sequence. Is this approach conceptually clearer and more intuitive? Is it closer to the way people already think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back to our old friend Fibonacci, poised precariously between human conversation and computer programming. The more I think about the Fibonacci sequence as a way in to the question of a lingua franca for introducing people to ideas about how to program, the more intriguing it gets. In this post I’m going to write things … Continue reading “Talking to computers, revisited”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":71,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1128,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions\/1128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}