<story><title>How to Write a Spelling Corrector</title><url>http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChicagoBoy11</author><text>I couldn&amp;#x27;t help but read this and think about all the &amp;quot;coding&amp;quot; initiatives I&amp;#x27;ve seen in K-12 and shake my head.&lt;p&gt;What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like.&lt;p&gt;Everything I&amp;#x27;ve seen around &amp;quot;coding&amp;quot; though has become a masochistic exercise in teaching kids random syntax details and then calling them Coders and Geniuses and Computer Scientists when they successfully copy what the teacher showed them.&lt;p&gt;When you read Norvig&amp;#x27;s code (big fan of his Sudoku one as well), you realize how the actual &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; is secondary in the sense that what it is really doing is expressing an idea. A very nunanced, elegant idea, but ultimately the product of doing some hard thinking and exploration on a problem domain.&lt;p&gt;If we taught kids to just think about problems in this way, ohh what a world it would be!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danso</author><text>I agree that what Norvig demonstrates here and in all of his notebooks is an ideal of how we use programming to explore (nevermind &lt;i&gt;implement&lt;/i&gt;) concepts. But how do we get there without teaching people how to program, including syntax? I think everyone agrees that kids should be able to understand the themes of &amp;quot;A Modest Proposal&amp;quot; and perhaps even write with such depth, but they have to learn their ABCs and be compelled to write about what they ate for breakfast and other insignificant topics before they get to an adequate level.&lt;p&gt;I wish I could say that in my time of teaching, I&amp;#x27;ve met people who could just get these things without actually writing code. But I think for most non-geniuses, including myself, it&amp;#x27;s all too abstract until you know how to concretely write code yourself.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to Write a Spelling Corrector</title><url>http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChicagoBoy11</author><text>I couldn&amp;#x27;t help but read this and think about all the &amp;quot;coding&amp;quot; initiatives I&amp;#x27;ve seen in K-12 and shake my head.&lt;p&gt;What Norvig is doing is what we should be teaching. He is tackling this seemingly REALLY hard problem by thinking about it methodically, translating some intuition into code, carefully constructing an argument about how to solve it, and ways that it could be extended. This is what actual engineers look like.&lt;p&gt;Everything I&amp;#x27;ve seen around &amp;quot;coding&amp;quot; though has become a masochistic exercise in teaching kids random syntax details and then calling them Coders and Geniuses and Computer Scientists when they successfully copy what the teacher showed them.&lt;p&gt;When you read Norvig&amp;#x27;s code (big fan of his Sudoku one as well), you realize how the actual &amp;quot;code&amp;quot; is secondary in the sense that what it is really doing is expressing an idea. A very nunanced, elegant idea, but ultimately the product of doing some hard thinking and exploration on a problem domain.&lt;p&gt;If we taught kids to just think about problems in this way, ohh what a world it would be!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mack73</author><text>But what you should realize is that the person who wrote this beautiful piece of code is someone who is at the peak of their career, a thinker, an artist, and that it must be ok to not ever rise to his level, because this is close to a master-piece. Few of these geniuses become professors, is just a guess, because no matter how quirky you are you always get a job somewhere.</text></comment>