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Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread for December 24-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 24 December 2013 08:58AM

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Comment author: moridinamael 29 December 2013 04:02:42PM 6 points [-]

After trying and failing to grasp Objective-C for quite a while, I stopped Googling things like "Objective-C tutorial," "Objective-C documentation," and "Objective-C examples," and instead looked for "Objective-C for C++ Programmers" and "Objective-C for Python Programmers" because those are my two strongest languages. This was just tremendously efficient for a large number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that new information is expressed explicitly in terms of direct contrast to information with which you are familiar. The typical "computer language tutorial," in contrast, is in my opinion a very shoddy document from a pedagogical standpoint, usually appearing totally clear to anyone familiar with the language but vague and ambiguous to its target audience.

As someone who spends a lot of time reading Internet, I don't recall ever reading this advice before - learn new languages faster in context of languages you know - so I thought I'd post the thought here.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 29 December 2013 09:29:55PM 4 points [-]

Maybe, but here are two other hypotheses:

  1. People who think about pedagogy write more specific tutorials, but what makes the tutorial good is a separate effect of thinking about pedagogy.

  2. There was nothing special about the last tutorial; you just needed repeated exposure to the concepts.