TITLE: Programming is an Infinite Construction Kit
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 02, 2019 2:48 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
As so often, Marvin Minsky loved to tell us about the beauty of
programming. Kids love to play with construction sets like Legos,
TinkerToys, and Erector sets. Programming provides
an infinite construction kit:
you never run out of parts!
In the linked essay, which was published as a preface to a 1986 book
about Logo, Minsky tells several stories. One of the stories relates
that once, as a small child, he built a large tower out of TinkerToys.
The grownups who saw it were "terribly impressed". He inferred from
their reaction that:
some adults just can't understand how you can build whatever you
want, so long as you don't run out of sticks and spools.
Kids get it, though. Why do so many of us grow out of this simple
understanding as we get older? Whatever its cause, this gap between
children's imaginations and the imaginations of adults around them
creates a new sort of problem when we give the children a programming
language such as Logo or Scratch. Many kids take to these languages
just as they do to Legos and TinkerToys: they're off to the races
making things, limited only by their expansive imaginations. The
memory on today's computers is so large that children never run out
of raw material for writing programs. But adults often don't possess
the vocabulary for talking with the children about their creations!
... many adults just don't have words to talk about such things --
and maybe, no procedures in their heads to help them think of them.
They just do not know what to think when little kids converse about
"representations" and "simulations" and "recursive procedures". Be
tolerant. Adults have enough problems of their own.
Minsky thinks there are a few key ideas that everyone should know
about computation. He highlights two:
Computer programs are societies. Making a big computer
program is putting together little programs.
Any computer can be programmed to do anything that any other
computer can do--or that any other kind of "society of processes"
can do.
He explains the second using ideas pioneered by Alan Turing and long
championed in the popular sphere by Douglas Hofstadter. Check out
this blog post,
which reflects on a talk Hofstadter gave at my university celebrating
the Turing centennial.
The inability of even educated adults to appreciate computing is a
symptom of a more general problem. As Minsky says toward the end of
his essay, People who don't appreciate how simple things can grow
into entire worlds are missing something important. If you don't
understand how simple things can grow into complex systems, it's hard
to understand much at all about modern science, including how quantum
mechanics accounts for what we see in the world and even how evolution
works.
You can usually do well by reading Minsky; this essay is a fine example
of that. It comes linked to an afterword written by Alan Kay, another
computer scientist with a lot to say about both the beauty of computing
and its essential role in a modern understanding of the world. Check
both out.
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