All I Really Need to Know About Programming I Learned in Kindergarten
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
On the days that I pick up my daughter from Kindergarten, she’s always bursting with excitement over what she has learned that day. It often makes me wistful for my own Kindergarten days, almost 30 years ago. As I listen to my daughter talk about her day, I reflect on my own time in kindergarten, and how, trite as it might seem, that year spent in school at age six, really gave me all the tools and life lessons I needed to be a professional programmer.
I often think back to what Miss Johnson used to say in that small classroom at Laird Elementary back in the early 80s, “now remember class, try to keep your initial load factor for your hashtables at 0.7″. At the time, I remember thinking, “now when am I ever going to use that?” But sure enough, my mid-thirties self now chuckles at my younger naivety.
After recess, we would all gather ’round and listen to her tell the story of the Traveling Salesman and how he could never find his optimal route in a deterministic amount of time. “Use a branch-and-bound algorithm!” we’d all shout at the climax of the story.
“Children”, she’d chide us, “can we do better than that?” Of course we couldn’t resist being baited like that, “use a Nearest-Neighbor Heuristic!” we’d exclaim with excitement, barely able to stay on our carpet squares.
She would often tell us that while learning to clean up after ourselves, and sharing with others were indeed important life skills, they were not relevant at that age, and we would likely learn about them in grad school.
Come to think of it, I do recall an extensive lecture on the importance of flushing and always washing your hands in Genetic Algorithms in my Masters program.
Tags: Humor, Observational
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