deskthority

Hi guys!

I have just released a new project! Some of you know through our private conversation that besides being a Lisp enthusiast and a specialist in obscure garage manufacturing, I am also a proud father who is home schooling his two kids. Unlike many of us that have been forced to home school kids because of the COVID pandemic, I chose this deliberately and voluntarily long before COVID was even a thing. This is actually the most important job I have now, it has a priority over keyboards and anything else.

Not long after seeing my newborn kid, a sudden thought crossed my mind:

You know what would be fun? I can try to teach this kid programming in a LISPy language and I will combine it with teaching mathematics. I can actually make the course so that the programming will support the teaching of the mathematics and vice versa. And I am going to make it fun! Kids love comics, don't they? So perhaps, I can make a comic book that involves some funny characters, LISP, and mathematics and will be entertaining and educational for readers of all ages. After all, I spent 20+ years teaching this at universities, so I can finally focus on my own kids and use all the know-how I have acquired. Let's see if they can handle higher order functions at the age of 8! Well, this all will probably take a lot of time and energy, so I better quit my job and home school the kid and, while I am at it, I also need to make a decent keyboard to write the whole thing and to make some simple programming environments that the kids can enjoy when the time comes (hence, Keymacs was born as a byproduct of this glorious mission).

So I started teaching my 7+yo son using a hand-drawn comic full of my weird humor and he we really enjoyed it. More importantly, I am pretty sure that his abstract thinking was really boosted by this approach. After receiving some encouragement from my peers (who wanted to have the same fine education for their kids), I decided to turn this into a more official thing. As a poor ESL guy (me no speaking anglish goodly), I found a native speaker from England (who is also fluent in Czech) to help me with the English version and an illustrator to make the comic appearance less crude. Besides that, it is again a one-man project. The book I have released now is the first volume (actually, they are 4 books—in two languages and solutions manuals), I plan to make 3 volumes per year for at least 8 years (and eventually make translations to other major languages like Esperanto and Volapük).

The main point: If you cannot afford to spend big bucks on my keyboards (that's quite understandable) but you admire what I do, you can buy my books on Lulu or support me at my Patreon (do not miss the opportunity to be my first supporter) and, of course, you can spread a word. I will really appreciate it! If I get J.K.Rowling-rich on this venture, I will throw a portion of the proceeds back into the keyboard business!

Links:

Lulu Book Store
Patreon (check out the subtle product placement!)
Book Previews: (English / Czech)

Going by the 23 thousand views this thread has already had, I think your project might do well. Best of luck!

I look forward to the results of your project.

Brilliant.

This is really beautiful - especially for a programmer, keeper of some farm animals and native Czech speaker at the same time.

I'm a bit sceptical though. Classic programming we learn will be soon for a bunch of guys writing very specialised code (maybe specific parts of unusual firmware etc.)
For other tasks, AI will be a much faster and cheaper option. (Not that last 15 years wasn't just using libraries glued from other libraries, glued from other libraries...)

This is such a nice project and it looks helpful for self taught tech people / software devs, since big procent of them learn boot-camp style and do not concentrate as much as they should on algorithms and data structures (me included)

paperWasp wrote: ↑

26 Jan 2024, 23:11

(Not that last 15 years wasn't just using libraries glued from other libraries, glued from other libraries...)

I have noticed that too especially in the past 6 years since I moved into a software engineer role.

I have seen many mid-ish people that have difficulties being technology agnostic and that rely automatically on non-standard libraries or frameworks.

paperWasp wrote: ↑

26 Jan 2024, 23:11

This is really beautiful - especially for a programmer, keeper of some farm animals and native Czech speaker at the same time.

I'm a bit sceptical though. Classic programming we learn will be soon for a bunch of guys writing very specialised code (maybe specific parts of unusual firmware etc.)
For other tasks, AI will be a much faster and cheaper option. (Not that last 15 years wasn't just using libraries glued from other libraries, glued from other libraries...)

The way I see it is just that AI is another helpful aid but nothing more. There were times where programmers used just printed manuals, then they switched to full text and hyper text documents. Later, stack overflow appeared , now it is AI, … It is all nice but the point is that everybody is going to use it for better or worse. In other words, AI+classic skills will always be much more valuable than just AI+dumb ass, if you know what I mean.