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At What Age is it Easier to Learn?
Maria D asks: "At what age do people learn faster? Suppose you want to learn to write code at a certain level. What age ranges will absorb the lessons the best? There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development. A language won't be quite native if you start learning it after five or so, but what about adult differences? From informal observations in graduate schools, I've concluded that older people learn faster because of their experience in learning techniques, which seems so counterintuitive!"
I've got a couple of small children. The 4.5 year old can get around pretty well, knows some programs work in windows and some in linux and can boot into whichever one she wants. She can also recognize the icons and start whatever game or explore the system menu and bring up other games and applications. What she can't do is read.
Sure, she's learning. She enjoys sounding out various words and spelling them. But she's gonna have a pretty difficult time writing programs and debugging code until she can read and understand various error messages. I think about the earliest you can expect learning to code to be productive is around 7 years old.
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I think it's more fair to ask at what ages are we more easily trained. We learn skills, repetitive routines, and hopefully creative ways to apply those routines when we're younger. The notion of routine and application aren't quite so tedious then because it's all new. As we get older we start to generate interests past the simple routines and our horizons broaden. As a chemist, I'm wonderfully interested in the application of programming and "what can I do?" but I'm no longer so interested in programming that I have the patience to go back and learn the formal syntax and the basic routines necessary to familiarize myself with achieving those ends within the context of, say, C programming.
Basic math is a great example. Throughout grade school we found ourselves doing 50-60 of the same problems over and over. Into high school sets were down to 10-20. By the time we get to differential equations we're solving only a handful of each type of problem because the method is so much more complex. Essentially, however, we're conducting millions (or approaching infinite) numbers of the basic calculatins we did by the dozens in earlier years.
As we get older we tend to eschew formal training in favor of more abstract pursuits. It can be said that we're less apt to learn. That holds true if learning is only defined to be an interest in extremely fundamental concepts that don't have easily perceived real world impacts.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development.
Really? I'm sure that nobody has studied "the best time to learn a computer language", but if you've done a real survey of the literature, I'm sure you can synthesize your own answer superior to pretty much anything you can read here.
My own conjecture is that "developer ability" (the ability to construct your own abstractions, and use others effectively) as opposed to mere "coder abilitity" (the ability to make code "do this" and "do that") is probably almost directly correlated to mathematical ability, both in the K-12 and upper-level-college senses of the term. In fact I suspect there would be an almost direct parallel between the "numerical manipulation" skills that constitutes most math in a K-12 education, and the ability to do math at a Mathematician's level. To use the somewhat-out-of-date-but-still-useful Piaget naming, "concrete operational" vs. "formal operational".
I'm not saying the two are identical, just that the cognitive skillsets are so similar that the development literature for math is likely to apply quite directly to coding. Trying to teach an average six-year-old "Object Orientation" is probably too much abstraction for them; they may learn to manipulate pre-existing objects but I'd bet that until they become "formal operational" they will have a hard time creating good objects of their own.
OO here is just an example; functional, for instance, I'd expect to be even harder to really grasp in the general case. You could teach simple map and filter, but they aren't going to get the full richness. Again, on average.
So this is a meta-answer: I don't know the answer to your question, and 99 out of 100 people posting won't either. But I can refer you to the literature on learning math and guess that it is as likely to apply as anything, with the mapping I've given you here. I can't be sure, but it's a good guess. And I'm pretty there's been a lot of study on that topic.
(People rushing to reply to this are encouraged to be sure they understand the meaning of "concrete" and "formal operational", and the meaning of the word "average". If so, fire away, but I'm sick of people mentally editing qualifiers like "average" or "most" out of my messages and then firing with all cannons as if they weren't there, and if you don't know those Piaget terms you don't really know what I said here.)
(And while I've defined the terminology, I'm going to point out a lot of people who think they are "developers" are in fact "coders", at least as evidenced by the source code I've seen both in closed and open source projects. Few people seem capable of creating decent abstractions.)
Studies have shown that after the age of about 14 your "plasticity" for new languages drops radically. A new language is stored in physically different locations of your brain when acquired late in life. This is a serious limitation, but it is not impossible to beat. My mother learned spanish in her 30's to get her BCLAD and now speaks it so well that native speakers ask her what part of south america shes from. Its also the reason the american education system is *screwed* as the first time I saw a foreign language I was 15 -- far too late for it to do anything other then frustrate me.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I took some speech therapy for foreigners learning English. What helped me learn to distinguish the sounds I could not previously tell apart was not listening to them, but LOOKING at their visual representations. For example, there is an oscilloscope of sorts that draws a "shape" of each sound. As you try to match the correct shape, you learn to distinguish sounds through the visual feedback, and not through your ears - they can't do the job initially. Another helpful visual tool is a diagram of your mouth position as you produce the sounds. You can compare the two positions, try to reproduce them, and through these actions eventually learn to hear the difference.
How is Koko capable of saying anything without using anything close to proper grammar? Even based on the loosest analysis, she's capable of showing some language-type signs that people rework into the thoughts they think she's having. I think a far more strict and fair analysis would be that Koko is capable of a) repeating known signs that are viewed as rewarding, b) matching signs to her behavioral state, and c) noticing associations between signs based on the context in which they are presented.
h ives/aug99/aug99.shtm". It's clear that the author is doing far more interpretting than Koko is doing language. Sure, Koko knows signs for some interesting things, and Koko may have even formed her own associations, but taken from a skeptical viewpoint, Koko knows not *language*, but association.
There are plenty of creatures that can express behavior based on a set of circumstances. Language is something that must be *different* from this.
Read an example article: "http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/scienceline/arc
From what I understand, Koko is heavily rewarded for formulating and behaviorally displaying anything that sounds remotely like a proper thought a language-using creature might have. While you're right - there is some promising evidence that animals may possess some of the rudiments of language - I think it's fair to say that Koko and other great apes don't really have some of the linguistic abilities they are often ascribed by the people who write science articles for the media.