Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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Nevermind the Pluperfect Subjunctive

In going back and reading some old posts as part of this curriculum project (I may be launching a separate site for that soon, so stay tuned) I ran across this quote from The Economic Naturalist that sums up the way I feel about the current methods for teaching people code:

Knowing about the pluperfect subjunctive is not a bad thing. But if learning to speak a new language is your goal, the time and effort required to learn the explicit technical details of this tense would be far better spent in other ways. Courses that focus most of their energy on such details are no fun for students, and they’re also astonishingly ineffective.

That is precisely what I want to get around.

August 28, 2009