Reconsidering the way I explain programming

Reconsidering the way I explain programming
“Do you know a recipe for a recursive salad?” – I asked. “It consists of tomatoes, olives and a recursive salad”.
My joke falls flat. Michael’s eyes confused and waiting for the explanation. I regroup and try a different strategy – sketching:
One of my failed attempts at explaining recursion
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I’ve explained a lot of programming concepts to different people. From high school students who are just getting started, to experienced engineers who are quickly diving into a new programming language.
I used to take a lot of pride in the clever explanations I used to come up with. “Your UI is just a function of state”, “the closure hugs your variables in scope”, “Prolog function arguments can be in or out”. I also loved the visuals, formatting code and showing clever animations.

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Andy Matuschak , ,