[SanderNL]

You are plenty clever.

This is the equivalent of introducing programming by giving a piece of ARM assembly and stating that it is immediately obvious that we are dealing with a merge sort implementation.

I’m not sure why, but I see this often in other domains as well. Math in particular. I guess it’s the curse of knowledge.

[tinco]

Except that when I was in highschool, programming in assembly was not in the curriculum, but designing simple logic circuits was. I am pretty sure we practiced designing a half adder in physics class as part of the electronics chapters.

The bad part of the writing is the assumption that all that technical language and knowledge is stil at the top of your memory when you just picked up this book.

[SanderNL]

I don’t know what high school you were in, but that is not the norm.

[tinco]

I no longer have the textbooks obviously, but it was just a regular gymnasium in a provincial town (Leeuwarden), we were using the standard government recommended VWO textbooks too, just under 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure it was in the textbook because the teacher was not the type to go off book and teach us something not needed for the tests.

We had those electronics circuit practice boards and you could hook multiple up together to make a half adder.

A group of students that were acing the tests and finishing their homework were spending a couple weeks of time in the back of the class assembling a full adder out of literally all of the practice boards the school owned. I wasn't acing any tests and wasn't finishing my homework on time but I joined them anyway because it was more fun. My contribution was realizing that we could use the relais as and and gates, doubling our resources enabling the completion of the full adder.

[SanderNL]

You had a good education. Don’t discount “provincial” schools.

> A group of students that were acing the tests and finishing their homework were spending a couple weeks of time [..] assembling a full ladder

Let’s just say I was submerged in a … different socio-economic class.

[Hunpeter]

I wish we had done anything of that sort in my high school.