[WalterBright]

> and an impressive amount of capability for a high school senior

It's only impressive because very few (none?) high schools teach calculus at the level required for his implementation. High schoolers are quite capable of handling that kind of calculus, it's just that the high schools don't teach it.

[Closi]

It's not about the level of calculus knowledge for me - it's about building this from scratch with 1960's technology in 50 lines of basic and very little prior art.

It's easier to be the second person to do something.

[krallja]

For accuracy, it was written in FOCAL, not BASIC.

[Closi]

Thanks, my mistake!

[WalterBright]

I agree with that.

[Aeolun]

I’m fairly certain that while schools might be capable of teaching calculus at this level, the amount of interest in that roughly corresponds with the number of students that already know calculus at that level anyway.

[mhh__]

The UK stopped including calculus as part of physics even!

I got told off for doing an integral.

[WalterBright]

How sad.

[renewiltord]

Yeah but being first is part of it, no? In my mid 20s I read Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations and realized I'd reached the falsification pathway to epistemology as a teenager. But was I a genius or was I just lucky to be born in this age where the soup of concepts we're bathed in makes that obvious? I think the latter. Same with Goldbach's Conjecture, I came up with an equivalent conjecture as a pre-teen.

Evidence since has shown I'm reasonably intelligent but not the Popper or Goldbach or even the Walter Bright of our times.

Humanity the organism evolves so more things become obvious to more average members. Perhaps ten year olds will see the intuitive use of monadic structures in the future.