I appreciate the candid response. I have noticed there is a class of very intelligent, well-educated adult learners who have nevertheless been unexposed to software education until adulthood who are now looking for a career change. I've found that there is a lot of difficulty initially with combining abstractions, i.e., "a variable holds a value, a function is also a value, a function is also a thing that sometimes takes values and sometimes returns values, therefore a variable can hold a function, a function can be passed as an argument to a function, and a function can return a function".
Reasonable adults might have reasonable questions about those facts, such as, "what does any of that have to do with a computer?"
To my embarrassment, I realized they were completely right and my early exposure to software made me overlook some extremely important context.
So for these adults, the expectation of struggling through a few semesters/years of javascript is not an optimal learning route.
My hope was that working from the logic gate level up would at least provide the intuition about the relationship between computers (Turing Machines, really, not modern computers) and software.
However, I think based on your excellent critique I will be sure to include a unit on how "educational architectures are very different from modern architectures and I may have ruined your brain by teaching you this" haha.
Reasonable adults might have reasonable questions about those facts, such as, "what does any of that have to do with a computer?"
To my embarrassment, I realized they were completely right and my early exposure to software made me overlook some extremely important context.
So for these adults, the expectation of struggling through a few semesters/years of javascript is not an optimal learning route.
My hope was that working from the logic gate level up would at least provide the intuition about the relationship between computers (Turing Machines, really, not modern computers) and software.
However, I think based on your excellent critique I will be sure to include a unit on how "educational architectures are very different from modern architectures and I may have ruined your brain by teaching you this" haha.