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Comment on Hedy is a gradual programming language that helps kids to learn Pythonparent

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She's talking about delaying the fundamental concept of a function, and using the absence of the function syntax in order to motivate the need for it.

Do you have kids? My nephew has been learning math. He won't be told about f(x) until he reaches algebra. Until then the presence of parentheses would just be arbitrary added complexity. In fact he hasn't even been shown parentheses in the context of application order yet.

I agree with you that you could start with that syntax. I also think you could start with = instead of "is". In both of those cases though we've introduced distinct concepts - function application and operators - and her entire approach is based on introducing one concept per learning step.

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