I have discovered that teaching programming goes much better with my fifth grade students if I take the time to teach them about all the symbols I think of as "normal" that are totally new to them.

"These are square brackets, you'll find them over the 'enter' key we use them for lists. In programming we have three kinds of brackets..."

This reduced confusion so much. And I feel a little silly for not realizing that OF COURSE they don't know what they characters are or how to type them.

@futurebird There is even more to consider here: Maybe you were using a standard ANSI QWERTY keyboard layout (US) with { and [ on one key (reachable via shift) and } and ] on another key (reachable via shift).

Using a standard German keyboard layout those are spread to Alt Gr of 7, 8, 9 and 0. I remember having had similar issues when I ran The Carpentries workshops.

US: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:KB_United_States.svg&oldid=1095945851
German: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:KB_Germany-text.svg&oldid=1059056551

@KatS

OK this is a bit new to me I thought that all of these things:

() [] {}

Are brackets.

{} Braces, Fancy Brackets, Curly Brackets
() Parenthesis, Round Brackets
[] Brackets, Square Brackets, Computer brackets

Are there more names?

I tend to think of [] as the "default" but others have suggested that () are the default ...

@futurebird @KatS
Curly braces were introduced in my life as being called Accolades.

@futurebird I once thought I may end up in coding, but I just cannot sustain interest in it. But I did find, after having spent most of the last two decades in at least a Unix-like system or Linux, I like to use Vim for writing. It made me pay attention to things like brackets and suck. It was not at all obvious to me what all those symbols mean, and frankly I still barely know, but I use muscle memory now. But this is a far cry from a college course or technical work in the field.

@csgraves

The meaning of those symbols depends entirely on what software you're using.

Not all software agrees on their meaning. Not even all programming languages agree on their meaning.

The only reason people understand [a, tx, 5] “is a list of 3 items” is because that's what it means in JavaScript.

@futurebird

I have discovered that teaching programming goes much better with my fifth grade students if I take the time to teach them about all the symbols I think of as "normal" that are totally new to them.

"These are square brackets, you'll find them over the 'enter' key we use them for lists. In programming we have three kinds of brackets..."

This reduced confusion so much. And I feel a little silly for not realizing that OF COURSE they don't know what they characters are or how to type them.

@GinevraCat

CS is a much younger field than math and many of the people doing the teaching learned from a kind of immersion that obscures more efficient and broadly effective ways to teach these concepts.

I don't even remember how I learned what a bracket was or how lists work and I was implicitly assuming it was "obvious" just something you pick up from using a computer.

This is NOT the case.

Open the door and let more people in.

@futurebird @GinevraCat but how do you figure out what part of it exactly isn't obvious to others when you never thought about it yourself cause it has always been obvious to you? Like how do you explain it so that it becomes obvious to them too?

Note that I am not a teacher so it's not my job, just curiosity

When I was in grad school for math the one day when I felt most like "I don't even belong here." was the day that my Complex Analysis prof suddenly wrote ∮ on the board and being mostly self-taught in Calculus having mostly passed tests to skip various pre-recs (to save on tuition!) I already felt like I didn't really "get" calculus like everyone else.

Seeing some new integral I'd never seen before made me just want to die.

Be careful with symbols. Make them friends.

@futurebird, hmm, any experience of APL? I understand that that has lots of symbols…

Also, no idea what you mean by “grad school” other than it's something which appears to be American. I know, I could look it up… I think that I'm going to assume that if I multiply it by 0.9 I get deg school and if I multiply it by π/200, I get rad school.