Talk:Learning Learning/Parable 2

What is foo and foobar? These terms are often seen in American documents about programming where they are often used as items in examples. Are they phrases from some well-known American children's book or something like that, something which Americans have known about since childhood yet which are unknown as regards their origin to people elsewhere?

Foobar derives from an acronym, FUBAR, that was used by the American (and British) military during World War II. It is commonly said to stand for Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition, although there is a much less polite interpretation. I don't know the history of how it became popular in computer science, but by the time I came to MIT in the mid70s, it was quite commonplace as a variable name in programming examples. (See the Wikipedia entry). Walter 21:11, 30 April 2006 (EDT)

For an actual historical example of rapid attainment of literacy, it is said that when Sequoyah brought his new alphabet to the Cherokee people, they all became literate within two months. Whether or not that is factual, the literacy rate was high, and there were a number of regular publications in Cherokee within the year.

For another, the most effective method of raising literacy in India turns out not to be classes or computer software, but Karaoke-style captioning of Bollywood movies. People routinely go to watch the same movie five or more times, and the whole audience sings along with the musical numbers.

Raymond Kurzweil has pointed out that English has more than 2,000 spelling rules with more than 2,000 individual exceptions such as 'rough' and 'though'. In languages with a closer correspondence between letters and sounds, literacy follows almost immediately after learning the alphabet.

One person who got the connection between computers and literacy early was psychologist Omar Khayyam Moore [sic], who programmed an IBM 360 in the 1960s to teach his 3-year old daughter to read and write.