> The implicit message here seems to be, "let everyone pass through the system regardless of how qualified they actually are, but we'll have to lower the bar to keep grades and graduation rates high."
This is how highschool was for me. I dropped out of a highschool with a 98% graduation rate. In that situation, no one cared if people were learning or even about what's best for the society or economy. For the school it's about building a system that gives them the desired numbers. Second anecdotal: Education has been giving girls better grades. There is a college in California that is famous for their animal science and veterinary programs. Girls don't want to work with big animals. So the school simply does not have enough people interested in big animals. They tried lowering the GPA requirement just so they could let enough boys into the program. This caused their school ranking to fall, and they immediately reversed the decision.
Schools are playing politics. Favoring girls in education has led to problems across the board as people just assume girls will want to do the same jobs at the same rate.
All anecdotal for sure. Definitely nothing conclusive. Just thought I'd add my 2 cents.
I'll make an argument that has nothing to do with the quality of disney's entertainment or disney's ability to give value to your child in the form of happiness/lessons.
Being a human being is a social experience. If all of a kid's friends watch disney movies and have disney toys, there is an opportunity to connect with his friends. There is also the opportunity to feel excluded, to miss out on experiences and discussions with his friends. I remember quite fondly how excited me and my friends would get talking and arguing about Star Wars and Indiana Jones in the sandbox.
"This article is aimed to introduce and explain a number of topics and ideas that will help you when practicing recursive problems."
I know I'm not supposed to shit talk the article. I know someone spent a lot of time making it for me and others. However, we've gotta move forward as a community. We have to raise the bar. We have to stop this nonsense.
There is an issue here greater than recursion. I know that's bold of me to say, but I'm serious. Programmers need STOP fucking telling people that they can explain something that requires practice to understand. You cannot learn multiplication from reading a blog post. It has to be drilled into you over and over again. And only after it's been drilled into you what numbers are, what addition and subtraction are, and what carrying and borrowing mean. You learn this over the course of YEARS not 5 minutes reading some shitpost on the internet. Recursion is just like math. It has to be drilled into you. I had zero understanding of this for YEARS. And then I picked up a book that drills recursion into you. Only after writing function after function (functions essentially identical to one another in structure), was I able to understand the IMPORTANCE of recursion. Not by thinking about it, or reasoning about it, by actually doing it, over and over again. Recursion can be explained in 10 seconds. I'll do it right now. Recursion is when a set of instructions starts over from step 1. Or for us programmers, a function which calls itself. Bam. all you need to know about recursion. Guess what. It's not enough to understand what multiplication is, you actually have to be able to use it. You actually have to be able to use recursion. Explaining why multiplication is important is frankly retarded. This post is frankly retarded. STOP pretending that you can explain in 5 minutes what took you months and years to understand. STOP. All you do is make people like me think they're dumb for not getting it. I'M SMARTER THAN YOU! But it took me months of ACTUALLY WRITING RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS to realize HOW FUCKING DUMB YOU ALL ARE. Stop fucking telling people you can teach them calculus in 5 minutes. Stop telling them that all it takes is this one clear explanation. It doesn't! It takes actual work. Fuck the guy who wrote that post. You have no idea how many years I wasted thinking blog posts like this were how to learn. If you don't get why recursion is a big deal, do yourself a favor and forget everything you read in that post, grab a pencil, some paper, and a copy of the Little Lisper. Email me in 6 months when you're finished, so that you can thank me for being the only one to tell you the truth about recursion.
Did you think of that on your own? God I feel dumb. (I like being made to feel dumb) I googled it and didn't get that answer. I guess remembering ST can be a street or saint is a good rule.
The blog post has tremendous value to the right audience, no doubt about that. But it's worse than worthless for its actual target audience because the article makes those people feel like they're supposed to get it, and they probably feel shitty when they don't (I did). Even though they shouldn't. No one expects you to read that blog post and get it if you've never used Map or Reduce before. It's misleading and disheartening to the target audience. It's a pretty easy fix. Just change who you're talking to.
When I discovered Array.map, I already knew about map/filter/reduce. The reason it was a discovery is that the bulk of Javascript resources used for(){} loops and in those few places where map/filter/reduce were used, many implemented map/filter/reduce as library functions because Array.map etc were not always part of Javascript...I think Mozilla added them at some point based on how I found out about them.
I'm sorry to say that I completely agree. As a "here's how you do X in javascript" this is a great post. However, the conclusion clearly shows that this post was not aimed at people who already know how to use map and reduce: "Functional programming is a great tool and will drastically improve your productivity...."
It's like someone showing you multiplication and saying. See look how useful it is! See look how simple and easy it is to understand! I still don't know multiplication, or even addition for that matter.
Map and reduce are things you build up to by doing recursive functions over and over again. They are not something you learn from reading an article. Just like you can't read an article and suddenly know how to solve problems with long division.
