Research Mathematician. I'm going to try anyway but I doubt I'll even make it to grad school and the career prospects for an average mathematician to do research near full time are dim.
I like your points, but I'm not sure of the Idris on half a page. How much tacit knowledge does that rely on? We do need to focus on the fundamentals of education, the spectrum of logics with quantifiers, lambda calculus, and natural deduction style presentations of language semantics (not sure what to actually call this?).
I'm referring to the operational semantics[1]. This doesn't require any tacit knowledge to fix the language past what the horizontal line and definitional equality symbols mean (it's entirely in the form of purely syntactic "given this, you can write this"), but it won't be remotely helpful to teach you what the syntax reductions mean or how to use them. If you're never heard of lambdas, you could technically still "use" them in the sense a computer can, but good luck figuring out that they represent functions. It wouldn't fit any sensible definition of "understanding".
My point isn't that these things are easy to learn because their presentations are so brief; personally, dependent typing took me a long time for me to wrap my head around. What I think the briefness of the operational semantics in combination with the examples of things people have built within them suggest is that they're very versatile. Even if only people working on language level features bother to learn them, the utility of their creations (all without needing to move to another language or introduce possibly incompatible extensions) is a huge asset.
It looks like you're criticizing the GP's praise of Idris' concise formal definition of its unsugared semantics. I wouldn't use such a formal definition for educating novices (like I think you're implying in your next sentence); I'd use it professionally to show that many desirable things--effect tracking, compile-time checking, and design-by-contract--derive from the same thing. Ken Iverson in his notes on mathematical notation says that one criterion for a good notation is "suggestibility"--the notation should suggest that other problems similar to those you found just now could be solved as well.
Whether formality is useful for novices, it is certainly useful for experts.
Cool, but I find that hard to read. I'm going to do a custom stylesheet, I was just waiting to see if there was any interest in the conversational format form my Slack conversations. Really appreciate your effort.
Drop the dogma. Stuff like "OOP is terrible" or "FP is terrible" or "JavaScript is terrible", etc. are not only wrong but they are destructive only to you. Nobody else cares that you hold this view, it just keeps you ignorant about that thing and holds back your skill set and career. If you take the time to actually learn how to use the thing in question properly, what the good parts of it are and how good things not only can be made with it but are being made with it you will be better for it. Even if at the end of that you still decide you don't want to use it yourself (which is totally valid, we all have our preferences) you will be better off. You will be take the view not that "X is terrible" but that "X is not my preferred way of doing Y."
Second, don't waste your time bullshitting with a bunch of people who don't know anything about anything and just want to be "right" all the time. Where "right" here is actually "agree with the trendy position", which right now is "FP is good, OOP is bad." Talk to professional developers who actually do the work you want to do, and learn from them what it is they do and how they do it. To be sure, some people who hold those silly views do work as developers, but I would argue they're not professional. A professional sees tools as tools and not as a substitute for a personality.
Bullshitting is a great thing to do to blow off steam, we can't code 24x7, but there's constructive chat and then there's a useless echo chamber full of nonsense (which IRC is really good at forming.)
Anyway, hope that helps. I used to talk like the stuff I see in this chat when I was younger, then I realized what I just said about those opinions only being harmful to myself and now I try to be more open minded.
Thanks. I was trying to show it started off unproductive and went into a constructive chat about Haskell type and value level functions, but this was also a lazy test of if people are interested in the conversational format. I think the result is maybe? I want to make a socratic dialogue style presentation of some ideas in FP, I don't have much interest in saying OOP is terrible, because I don't have much interest in talking about OOP.
I hope it is not stupid. I won't fit inside the university system at this point. They would make me take courses on subjects I already know which is a waste. I have about 20 hours on the weekend I can use towards accomplishing a class and I will have minimal waste since my curriculum is tailored directly for me. Of course it is only because I already wasted a decade learning math poorly that I know what I want to know and what I need to know to know it ;)
Prerequisites for classes are oftentimes a suggestion, you can easily get into a class you don't meet the prerequisites for by simply signing up for the class (most class registration systems don't bar this), or by emailing the professor and getting an override. Furthermore, if you're a non-degree seeking student, the university cares very little about you, so you can skate by with a lot more freedom with classes.
Interesting, anecdotally, I went to three different universities and they all barred this from happening without an explicit override from a professor or occasionally an adviser. Just curious what experience you have that makes you say this?
Huh, I've attended classes at two universities: one for my undergraduate and one while I was in HS, and neither had a system in place to explicitly bar you from registering for a class whose pre-reqs you didn't fulfill. At best you'd get a scary message confirmation message telling asking you "You don't meet the pre-reqs, you may be dropped from the class, are you sure?".
Also, at least when I was an undergrad, the Banner student system (from ellucian company) had no system in place for barring you from registering from classes. This was frequently the point of discussion between the professors that I TA'd for.
Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exceptions to these, and personal requests to professors to get out of them were completely ignored. The prereqs were enforced by the computerized registration system - good luck getting past them without a waiver.
As one anecdote, they once told me I needed to retake intro physics. On the pretest given on the first day of class, I came within one problem of a perfect score. Didn't make a lick of difference - their syllabus differed from the last university in the most minor of ways, and despite the fact that the class never actually covered even 50% of the stuff it claimed to on the syllabus, I was made to retake the entire sequence anyway.
I'll counter your anecdote with mine: in my undergrad years, I started out as a computer science major, and discovered that I wanted to do computational astrophysics 3 years into my college career, meaning that I lacked significant physics background. The Astronomy department was adamant on me "needing" to have done the basic physics classes (mechanics, E&M) before letting me into an introductory quantum physics class, even though I already possessed a working knowledge of the basics. I emailed the professor of the quantum physics class, explaining my situation, and simply ended up taking the quantum class alongside the basic physics classes.
Although I think your situation was pretty special as well, transferring universities is usually incredibly annoying and filled with road bumps. I've found there's a lot more leniency given to students who remain within the same university.
If you are taking a degree program, it is the institutions responsibility to ensure that you have met all the requirements. If they don't have enough information on equivalence of a different institutions course, the easiest thing for them is to require you retake the sequence.
The way to get around this isn't by taking pretests (which don't mean much) it's by writing the final exams. In some institutions you will be able to do this without (full?) course fees if you are attempting to demonstrate equivalence.
That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead they chose the path of petty legalism by assuming since the syllabus didn't agree with their's 100%, the only way to guarantee I knew the material was to make to pay to retake the entire sequence.
I failed to mention I'd also already spent three years as a physics major and had already taken classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics - so being told to retake the intro physics sequence was quite silly indeed.
It's not exactly petty legalism, they can lose their ability to grant degrees over stuff like this. This is one of the reasons that if you are transferring institutions, as a student it is your responsibility to check transfer credits. After all, it certainly isn't true that all undergraduate curriculum are equivalent.
It's a bit of a pain, but the point wasn't that they should give you some questions from the old exam but that you should actually sit the new one, under exam conditions. That resolves the problem for everyone without you having to spend the time repeating lectures etc. In the best case you don't pay full rate either.
Having taken Algorithms at both undergrad and graduate levels and read through many books to prep Google/Facebook/etc interviews, I would flip out if anyone ever makes take an Algorithms class again.
> They would make me take courses on subjects I already know which is a waste
Then find a lower-tier university. In any densely populated region there will be at least one that's happy to take your tuition money to let you enroll in a non-degree-earning course of study.
You'll only have an issue if you want a degree which, BTW, is typically intended to be broader than a narrow course of study in a particular area of expertise.
This approach is what took my math skills to the next level. I would also frequently skip exercises and forget material that I learned previously. Since I started adding exercise books to my study routine I have seen enormous gains in knowledge retention and my ability to build on concepts already learned. It also doesn't have to be Olympiad style, there are also Math Circles and the general Problems in {Area} book, like one of my favorites Sequences, Combinations, Limits.
