Teaching to Topics
Teaching
Is it better to teach programming bottom-up or top-down? That is, start with something like logic gates or something like Logo? Related comment.
Reactive
Why do we keep convincing ourselves that reactive programming is a good fit for imperative languages, even though side effects are a defining feature of imperative languages?
I’ve run this discussion past Gemini several times and I generally find it very receptive to my critique of the entire idea. It seem that skepticism of reactive programming is actually quite widespread among people who actually think about it which is automatically not most engineers.
Reactive coding is how the concensus stack works and so the concensus thinks it’s good. The fact it is not good and is in fact bad isn’t even considered.
This is like server side rendering. This is bad from top to bottom and only “good” because social media links an google’s crawler are designed for the static web. But if you engineer around this specific issue you don’t need SSR and everything is better. But the concensus stack just does SSR so the concensus thinks it’s good.
Also see IT Tech Support and its love for Windows.
—TL
I’m not sure that inertia explains why the idea of creating a reactive framework for an imperative language keeps rising from the ashes, since there have been epochs of programming when reactive frameworks were not the norm for imperative languages, possibly most of the history of user interface programming. Am I wrong about it keeping rising and failing? Why do I have that impression?
Removal
What percent of problems in software get addressed by adding something when removing something would be better?
Topics
What topics should have been more emphasized in school? For my part, I wish that the time I spent in calculus classes were instead on linear algebra and statistics.