Our foundation with respect to distributed systems isn't really formally rigid (I'm still trying to understand how Raft and Paxos work) and looking at this will probably help a lot!
A course designed around using a particular "modern" web technology stack will have to change too often (every time it doesn't become "modern" anymore) for it to be sustainable. Imagine that in 2016 you have a course centered around using what was modern in 2006. That would inevitably happen with a course like that.
I'd rather teach programming from 0 to making a really basic 2D game (be it in C++ or Python or whatever language and whatever library). The results are eye-catching and the coding process is engaging, and there's no need for it to rely too much on how trendy the framework is in the current year.
I love games as an introduction to programming. But then you have to teach kids how to do collisions (or physics), you have to teach them how to keep track of multiple sprites that behave the same but are in different places at the same time (I'm talking about classes, yes), and it's harder to point to a "real world" usage of game programming... which makes it harder to get your course approved.
I know, teaching today's web standards means they'll be out of date within the next ten years. But I believe the improvement of the web is asymptotic and will slowly come to a halt in the coming years... that and I would never forgive myself for not refreshing a course when it's too old to be applied to the real world, as a pragmatist. Finally, I don't think Vue will beat React too quickly.
(I'm not an educator, but I've spoken with a few on some of these topics.)
I went to a private school, where the only CS class was game programming; and it was offered as an art elective [0]. The class itself was very much a programming class, requiring only a couple of supplemental lunch time classes to be prepared for the AP exam [1].
[0] According to the teacher, the class was originally planned as offering a CS credit; but was changed to art when they realized that a CS credit is not a graduation requirement, while art credits were.
[1] This was not out of the norm for my school. The only class that was designed for the AP was calculus.
When I taught myself basic as a child I did so by building my own single-user dungeon. In my first c class in high school the project was to create a playable terminal-based hangman game. Neither of these engaging projects required me to learn anything about physics or sprites. Though I did build an ascii-animated hanging sequence for those who lost at hangman.
It will be interesting to see how this fact will come up in legislative discussions. Has it happened before -- that so many people ended up relying on a single corporations that the corporation needed to take on special obligations?
Despite any implementation problems, I don't believe that someone should have a worse chance of keeping their life in the face of disease just because they are not as wealthy. That alone means that society is considering some people's lives more important than others, which is not a society that I would like to live in.
But life isn't fair. We didn't create this problem, it just is. What we can do is work on solutions. So what are those solutions? You can't bury your head in the sand and pretend that the worlds resources aren't finite.
This. This is the crux of the issue in discussions such as this. Of course we all want Utopia. Just because some of us have disagreements about how to get there doesn't mean that we're heartless bigots.
(I'm not implying anyone in particular here has said this, but this is often where these discussion end up).
It's incredibly difficult to rectify free will with every person is equally valuable. The correlation of that is all behavior is equally virtuous, be it reading, getting high, or punting babies off bridges.
I would settle for a communally accepted floor we don't let people fall below.
>That alone means that society is considering some people's lives more important than others
No it doesn't. Healthcare does not happen through some fictitious consensus of "society". It happens through individuals interacting one with one another and forming a natural order. To claim that healthcare is a "right" ultimately means healthcare providers are slaves.
Competing at the top level of any sport (athletic, mental, or otherwise) requires the right training and support almost as much as the right mindset, work ethic, and talent. The training and support requires time and money.
At present, people of different ethnicities have a disproportionate share of wealth, and thus fewer resources that they can spend on training and support. Support begins early: parents help their children find the right activity to undertake and also teach them the mentality to work hard at it in order to compete -- this is almost impossible to accomplish if those parents have to be away most of the time because of financial constraints.
As for gender, we have only recently entered an era where we recognize that girls are equally capable of doing things like math at a top level (the first Fields Medal given to a woman was given to them quite recently). In girls' formative years, parents still have some subconscious expectations of what their children are capable of -- perhaps being reluctant to expose girls to the sciences or other serious undertakings. There are some recent efforts to get girls into these things, but the fact that they are newsworthy proves that it's not the norm yet. The time that there will be equal female representation in these areas will be when an entire generation understands that women and girls are equally capable of getting into them. This will be after everyone who comes from the previous era of society have died.
Your theories would be plausible if the number of girls competing at a close-to-top level wasn't outnumbered by the number of boys who by any life-background metric would have no business being there. I'm talking about trailer park kids, poor immigrants, schizophrenics, and absolute slackers here. It will take some training and practice to get on an IMO team -- because your competition is doing so -- but at levels below that, girls are outnumbered by boys making no special effort in math that just show up and get high scores on contests.
Realize that anybody that would be at, say, top-500-high-school-students-in-USA math level will be the sort of student that coasts through all their math classes from K-12, with the typical schedule taking pre-calc in 10th grade, with no studying and no stress at all, easily the best in their class, assuming the school system just ignores their talents. There would have to be 250 girls in this situation, of which those that finish over the top 500 threshold on things like the AMC or AIME or earlier contests are outnumbered by boys with less "support" that just show up and get high scores on math contests.
Also, in my experience in middle school there were many girls that were quite competitive in 24 game, that just disappeared in more mathy contests like MathCOUNTS.
Reading the full text, I can't help but notice the mention of "Episodic" meaningfulness, which means that meaningfulness peaks at certain times rather than being present at a constant level throughout.
Does this apply to the feelings about what someone is doing that day, or does it apply to the job as a whole?
All of those installation steps and disjoint applications make this comment sound like one of the early detractors of Dropbox commenting on its Show HN thread.
Our foundation with respect to distributed systems isn't really formally rigid (I'm still trying to understand how Raft and Paxos work) and looking at this will probably help a lot!