CommunityNews

CommunityNews

How NOT to Teach Recursion

We all know how to teach recursion. We’ve done it for decades. We pick some honored, time-tested examples—Fibonacci numbers and factorial being leading candidates—and use them to teach the general idea. They’re so canonical they come directly from the gods: you can find these in books by people like Niklaus Wirth.

But I’m here to tell you they got it wrong, and everyone’s been getting it wrong ever since. Students come away underwhelmed and baffled, and go on to become the next generation of teachers who repeat this process. However, we need not repeat this cycle; we have much better methods.

https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/how-not-to-teach-recursion/

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our automated news source trackers.

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

First poster: bot
Julia is a scientific programming language that is free and open source.1 It is a relatively new language that borrows inspiration from l...
New
First poster: bot
The Race to Replace C & C++. Three expert compiler writers sit down to discuss moving beyond C and C++ This thread...
New
AstonJ
Just listening to this now… Totally agree with @FrancescoC’s and @thompson_si’s comment “learn to learn” :sunglasses: In our talk we’...
New
First poster: bot
In this post we’re going to be looking at a more advanced use of Gleam’s type system, known as phantom types. Hopefully by the end of thi...
New
First poster: bot
I’ve been more serious about learning Rust recently, after dragging on with passive learning for a while. My first real programming langu...
New
First poster: bot
Too long have we hustled to deploy Clojure websites. Too long have we spun up one server instance per site. Too long have reminisced abou...
New
RudManusachi
Hi there! Recently I was playing around with extracting and updating data in the DB and for fun challenged myself to try to implement a ...
New
ragamuf
Does the world need another How to create a blog article? Maybe not. But then again, creating something out of nothing is what we love....
New
brainlid
Jason Stiebs shows a couple ways for a LiveView to make it easy for users to click and copy an important value to their clipboard. He sho...
New
mudasobwa
Peeper is the tiny library to preserve state across GenServer crashes/restarts. Works as an almost drop-in substitute for GenServer, sui...
New

Other popular topics Top

wolf4earth
@AstonJ prompted me to open this topic after I mentioned in the lockdown thread how I started to do a lot more for my fitness. https://f...
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
New
AstonJ
You might be thinking we should just ask who’s not using VSCode :joy: however there are some new additions in the space that might give V...
New
AstonJ
I’ve been hearing quite a lot of comments relating to the sound of a keyboard, with one of the most desirable of these called ‘thock’, he...
New
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
DevotionGeo
I have always used antique keyboards like Cherry MX 1800 or Cherry MX 8100 and almost always have modified the switches in some way, like...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fight complexity and reclaim the original spirit of agility by learning to simplify how you develop software. The result: a more humane a...
New