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
Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust? No hidden control flow No hidden allocations First-class support for no standard library...
New
Rainer
Just wrote a short post, more a memo to myself, but maybe someone find it useful :stuck_out_tongue: https://dwarfte.ch/2021/02/03/giving...
New
First poster: Exadra37
Summary: I describe a simple interview problem (counting frequencies of unique words), solve it in various languages, and compare perform...
New
First poster: bot
This post is a spiritual successor to Loris Cro’s Go cross-compilation. The encounter During a recent stage 2 meeting Jakub Konka wanted...
New
New
AstonJ
This was posted on the Elixir Forum and thought it was worth sharing here! I love how the excitement of the author shines through and I ...
New
pablocostass
Todos coñecemos os focos de Erlang/Elixir máis renomeados do mundo, como a Suecia, o Brasil, a California ou Londres. Mais a comunidade, ...
New
First poster: bot
I wrote Python for the last 10 years, and I always tend to write code in a “functional” way - map, filter, lambda and so on, it makes me ...
New
axelson
I describe how we use Hot Reloading with Webpack to develop faster and show how to integrate Webpack 5, webpack-dev-server, and Phoenix f...
New
brainlid
There is a new community resource available on writing “Safe Ecto Migrations”. When we get a migration wrong, it can lock up your product...
New

Other popular topics Top

New
ohm
Which, if any, games do you play? On what platform? I just bought (and completed) Minecraft Dungeons for my Nintendo Switch. Other than ...
New
dimitarvp
Small essay with thoughts on macOS vs. Linux: I know @Exadra37 is just waiting around the corner to scream at me “I TOLD YOU SO!!!” but I...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
foxtrottwist
A few weeks ago I started using Warp a terminal written in rust. Though in it’s current state of development there are a few caveats (tab...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
New
AnfaengerAlex
Hello, I’m a beginner in Android development and I’m facing an issue with my project setup. In my build.gradle.kts file, I have the foll...
New