Not so. The consideration should include the fact that when a child has been spawn camped by school, family and society at large to implant the idea that tertiary education is required to participate in society and without a degree one amounts to nothing, as is often the case, then it indeed is a failure of systematic nature and it would be not fair to put the blame on the now young adult's shoulders alone.
> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.
You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.
Whether things like "intelligence", "cognitive ability", and "aptitude" (some of which may be synonyms depending on your view) are innate vs. learned or fixed vs. variable over time are orthogonal to each other. And for each of those pairs, the answer may not be as simple as a binary division or even a gradient (it may decompose into something weirder, being causally determined by multiple factors where some of those factors are fixed and others aren't).
Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).
Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).
It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:
- IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
- IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
- some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
- IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability
where aptitude means something like fluid problem-solving ability, speed of learning, etc.
Came here for this comment. Janet would score positively in my mind if the evolutionary dead-end PEG were replaced with a grammar parser that is known to work under all circumstances.
Many. I don't have enough room on HN to show a representative sample of the shortcomings. Read the relevant literature or converse with an LLM to learn more.
This almost trivial grammar works without any problem in known good parsers. If you want to try out grammars in the wild in Janet, it is nearly guaranteed that they are complex enough for peg to shit itself.
Of course this grammar does not work; you violated the two rules of writing PEGs:
• do not use left-recursive rules;
• put alternatives in such an order that none can be a prefix of a subsequent one.
These may seem limiting, but can always be fixed by a simple local change. In contrast, transforming a PEG into a conventional grammar often requires complex, wide-scoped changes. I’ve had the Tree-sitter compiler “shit itself” many times at grammars that PEG accepted with no problem, and had to introduce several ugly hacks to work around the problem of Tree-sitter not allowing ambiguous grammars.
That's the critique, yes. If I put this grammar into a known good parser, it just works. I have to repeat this to hammer the point home.
A user should not have to waste time to find work-arounds for the undocumented limitations. Since there are many more limitations than just the one example I showed, you should realise that there is not much value explaining the particular limitations to me; all the limitations and the required work-around steps should rather go into the Janet documentation so that all users can see them and make use of them. But that's still a crappy developer experience, I would rather see Janet simply adopt a parser that is free of this kind of limitations.
> can always be fixed by a simple local change
I sceptical of that. I claim once the grammar is of the size required to model real-world problems, say about dozens of production rules, fixes become complex, wide-scoped. In the spirit of HN curiosity, I am willing to cooperate with you by conducting an experiment that is designed to change my mind. I would show a grammar that is of the type which is in common use everywhere, and you would apply the fixes to make it work in Janet/PEG, and then we examine whether the changes are always simple and local. Are you willing?
> [PEG grammar in Tree-sitter]
That reads rather bizarre to me because you describe the opposite direction. I have not had that train of thought because in all of my experience and those of the people I know it has always been the case that one receives a grammar that is of the type which is in common use everywhere. And when we try to express it in PEG, it does not work at all, no one knows what to do to make it work, experts who might help cannot be found, and the solution (after wasting a lot of time) is to either give up or try a different parser.
As an aside, I have not examined Tree-sitter yet, and its documentation does not tell me the information I need, so I cannot put it into the category of known good parsers.
Because society is full of dickheads? In a just world, it would be legal for a policeman to bludgeon anyone who does not respect a user agent's <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track> setting. Second offence, hang them from the flagpole in front of the parliament building. The problem would disappear over night.
You seem to be under the impression that adding new syntax necessarily breaks existing code. But that just isn't true. If you can't fathom how it's done, then look at the use VERSION statement in Perl.
This answer that is both so stupendously confident and wrong is only possible if you in actuality decided to not read and understand how this problem is solved in Perl.
Under the circumstance that the primary and secondary education levels have failed to adequately prepare a student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be unfair.
The university teaches what it teaches; it exists as a place of higher learning. If the student is unprepared for that, they are unprepared to attend. It's not university's job to fix shitty high schools' teachings and redo lower learning. Go get a highschool tutor if you need that.
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