I notice more and more pushes to 'improve' C and turn it into something it should not become. I feel like the C++ community gave up on C++ because of the growing complexity and so turned to C with the hope of adding to it the good parts of C++ without the ugliness. But this is of course hopeless: every added feature will create new issues that will be solved with new features until the language becomes too complex for anyone to fully understand.
Readit Newsguillaumec commented on Why not just do simple C++ RAII in C? thephd.dev/just-put-raii-... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
guillaumec commented on Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on navigating complex systems conversationswithtyler.co... · Posted by u/kulor
It's interesting; most of Patrick's writing I find unnecessarily tedious to parse, regardless of substance of content. This one really clicked and easily is one of my favorite CwT episodes full of insightful answers.
I often wondered if Patrick uses unnecessarily convoluted sentences, or if he is simply careful about using the proper terminology, and my English is just not good enough to follow him like a native speaker would.
10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite.
How big is elite? How big is prodigies?
Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%.
But what is that size compared to general population?
If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle.
If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it?
tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.