[such_a_casual]

"This article is aimed to introduce and explain a number of topics and ideas that will help you when practicing recursive problems."

I know I'm not supposed to shit talk the article. I know someone spent a lot of time making it for me and others. However, we've gotta move forward as a community. We have to raise the bar. We have to stop this nonsense.

There is an issue here greater than recursion. I know that's bold of me to say, but I'm serious. Programmers need STOP fucking telling people that they can explain something that requires practice to understand. You cannot learn multiplication from reading a blog post. It has to be drilled into you over and over again. And only after it's been drilled into you what numbers are, what addition and subtraction are, and what carrying and borrowing mean. You learn this over the course of YEARS not 5 minutes reading some shitpost on the internet. Recursion is just like math. It has to be drilled into you. I had zero understanding of this for YEARS. And then I picked up a book that drills recursion into you. Only after writing function after function (functions essentially identical to one another in structure), was I able to understand the IMPORTANCE of recursion. Not by thinking about it, or reasoning about it, by actually doing it, over and over again. Recursion can be explained in 10 seconds. I'll do it right now. Recursion is when a set of instructions starts over from step 1. Or for us programmers, a function which calls itself. Bam. all you need to know about recursion. Guess what. It's not enough to understand what multiplication is, you actually have to be able to use it. You actually have to be able to use recursion. Explaining why multiplication is important is frankly retarded. This post is frankly retarded. STOP pretending that you can explain in 5 minutes what took you months and years to understand. STOP. All you do is make people like me think they're dumb for not getting it. I'M SMARTER THAN YOU! But it took me months of ACTUALLY WRITING RECURSIVE FUNCTIONS to realize HOW FUCKING DUMB YOU ALL ARE. Stop fucking telling people you can teach them calculus in 5 minutes. Stop telling them that all it takes is this one clear explanation. It doesn't! It takes actual work. Fuck the guy who wrote that post. You have no idea how many years I wasted thinking blog posts like this were how to learn. If you don't get why recursion is a big deal, do yourself a favor and forget everything you read in that post, grab a pencil, some paper, and a copy of the Little Lisper. Email me in 6 months when you're finished, so that you can thank me for being the only one to tell you the truth about recursion.