> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude.
To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence.
Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec.
It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type.
Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings.
Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript.
I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process.
What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week.
I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.
To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence.
Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec.
It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type.
Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings.
Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript.
I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process.
What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week.
I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.