If you're uncomfortable enough with recursion that you can't easily convert loops to their recursion equivalents, you should be glad that someone is forcing you to practice it. It's difficult to learn to program at a high level with this kind of avoidance of basic programming concepts. Recursion and recursive data structures are absolutely at the heart of all programming.

Yah, I agree with you both and will check out those books sometime this year.

What kind of stuff do you find yourself using it for other than searching directories or sorting. The only time I really found it useful was when writing code to search window directories and keep going within a folder to within a folder and so on. I'm more interested in networking stuff and never find times of when I would want to use it for anything.

I understood recursion much better after taking Theory of Algorithms. Divide and conquer can be very useful.

Code School is Free till Friday if anyone wants to try/learn some new languages.

I have no idea where to ask this, but you folks seem technologically smart, so I'll try here.

I have an unlocked Canadian iPhone 6+ but my carrier doesn't offer US service. Is there a good cheap US pre-paid plan I can get when I'm there. Preferably something purely pay-as-you-go since some months I won't be in the US at all.

Check T-Mobile and Wal-Mart, I think they offer pay as you go.

Practically all document formats (source code for most programming languages, XML, JSON, HTML, etc) are tree structures, which means any algorithm that parses and traverses a generic document is going to be recursive in nature. If you do game programming, decision making and path-finding algorithms often require tree traversal, which is recursive in nature. Trees are also used extensively in storage systems, whether for representing hierarchies or storing indices.

It's important to distinguish between recursion as a syntactic feature of the programming language you're using and recursion as a concept. Technically you don't need to use syntactic recursion to do anything - low-level languages don't need syntactic recursion in the sense of a function calling itself to be turing-complete, or for that matter a concept of a function at all. But no one struggles with recursion purely as a matter of syntax - it's the concept they are having a hard time dealing with.

Just sang happy birthday over a video conference call. It was surreal.

That's ridiculous.

Recursion tickles your brain. I once spent two hours thinking about how to turn a bunch of rows in a DB result-set into a nested parent/child/sibling structure that a 3rd party JS-tree-nav we were using wanted as input. Then after all that meditation, I wrote 2 lines of code. And it worked. One of my prouder moments.

Every time I do too much nitrous I have these fleeting visions about how recursion is the secret to the universe - as the wanna-wanna-wanna rings in my ears. Then the ringing fades and I can't ever remember any details of my mind-shattering insights - just the feeling of having them.

Thanks. T-Mobile seems great. Looks like for $13 I can get enough voice minutes / text messages and data for a week.

Considering I was averaging $5-$10/trip on my old plan (w/ no data) that's a pretty good improvement.

Yeah smalltalk is a pioneering OO language, you probably will get something out of that. I was a little concerned the C++ course was really just a course in C. Of course you should have a foundation in C. The curriculum seems to be geared towards learning C type programming and then moving on to more topics suited to C++ specifically. Curriculum seems good if you want to learn C++, not everyone does nor needs to.

wat

Whipped cream cans?

I put in my first vacation request today, taking a Friday and Monday the last week of March and going to Vegas. A few minutes later I get an email that it has been rejected by my manager. I'm like "WTF?" because I know I will have plenty of vacation accrued.

Manager comes and asks to speak to me and tells me I won't have enough vacation. Now I'm really confused. Turns out he means that he doesn't think I will have "enough" vacation, and is worried about if I want to take a week or something soon after and don't have enough, so he is just going to give me the two days for free.

I love my job!!!!

this is the Universe telling you to read Douglas Hofstadter

Well usually chargers you can buy at most head shops.

Hahaha, awesome.

But obv it's standard to save whipped cream cans that you used for hot chocolate after the whipped cream is gone and there's still nitrous right?

Yeah about 1-2 good hits per can.

Once when I was waiting tables I went into the walk-in freezer and got the mother of all nitrous hits from a spent whipped cream can. The last thing I remember is my lungs hurting and thinking this is going to be good - before waking up looking at the frozen meat with a sore butt and shoulder. Amazingly no one heard my collapse.

Well... I am trying to get into databases and low-level ****. I suspect this is a big part of the problem. It is no big secret that people are getting jobs using JavaScript after opening up Notepad++ for the first time 6 months prior. Granted, they are only getting $10 to $14 per hour, but they are doing what they want.

I hate building websites so much that I take this email as a badge of honor:

Google systems have tested 10 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors....

Loops are just recursion in disguise.

is_palindrome() takes a string, tests if it is a palindrome, and returns a Boolean.

Write this using for, while, and recursion. I suspect you'll find the recursive version easiest to understand.

That's awesome! Congrats.

You wouldn't believe what I did to get vacation time for me and a handful of other employees.

hey, so i'm looking for a partner on a project with a high profit potential (sports betting stuff). i 100% know what i'm doing with this stuff, and know for a fact that there's a lot of money to be made.

i'm looking for a very talented programmer. anyway rather than spell it all out, i'll just post the ad i put up on craigslist.

i figure this **** is probably right up your guys' alley, and if not, maybe you can point me in the right direction with someone good. sorry if this is too spam-ish, just figure that one of you guys may want to get in on it. to clarify, i'm looking for a partner, not a codemonkey/employee sort of deal.

http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sof/4869512812.html

Does this bring the ringing back?

Unless you have a vision for the next Amazon, I don't see any experienced programmer working for future equity that may never be realized.

Having good management in terms of stuff like that is excellent, I know that feeling

Dave, job searching and the stress that comes with it is super hard no matter what someone's situation is and I would never intentionally trivialize that, sorry if I came across that way. I do think the topic of hiring on the basis of good tech skills vs good communication skills (i.e. racism...) is an interesting topic that I wish I could wrap my brain around though and I'd love to hear more experienced people's thoughts on that sort of thing.