"...while average scores have declined for everyone, boys are doing much worse."
And it definitely doesn't get the resources.
"But in contrast with efforts to encourage girls in math and science, which have helped shrink their achievement gap with boys, little attention or effort has been focused on improving boys’ reading skills."
We've been framing things the same way for decades now, ignoring boys. Maybe it is time to frame things differently.
Unless you also think that boys just don't matter.
Sadly, it sounds like you're all-in on making it a zero sum, us-vs.-them game. If not declaring a war over resources in the Education-Industrial Complex, then condemning anyone who's reluctant to take up arms for your cause.
Vs. over 100 years ago, my grandmother taught 1st through 8th grades. In a one-room schoolhouse. Rural community - maybe 1% of parents had been to college. Annual per-student funding was $50-ish. Grandma's teaching credentials were, at best, a 2-year "Normal School" degree. The School District's Superintendent was probably 1/4 time or less, with zero administrative staff.
And yet the vast majority of grandma's students left her 8th grade able to read at that level. Old family stories from the era have neither "boys vs. girls" subtexts, nor zero-sum worldviews.
Yeah, Swift looks like someone started trying to port a C# syntax onto an esoteric object-orientated C-dialect (similar to Vala and GObject) then at the last moment noticed Rust 1.0 had been released, tried to patch on some Rust features, and hit release before they were done.
It's quite deceptive. Rust seems initially hard to learn, but it's a small language, so you arrive at competency faster than you might think. Swift seems initially easy to learn, but is a broad language with lots of edge-cases, so you're never quite as competent as you think you are, or need to be
Ehh I have been using Swift from the beginning and I disagree with you and the parent. Swift was "good" before the addition of property wrappers and the result builder syntax. That's when lots of the weird "features" started being bolted on.
Before that it just felt like what a modern OO language with reference and value types, type safety, some very light "not truly functional but nice to have" functional programming features, and readable, "normal", dot syntax would be like. The language was basically complete at that point for the purposes of writing UI apps with the existing Apple frameworks.
> ... some of the more recent complex language features
This isn't recent. The approach that Swift took had this path locked in from the start, the (d)evolution towards ever more spiraling complexity was inevitable from the initial choices.
And this is not 20/20 hindsight, a lot of people, including yours truly, were saying that fron the very start. As an example, take initialization:
The swift book has 16 rules and 14 pages just on object initialization. Chris replied in the comments: "the complexity is necessary for <feature we want> and thus simplicity must give way". My reply: "the <feature you want> is incompatible with simplicity and thus must give way".
→ Swift included all of Smalltalk's keyword message syntax as a special case of a special case of the method call syntax.
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Rob Rix:
“Swift is a crescendo of special cases stopping just short of the general; the result is complexity in the semantics, complexity in the behaviour (i.e. bugs), and complexity in use (i.e. workarounds).”
> I was excited and optimistic about transitioning to Swift in the Swift 3 days. By Swift 5 I was pining for Objective-C.
Swift 5 isn't that bad (even if result builders felt like a weird hack to make SwiftUI possible and I dislike SwiftUI massively) but around that point the language has increasingly made me think "why did this happen when Java already existed?"
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