There is a quirk (almost a bug?) in FreeBSD's qsort where it will switch to insertsort for the whole array under certain conditions, which we hit in production given how our data was arranged.
Now that they are at school, there is always an emphasis on us as parents taking an active role in reading with them and encouraging them at home.
I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.
We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
Maybe Ascii art simplified things :-). I think what tends to trip people up are things like - Where do the pedals actually live in relation to the rest of the frame? How/where does the seat attach? The front wheel? Most people know there is kind of an angled bar on the frame, but where does it go exactly?
I like to think of the bike problem. Sit down and draw a picture of a bike from memory in as much detail as you can in 2 minutes. Easy right? But it is surprisingly hard.
So not like my take when I see a pack of Tim Tams with a half-star health rating.. "Hey these things are a little healthy, looks like you need to eat a lot to get any benefit though"
I joined a big tech co and dove in to a huge unwieldy code base that had gone through the process you described above. I did a lot of reading of the code, and soon became the only one that understood it and could make big architectural changes.
But.. that is a dead-end job. There is no career path being the maintainer of a large legacy code-base. It was pretty good if you wanted to rest-and-vest, I could do whatever I wanted. But there were no great features, no demo's, no selling of the work. Even small changes were painful.
Moved to a different team where everything is new and building from scratch and suddenly opportunities open up.
(I think this was the check) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/lib/libc/st...