My mother is an accountant. In the process of becoming an accountant, my mother learned to divide the world into two kinds of people: People who get debits and credits, and people who don't. You can simplify this to: People who pass first semester accounting, and people who drop it.

No one fails first-semester accounting, except maybe the very, very lazy. You have to be really obstinate to fail Accounting Principles I, because what normally happens is, the people who've spent the first four weeks of the semester patiently explaining to their instructors that MY BANK DOESN'T DO IT THIS WAY, or (this was a personal favorite of mine) THE SMALL BUSINESS FOR WHICH I DO PENNY-ANTE BOOKKEEPING DOESN'T DO IT THIS WAY; the people inevitably concluding with the plaintive wail, "WHY ARE YOU DOING IT THIS WAY, WHEN THIS WAY IS SO CONFUSING!!!"--anyway, those people?

They drop out. They're anal-retentive enough at least to contemplate being accountants, which generally means they're also anal-retentive enough to memorize the drop dates and get out of Dodge on time, if Dodge ain't guaranteeing them an "A."

I have taken the long way around again just to reach the simple point that, with computer programming, and the mathematics that provide the framework for computer programming, either you get recursion, or you don't.

And you know, maybe you would have got recursion if only you'd watched more Sesame Street.

No, really.

Posted by Ilyka at April 14, 2005 09:34 AM in navel gazing