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Pythagorean Triplets and other exercises require additional knowledge

Open mohmad-null opened this issue 3 years ago • 15 comments

There are a considerable number of exercises that appear to require some degree of domain knowledge / expertise to solve, and don't do anything to fill in the gaps. Often tracks have labelled these as "easy"!

The Exercism About page states:

"Exercism exists to help as many people as possible attain fluency in any programming language they want. Programming skills can be source of great fun and a route to social mobility and we want to help people regardless of their backgrounds or their motivations. "

Exercises with problem descriptions that require domain expertise/knowledge do the exact opposite of that, creating frustration for those who lack a background in that area.

Examples:

  • https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/issues/1902 - how do you generate them effectively?
  • https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/blob/main/exercises/react/description.md - What's a "Reactive system"?
  • https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/tree/main/exercises/complex-numbers - I don't even understand the first line of the description!
  • https://exercism.org/tracks/python/exercises/scale-generator - tries to explain it but is still no idea what it really wants
  • https://github.com/exercism/problem-specifications/blob/main/exercises/nucleotide-codons/description.md

I can see why these exercises may be appealing to those with that knowledge, but to those of us whose expertise lies elsewhere, they shouldn't be mixed in with the general pool of exercises where folks may stumble upon them, see they're "easy" and then start doubting their competence when they don't even understand the question (it will feed imposter syndrome and related issues). I'd instead suggest putting them in some other pool where folks who want to do this sort of thing can hunt them out. Or simplify them to the level that domain expertise is not required.

mohmad-null avatar Dec 26 '21 19:12 mohmad-null