100% agree: "Sets wtf is a set

    I’m not really going to get into set theory because I don’t know anything about it tbqh, but maybe it’s worth a mention? Wonder what would be a really good succinct but not wrong explanation of set theory…"

"Sets wtf is a set", I don't know Bob, what is grammar, and why doesn't your article have any? "lol, sets? one of the fundamental sections of mathematics? Wut r those lel? who cares I do js, fuck learning about what's going on when you're here to write a trite, subpar blog post on the subject".

"...but maybe it's worth a mention?" I don't know, is literally one of the fundamental parts of the underlying mathematics important? "...Wonder what would be a really good succinct but not wrong explanation of set theory…" Here's an idea, take literally 3 seconds, or the minimal amount of effort you have and search 'introduction to set theory'. I can almost guarantee that there is a plethora of fantastic resources out there. Hell, Wikipedia is often more than adequate for mathematics topics. Also, unless you're a James Joyce tier writer, this stream of consciousness style writing is exceedingly poor form and should be avoided. It adds nothing and really only serves to tell the reader how little you know.

It seems to me that the entire point of the post was "let's write a bare-bones program to create pretty pictures out of fractals", and that's what the post does.

Set theory is fantastically interesting and powerful, but it's very very understandable to brush past it so we can get to the pretty pictures.

Also, if I do actually "take 3 seconds and search 'introduction to set theory'" I find two (excellent)[0] resources that, in their introductory paragraphs alone, rival the largest sections of the original link.

[0] - https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Set_Theory/Introduction

[0] - http://www.math.toronto.edu/weiss/set_theory.pdf

It's just a way of saying:

" Outside the scope of this textbook".

The similar phrase, frequent in textbooks:

" Proof left as an exercise to the reader"

was no less annoying. But you can't cover everything and given that sets aren't important to this post, indeed covering them would be more confusing since the Javascript Set.prototype has things such as being finite, and strict equality.

This article is not an introduction to the mandelbrot set, it's "how to draw the mandelbrot set in javascript". I read this as a programming blog post not a mathematics blog post and enjoyed it.

Maybe this is how kids talk these days. There is going to be some Millenial who is a math genius an order of magnitude beyond Terry Tao, and what if they talk like this? Such things are going to happen. I find it amusing.

This is not how kids talk these days. Source: I have a kid.

It seems to be how 20something frontend developers talk though (source: work with a few of them and saw their talk slides).

Yeah, that weird blog-speak or whatever did seem a bit put on / affected. Does this http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/03/guide-to-new-teen-slang.html reflect your experience? It's NY specific I guess.

I live overseas and have no reason to talk to kids so I'm totally out of touch with the "real Millenial generation". But I want to know how they talk and think about things. I tried "Millenials react to X" videos but nothing is that useful.

I don't think it's very good if I'm totally out of touch or don't understand the Millenial generation at all. For me ( 80s so that's a gen-x-er? ) Millenials really seem like an important generation to understand...they grew up with the internet. They act differently online to the rest of us ( more privacy conscious and so on ). It's frustrating that I can't find any first-hand sources or interviews to see how they think and talk -- except things that are parody / making fun of it...or just theorizing by "experts".

The other side of this is about inspiration. I realized that as I got older, my "generational culture" ( for want of a better word ) is basically static. The shows, the movies, the music, the people, the scene, the lifepaths, opinions and ideas of peers...it's all just...so familiar. So boringly familiar. And unchanging.

Only the new generations can really have some vibrance, vitality and fresh inspiration, in a very organic sense, in my opinion. Not just fresh relative to another, static generational culture, but somehow inherently fresh and inspiring. It really makes me appreciate youth in a way I didn't before. As, if nothing else, this source of a fresh way of looking at the world. I also think that youth who grew up in the last 17 years, have to be some of the most interesting, or somehow express the most faithful reflections our world right now -- because they were literally shaped by all the huge changes that Earth has gone through -- Western political changes, rise of China, terrorism, social media. So I think to some extent if people want to understand the world we live in now, we have to understand the generation that grew up shaped by it.

I'm 22, so I suppose I'm a 'kid' to some here, and I stopped reading this very quickly. It's not funny, clever, or well-written.

The text certainly didn't inspire me to enable JS so I could see the code or images.

I think it's a shame we seem to be veering ever more toward 'code is all that matters' (or whatever the product of work is if not code) - not writing, presentation, communication, etc. - the result is rampant unprofessionalism.

It also may be neat for some people, but I found it went way too much into details of the technology used to draw the fractal, rather than the fractal itself. There's a good 10 image and 20 box of code just to initialize Canvas. Do you really need to explain how to dedicate a paragraph on how to set an id on an html element and another on how to grab the element in javascript?

Oh and I can't believe Github still does that whole "hosted with <3" bullshit.

I thought that was the point: the author was sharing their learning process for using canvas to draw in the browser through the goal of generating fractal images. Thus enabling others to start from zero and get to a point of drawing sets on canvas elements.

Indeed. I consider myself to be a curmudgeonly old man and even I don't understand why all the other curmudgeons seem to have got out their pitchforks over this.

Granted, I only skimmed the article and read in detail the parts that were most interesting to me, but I thought it was decent. Certainly, as an introduction - something to whet the appetite and spark interest on a subject in someone who knows nothing about it - I thought it did a great job, and I liked the fact the author has bothered to link to other resources if you want to take things further.

Sure, the writing style isn't going to be to everyone's taste, but, whatever.

On the plus side, at least he didn't litter the piece with childish 'meme' images, as seems to be in vogue these days.

Although I'm a huge fan of tech writing for beginners, in this case I could have done with 0.6 as much whimsy.

It's funny because it's called "Mandlewat", right?

At first I hated it and didn't get why the looooong introduction to the canvas (that part could have been much shorter). But eventually I think he did a great job explaining the subject to people with close to zero knowledge, and his step by step approach, while tedious, was awesome.