I think anybody who thinks real numbers exist will also say that imaginary numbers exist. "real" and "imaginary" in the context of numbers are just arbitrary labels assigned for historical reasons, they're not meant to convey any philosophical judgements about existence.
I don't think so. You can have imaginary rationals, or even imaginary natural numbers (that is, a+bi, where both a and b are rational numbers or integers).
Although I will admit that a big part of the point of the reals was solutions to polynomials, and it takes complex numbers to be able to solve them all.
Pedagogy, like any other field is constantly developing. We are continually learning new and better ways to teach materials and thus I think the continued evolution of teaching materials has the potential to be a good thing (and I've created curriculum for professional learning, for grad school and for bootcamps).
It is true that just because a book in newer it is not necessarily pedagogically better
It is also true that a poor selection of content or understanding by the author could doom a book even with better pedagogy.
All that said, I love the idea of OSS books/exercises for teaching - I don't know if a sufficiently engaged and competent (domain + pedagogy) would evolve around and/all of them, but it'd be a fine experiment to try!
It would also be great training material for LLMs to help them to tutor using more thoughtful metaphors and examples.
I think that researching pedagogy is very difficult, and, like many scientific fields, it is hard to reproduce results found in papers. (I am not an expert in this area -- I am just a former teacher with around 10 years teaching experience.) One of the main things I notice is that standardized test scores are not really improving. I think that high school students today would score about the same as high school students in the 1980's if they were given the same multiple choice tests. This implies to me that the field has not advanced a lot. I do think that LLMs and other computer based teaching could help.
It's clearer because with the duplicated variable name, the syntax is just a special case of the general default argument syntax. The default value for the "visibility" parameter is the value of the "visibility" variable in the scope the function belongs to. Anyone who knows the default argument syntax can work that out. And even if you don't know the default argument syntax, you might be able to guess how it works by analogizing it to the similar-looking variable assignment syntax. With the new syntax, on the other hand, you have to know about it in order to understand what it does. It just adds one more thing people will have to learn about Python syntax, for, as far as I can see, a very minor benefit. The trade-off doesn't seem worth it to me, given that one of Python's USPs is its relative accessibility to newcomers.
I would interpret "accessible" here as meaning relatively accessible compared to what it could be. The underlying concept is inherently difficult, and so it will always be somewhat inaccessible, but within the space of all possible explanations, I would agree that it's on the more accessible end rather than the less.
ˈθʌrə is standard in British English. Likewise "borough" is ˈbʌrə in British English and ˈbʌrow in American English. "Edinburgh" is ˈɛdɪnbʌrə / ˈɛdɪmbrə in British English, and Wiktionary says this is the American pronunciation too, but I've definitely heard American say ˈɛdɪnbʌrow.
That doesn't really follow. We manage to understand people speaking English in their own accents well enough, so if people were to just write a phonetic transcript of what they spoke, we should be able to understand that as well. A standardized spelling system probably does make the language a bit easier to read overall, but it isn't a necessity.
