If journals are going to rehash Facebook blah word by word, syllable by syllable, then I expect free endorsements to alternatives. It's a small public service in exchange for the free content and clicks.
158 karma · joined May 10, 2015
As for partial matching, other languages give warnings or errors if a pattern doesn't cover all cases.
If you wanted to, for example, write a new experimental functional language and reuse part of the Rust compiler to sanity check and generate the executable, then tail-recursion would be really important.
Similarly, if you create something like a parser generator and don't have tail recursion optimization, then you are going to run out of stack space before being able to parse stuff. So, there are lots of practical applications that depend on this feature too.
It's like the story of the janitors that were too good: the executives decide that the office is clean enough, so they cut the budget and then everythings a mess... that's just how bureaucracy works at the high level.
I have no problem with the science, probably taken out of context. But the article, wow! If you can determine education outcomes at age five, then why do you even go through the motions of K-12.