Is Algebra Worth It?

 My youngest is taking algebra. They are learning factoring right now. x squared + 2x + 3 stuff. It's really mind boggling. The mechanics are straight forward, but it is like following steps for how to pray to the machine. We of the unclean hand must keep the sacred plug in the socket. The generator must roar! We gently press the button of majesty, await the blazing phosphor of the night cave, it is your blessing! The light of healing. The board of keys must enter the A - D - M - I - N of glory to be able to ask the questions of the faithful.

You are learning the mechanics of breaking down an equation  to build it up again, and exercise in the mechanics of problem solving. Describing physical space mathematically is useful, and the ability to look at something complex and break it down into more simple parts is important. I do that on a daily basis. I mean fuck, you should look at a replacer function for replacing values in a string. Input masks are fucking irritating. I still haven't spent the time to get the cursor back in the right place. That's really irritating to the user. Although there are worse things. I have a friend who's writing a CBOR reader/writer to move things with the least footprint possible. Half the time it makes no sense what he's talking about, but it's cool stuff. I got excited about designing an input box. I'm shitty with the looks, but I'm finally learning how to bake in functionality with vanilla ts. I really admire the fucking effort people put in to make good looking controls that do interesting things. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but so many brilliant libraries are fucking huge, they are built for the wild west, the land of browser wars, having to rewrite everything to target to the specific browser. 

Thank you for the standards that have made it so that I can read MDN documentation and have what I want to do work in multiple places like yelling in a universal language. I'm still doing cave paintings, but I'm going back to my algebra, my mechanics, to learn from the ground up before I pick up the tools again. This way I'll know a lot more about how to evaluate frameworks, and learn ways to get things done when the framework comes up short.