PieSquared

First of all, was writing in that arrogant, insulting tone really necessary? Please. There's no need to insult your readers.

And also: "Unlike my friends at the Free Software Foundation, I believe in choice. At the end of the day though, I’ll keep my iPhone." Is that sarcasm? I found it hard to tell, but I hope it is. Because if anything, 'choice' doesn't come into play anywhere in the iPhone... And his mistrust of Google is completely irrational (well, given his trust of Apple or whatever other smartphone company; personally, I think I would avoid putting all my assets into one company anyway.)

So yeah. Either I failed to understand this article and it was supposed to be funny or a parody, or this is just slightly pointless and aggresive... (Although upon further investigation, if this is by you, unalone, I suppose that's just your writing style, given your profile.)

Either you're talking about something different, or I don't understand what's wrong with such an approach... Although maybe 'experimental' is a better title?

...correction: On rereading your post a few more times, I realize it's just a misconception of terminology.

  (loop for x from 1 to 10
        as x-sqr = (* x x)
        collect x-sqr)

Although it is rather low on facts and high on hype.

(Although I personally do like the placement, and the author clearly does too; just from Google's perspective, isn't it bad that the user doesn't immediately notice it?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fractions

Here's an example. Take, for example, this class declaration:

  (defclass dog (animal)
    ((size :accessor dog-size)
     (name :accessor dog-name :init-form "Fido")))

  '(defclass dog (animal) ...)

  public class Dog {
    int size;
    String name = "Fido";
  }

What the previous poster was saying is that once other languages have a code representation that is easy to work with as data, and can manipulate that code as data at compile-time to produce complex macros, then Lisp might fade. (At least that's how I understood it, correct me if I'm wrong.)

(Completely serious question, btw, not snarky remark.)

Hmm, I don't know about you, but about 4-5 years ago when I learned to type it was pretty difficult. It took me a year school classes to get up to 40 wpm.

And recently I started re-learning how to type - using Colemak. But it's significantly easier, since I already have the finger dexterity. Either way, I think that your exaggeration is slightly too much. For younger kids, learning to type isn't as easy as you seem to think it is. (And most of the people I know now only type at 50, maybe 60 wpm - had they been taught earlier and with more emphasis, they might be typing at 100 or 120.)

(Speaking of Lisp, I recently discovered reader macros. I mean, damn, but they're awesome.)

Please, paraphrase people correctly :P

~Hacker News Guidelines.

Seriously, calm down. It might be old, but I still found it interesting to reread. Don't like it, don't read it.

Chrome isn't going to be an OS; but it might be a desktop environment. Which, to the casual user, is the same thing.

However, the topic bugs me slightly - "Why XXX is problematic" is a completely milked out topic, just like "Why XXX is better than YYY", "XXX is Awesome", etc. Although your writing isn't bad, I prefer to read about new ideas, not criticisms of already-existing products (although criticisms well deserved in some cases).

Don't take this too personally, of course - writing about new things is much harder, and even writing about things which may have not been summarized as concisely or not been put in your words is good practice.

"We had the technology running for about a month [detecting who was online] before we had the user interface visible"

Rolling out a feature that gradually seems like a great method.

It's better than C++, it's worse than C. Better than Perl, maybe worse than Python. It's the perfect language for classes which don't actually teach you how to program, but instead just teach you how to be a code monkey.

As andreyf said, if you're serious, high school may not teach you much, or so says my own experience. I am only in tenth grade right now, but by my estimation I probably already know the whole CS curriculum at my school (although supposedly it is advanced). I suppose this is actually a very good thing, because I've learned how to learn on my own.

I'm sort of in the same boat as you. What I've noticed though, is that many (if not most) of the students don't really want to learn CS, they just want to take the course. Sad but true.