anc2020

Common Lisp changed the way I program because the macros open your eyes to a whole lot of code duplication that you can't avoid in other languages - this encouraged me to really work at those bits of code until they actually contain the bare minimum of boilerplate code possible.

Haskell changed the way I program because laziness can allow you to express your code in much clearer and simpler ways - this encouraged me to use more memoization.

Functional programming is definitely where we want to be in theory, so if practice permits, use it!

> Programming doesn't end, it just changes and become harder and harder.

I'd say the programming becomes easier, but then there are always harder problems than the ones that are currently within reach (eg. AI is still out of reach), but I think this is what you meant.

For me the best example of this was writing some PHP after learning Scheme and Haskell: This problem would be so much easier with a lambda keyword.

Right, but I meant generating code at compile time with macros which take code as a data structure as their input. PHP doesn't have that.

Yeah but to be fair he said you should learn a decent language from all paradigms, things like Smalltalk, Haskell, Prolog, C etc. and not specifically functional programming. He was quite specific about learning Lisp though, probably because of the metaprogramming aspect.

I am a programmer and I want to be one. Unlike "web designer", this is the first time I've come across negative feelings to the term "programmer" and I can't really see why (if you want to insult a programmer call them a code monkey).

What title would you prefer over programmer?

Firstly, mapping consonants to digits is hardly original, Derren Brown teaches the method in one of his books, and its one of the techniques used by people who do this seriously. Its also not very space efficient because all of your vowels are counted as whitespace.

Secondly, it would be a lot harder to randomly access the nth digit using your conventional method because you would also need to be counting the consonants as you go along through the sequence, rather than just +5 for every word.

1) Its a cool party trick - if you can give someone the 82nd digit of Pi in 8 seconds, they'll probably be impressed because you can't really do that using a conventional method of counting in your head through to that digit of Pi in such a short time.

2) Brain excercise - things like this will probably help keep your brain healthy.

> Personally, I find understanding concepts and composing ideas to be far more valuable.

Me too, they're not mutually exclusive! I very much take the same view about memorizing facts and have a generally poor memory. That's partly why this is cool, I still knew the first 25 digits of Pi effortlessly 2 years after doing this.

Use this to impress your friends by recalling the nth digit of Pi where n < 100

It took me four days I think, 5 words a day, and got me some beer money from my maths teacher.

Only slight relevance to HN because I'd like to think that its a cool way to hack number memory.

It works by sorting the 10 digits 0-9 by number of occurrences in the first 100 digits of Pi, and then associating each digit with the corresponding top n most commonly used letter of the English language (eg. the letter "E" is the most common English letter).

I use Linux too and this should work on both Linux and Windows.

When you start with Firefox it has File Edit View etc. followed by a separator on the top row, then the rest of the row is filled by a flexible space and a little "loading" image. Then on the row below that you have the buttons, the location bar and the search bar.

What I'm saying is it should be possible to drag the flexible space back into customize and drag the url up where it used to be. This will mean the UI is only taking up one row.

Like this: http://i41.tinypic.com/f7y9j.jpg

I don't know how to change the selection behaviour though. Personally I like having the whole URL selected but I can see it could be useful that way.

I've got everything on one line, like this:

File Edit View History Bookmarks Tools Help [Y|http://news.ycombinator.com/ *|v] [G|v| Google ]

Just drag the address bar and search to the top.

Probably only plugs it in while copying files, so no Linux distro. Would also lose its novelty factor pretty quickly with me because my desk means I have to have my PC on the right side!

It'd be interesting to see the stats on how much it affects the site's traffic!

> While I won't claim that learning these 4 skills will make you a great hacker, it seems unlikely you can become one without them.

Seconded

Read this and thought it made sense, but I'm not physicist. I'd really like to know what actual physicists make of this.

Indentation reader for Scheme:

http://www-student.cs.york.ac.uk/~anc505/code/sugar-read.scm

Some less-parenthesised forms for Scheme:

http://www-student.cs.york.ac.uk/~anc505/code/macro-sans-par...

Scheme mode for Emacs will fade out any remaining parenthesis :)

Do you think Google's Native Client could provide the ingredients for a 3.0 stew?

Because its not very hard to validate and can catch minor errors and typos. If you're a C programmer, do you also ignore warnings from the compiler?

Use your mouse to quickly highlight the text. Now you can read it as light grey on blue, which is much easier.

This is a post about JavaScript as a whole, and so I can only hope he meant "first class functions and closures". If he didn't, well that would be even more worrying.

It changed my mind too. As for only now realising that tables really are the only easy way to do it, I guess partly we've come to accept that the web is broken thanks to IE, so it doesn't stand out as odd that layout is hard with CSS.

> First-class functions - great.

The author magnificently understates how useful closures can be.

Besides this, the author has posted a single complaint about the language (one that I don't find particularly important) and then seems to act as though the language is completely unusable.

Hehe, no-one. But KDE are probably right to show a Vista knockoff. People like you and me already know its customisable, but people who use Vista might see it as a slightly nicer looking version of what they've got and be more tempted to try it.

Hang on, we haven't had 2.5 yet

> Incidentally he mentions that he's using mod_lisp

A cleverly laid decoy.

Summary: In taking this job, you will be my bitch.

University of York, UK

Ah, well this is where we differ, I'd say PHP is easy, not simple, and that Python is simple not easy.

My reason for feeling that way hinges upon Python having more available abstractions.

Scheme is an exagerated example of this. Continuations are a very simple idea, you can describe call/cc to someone without much hassle. But the implications of call/cc can be very difficult to grasp.

The closure is a lesser example of a simple, pure abstraction which allows complex code through this devious form of simplicity.

So that is (pretty much) why it is very easy to reach expert level in PHP but very very hard in Scheme.

At the end of the day, what's easier to learn: closures, or the fact that a callback (in PHP) is supplied by giving its name as a string?

Its easier to not learn something than it is to learn it :)

> I'm not sure how anyone can claim that ... could be considered easy.

PHP is Easy, and it's easier than Perl, I'd be surprised if you argue with me on that. PHP has very little to trip you up mentally (or at least that was definitely the case when it started winning). No closures, "arrays" are just hashes etc.

PHP is not hard. Actually the hardest thing about PHP could well be its dynamic variable names, like $$foo.

Neither is PHP powerful, it is extremely un-expressive when compared with just about any other modern programming language.

With PHP you _just_ use the clean wrappers on the C API, and that is also easy to do, no knowledge of C required at all. It's so easy you can pretty much write PHP apps without knowing that "4" is any different from 4.

I don't know if I've convinced you, but honestly, I would have a hard time making a language that was any easier.

Careful. The year of the Lisp is not far off.