arvid

unfortunately PSOS does not use the current version of parenscript. It is based on an older and modified version.

"Too many parentheses" is a cop out for "This language is too far out of my comfort zone." And I think that is why Lisp is not as successful as other languages.

I also think the almost mythical status of Lisp is also a hindrance. Lisp couldn't possibly live up all the hype. This leads to a backlash of common complaints ("not enough libraries", "smug lisp weenies", "bad culture", "no ide", "prefix notation is unreadable") when it does not live up to the hype or worse the user fails to grok lisp. The mythical status also leads to a higher percentage of trolls.

Back in the day, most programming was from scratch or at most trading bits of code. Lisp was great in this environment. Coding from scratch was quicker than other languages and due to its dynamic nature morphing someone else's lisp code was easy. Today most programming is patching together libraries or tools. Scripting languages are ideal for this. No one "steals" code any more, they "steal" whole libraries.

1984

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Interesting interview with Allan Klumpp (one of the programmers)

http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=ApolloComputer

the url changed http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2009/04/tail-recursion-elimi...

this one is particularly true: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html

because smart scientific people are skeptics. It is tougher to resolve one's skepticism with religious beliefs than it is resolve with atheism. Interestingly, I have known several atheist who were almost "religious" in their atheism.

This is particularly true. Conformism is particularly strong in the black community. In college I had two good black friends. Both who grew up middle class and smart Both who were ostracized for having white friends. One liked heavy metal, computers and video games. One I roomed with for a year and he was harassed about it. We would receive threatening anonymous phone calls at all hours. If I answered, they would hang up. Eventually the campus police were able to trace the calls and we found out that it involved several people.

I always disagreed article with this because I did not experience this. My high school years were not painful and were a lot of fun, even though I was labelled a nerd, curve-buster, einstein, etc.... So this is my advice from my experience. Don't try to be popular. Be friendly. Help others. Volunteer. Get Respect. Get involved in a sport. Get involved in various things with different people and you will have enough friends that being popular won't matter and no one will dare pick on you. I played soccer and later ran x-country and track, I sang, I was a scout, I was in youth fellowship, I was a mathlete and I hacked a pdp-8 in the hour between school and practice. I certainly was not popular but I was friends or at least friendly with most of the school. People knew me and I had their respect.

Don't get your hopes up too much. Petrobras is a state run monopoly and has had a number of recent corruption scandals. Even though the price of oil has risen dramatically and Brazil continues to find more reserves, production has actually dropped the last few years. This is due to the fact that a platform sank a few years ago and 5 year's ago the government decided that all new platforms should be Brazilian-built. Of course they are also behind schedule with cost over-runs. These new fields are very deep and will require new technology and significant investments. Given the government's tendency to maintain political and economic control of natural resources, it is unlikely that much external investment or technology will participate in the exploration. The benefits from these new fields is many years away probably much later than 2012.

A second for Hungerford. Lang's Algebra is a horrible book. It was the course book in grad school but we all studied from Hungerford. Hungerford is very detailed with lots of proofs and examples. Jacobson's Basic Algebra I & II is also very good but very sparse. I learned more from Jacobson but Hungerford is a great reference.

I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can check out their website: http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/

"Startups need to identify their moat and build their company around it."

Mixing up metaphors. I think you want to be inside the moat.

Just a clarification. I was referring to PG "On Lisp" as advanced. Not PCL. "On Lisp" is mostly about complex uses of macros. Hence the name -- programming "On" lisp instead of programming in lisp

"On Lisp" is excellent but is an advanced text; I would advise against it as a first book. PG's Ansi Common Lisp is pretty good and I use it as a quick reference before I go to The Common Lisp Reference.

I would suggest The Little Schemer to understand the concepts of Lisp/Scheme. I would read and digest this before any other lisp book. The book appears to be an easy read but it is not. Practical Common Lisp lives up to its name and has some very good examples/projects intermixed with lessons. Be prepared to spend a lot of time manipulating, breaking down and refactoring code (for macros use macroexpand-1). This is exactly what you need to do when you get that lost feeling. The best thing about lisp/scheme is that the interpreter is always available to you to test and environments like slime or allegro IDE which allow interaction between the editor and interpreter. Also checkout lispcast (http://www.lispcast.com/)

The post is a year old and still has "Julias Ceasar" misspelled. A Nike-ish post with culture. Live-strong.

  Struggling Societies, Urban Essence, Blue Collar Blackbone,
  Varying Lifestyles, Aspiring Contemporaries, Remote America,
  Rural Villages and Farms, Metro Fringe, American Diversity,
  Upscale America, Small-town Contentment, Affluent Suburbia

OMG? New low in PC? It's like J.Crew colors to explain geographic groups. My curiosity got the best of me and I found this explanation: http://www.tactician.com/support/mosaic_documents.asp

BS Math CMU, MA Math UPenn. Both too long ago to matter anymore. A programmer and failed mathematician. On good days, a software developer. Never a computer scientist or software engineer.

You really need to learn Math by doing it there really is no other way. Books are really just references and guides and can give you good problems to work from. Either find a friend who will study with you or get direction from a math professor.

I do not know Spivak's Calculus but his advanced books (by Publish or Perish) are excellent, So I assume his calculus book is also. Especially Calculus on Manifolds and A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry. Anyone who wants to understand calculus on higher dimensions should read Calculus on Manifolds.

If you want to learn from the masters and you have the confidence, audacity and intelligence. I would suggest Fundamentals of Abstract Analysis by Andrew Gleason and Geometry and the Imagination by David Hilbert.

Just a warning. These books are for people adept at mathematics and are willing to spend hours on a page or two. If you are not, then avoid these books.

From what I remember from Cognitive Psych class of late Bill Chase (CMU) 25 years ago. (great class because I still remember lots of it): Chess Masters divide a chess board into 6-7 patterns that fit into short term memory. They generally do not use depth first search. They usually immediately guess at 1-3 moves (most common was to look at only one move) and spend the rest of the time trying to verify the move(s). If you asked a chess master to memorize a chess board, remove the pieces then ask put them back. the chess master could always do it perfectly if the setup came from a real game. If the pieces were placed randomly, the chess master was no better than a normal person (basically could remember about 8 pieces).

from reddit: "Excellent discussion on GWT and (versus) Parenscript" http://metabang.com/unclogit/?p=190

True, but one needs to be very self-critical when self-learning and interact with others (not necessarily in the formal situation).

To me, formal education is to provide the tools and knowledge necessary to learn on one's own, outside of a formal setting. Think about it. In elementary school, 90% of learning occurs inside the classroom. In high school, maybe 60-70%. In college, maybe 20-40%. Grad school 10-20%.

Ironically, what increases during this development is the need to interact with others: colleagues, mentors and acting as a mentor to others.

CMU wins on points but they won't say what points. http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/422997...

The problem with age is that you know enough to know that you know diddly. The young, on the other hand, are ignorant of scope of their ignorance.

My HS had a PDP-8 (http://www.pdp8.net/) with line printer terminal and paper tape for storage. The programming language it had was FOCAL with a tri-branching if statement (<0, =0, >0).

Off the subject but on this site: A list of Martin Gardner Puzzle Books: Martin Gardner's Collections of "Mathematical Games" Columns http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/books/gardner.html

a lot of "Mizzou" fans in Arizona

and set theory leads to the fact that the axiom of choice is independent and unprovable. But most mathematicians accept that axiom of choice is true. The same is true for the continuum hypothesis with a smaller majority accepting that as true. Similarly most in comp sci accept that P does not equal NP. One does not need to understand turing machines to understand the concept of time and memory for computers. It is just a way of formalizing the problem. Nice to know that the problem can be formalized but not necessary to be taught. I never said that turing machines where not important. But I am equally sure that you did not formalize your algorithm into a turing machine to show that it was np-complete. The author's point is that the same is true for set theory although he likes to phrase it in a very provoking way that I wholly don't agree with. Mathematicians use the general concepts of set theory not the formal one. Comp sci/programing uses the general concepts of turing machines not the formalizations.