dirtyvagabond

I don't think that's the message. The message was, "You said you couldn't imagine a scenario where this goes well. Here's one simple example of it going well, and that was easy to think of."

Author here. Definitely didn't mean to condescend. I used "like a European" as short-hand for, "this is an employee who regularly chooses to take off far more time than the typical American would generally be expected to take off".

This section of the article was meant to speak directly to management who may be concerned about using this policy due to this particular possibility. The following text is attempting to answer their concerns. That is, don't worry so much about this. Rather, judge the results, as you should be anyway.

Fantastic article. And nice demo of Drake. ;-)

nice post! i'd like to make a shameless plug for Drake, a 'make for data' workflow tool. https://github.com/Factual/drake

I felt like he was sharing a lot more than that, especially his personal story. So I found it a very worthwhile read.

Also: "Make me re-think the “wisdom” of the food pyramid, “low fat” diets, and nutrition vs. exercise"

I thought that was a great one liner... I believe that critical, honest analysis of official dietary guidelines and conventional wisdom around our diet is something we need much more of.

Agreed. I found the author's account inspiring, and I immediately recognized his overall outline as a basic paleo diet. I started down a paleo path fairly recently, hoping to lose a few pounds. I surprised myself by realizing after about a week that I was feeling so much better physically, I wasn't very concerned anymore about a relatively few extra pounds.

FWIW, it was the "Latest in Paleo" podcast that inspired me to try a paleo approach to life. It's one of the overall best podcasts I've had the pleasure of subscribing to: http://www.latestinpaleo.com/podcast/

I wish Dion all the best with making his success long term!

another way to look at this is: we didn't say to ourselves, "we have to be on the JVM, so which JVM language should we use"?

instead we asked, "what would be a great language for this project?" and arrived at Clojure based on the above.

There is love for R in Drake! As of about an hour ago: https://github.com/Factual/drake/commit/f63dd2630ca3e5e4a6a6...

Make was a major inspiration for us, and so Drake definitely has similarities to Make. The differences you list were non-trivial to us in usefulness, but of course YMMV. Also, there are a lot of (possibly) interesting future features described in the spec.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bF-OKNLIG10v_lMes_m4yyaJ...

Thanks jonmarkgo, good point. Not intending to ostracize anyone here, in fact quite the opposite. Working hard to be as inclusive as we possibly can. 8-]

well, i'd agree it's "entertaining"! had fun reading that, thanks.

I'll be there. Would be great to see the group get going again!

Yeah, I can see what you mean. My question to ZoFreX and those in a similar situation: what specific questions / fears / needs should be addressed in a good Part 2?

Thanks swannodette, very kind of you! Yes, it's been cool to layer Clojure on top of legacy Java and see what happens. Some want to sell Clojure as "a better Java than Java"... I think that may be a little misguided. But, there are certain situations where it rings true... at least IMHO

Fair point! Well, Google will show you plenty of results for, e.g. "clojure vs. scala". What I was going for wasn't an unfair comparison, but rather a kind of bridge for Java / JVM folks who might be interested in a more functional way of life. My bad if I missed the mark. :-/