fp

To be fair: That is actually #1 in the list.

It's a commercial project, so yes, people are willing to pay to see it. They had more than a million visitors in 2009 [1].

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatur_Wunderland (German language link)

"Man builds" is not quite correct. The airport is part of the largest model railway in the world [1]. The thing is build by a rather large team with ten years worth of experience in building high-end models.

If you ever come to northern Germany, I absolutely recommend a visit!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniatur_Wunderland

Haskell (GHC at least) has lightweight user-level threads, similar to Erlang.

Please, please, pretty please: If you use charts, choose a sensible type of chart to illustrate your point.

A pie chart is simply wrong for representing a comparison of benchmark results. A bar chart would be the correct type, in this case.

Can you talk about the metric(s) by which they measure productivity? I would appreciate it.

I think Clojure is not a simple language. The reason is, that you have to learn about 1) Lisp, 2) Clojure's approach to concurrency (immutable data structures + reference types) and 3) the JVM. These are all fairly complex systems on their own. The combination of them is what makes Clojure interesting, and, in my opinion, you can't leave one out and still have a great language.

Depending on your knowledge, this may make it a bad choice as a first language because it's so much to learn at once. You could be better off, to start by learning something more similar to what you already know (possibly Python/Django or Ruby/Rails for web programming).

That said, Clojure is learnable, of course. It may just take more time. If it feels right to you, then go for it. Enthusiasm about the tools will help your learning. And either way, it's not like you are making a mistake.

Could you elaborate, please? Or point me to a discussion of the issues with said functions? Thanks!

Priceless! Thank you for making my day.

I hope this will be included in future Shoes versions. Shoes is already awesome for making (portable!) retro-games. This will add another great deal of retro-ness. ;)

Who can do numbers 3, 5 and 8 in six minutes? I guess they will make you a Better Programmer (tm), but will consume slightly more time. Or does the article claim to make me a Better Programmer by just letting me know how to become a Better Programmer?

On the positive side: I like the idea of automatic uglification of "bad" code.

No matter what you do and how you do it: most likely it will work for some people and won't work for others. If you do what just works for you, that's probably sufficient to be successful.

As merrick33 pointed out, it will not hurt to listen to people like 37signals or Joel Spolsky and be inspired by their best ideas. Just don't blame them if goes wrong for you.

For games, Hamburg (Germany) is great. Probably slightly more expensive than Berlin, but at least as great in terms of public transportation and culture.

Nuclear power is not an option. There are about three companies in the world that have the know-how to build a nuclear power plant. And they are already at the limit of their building-capacity.

Also, some people argue that the nuclear fuel resources are rather limited and will support even the existing plants for less than 100 years. For a significant reduction (10%-20%. No idea if that is enough to fight global warming) of CO2 emissions, it would be necessary to build at least three times as many nuclear plants as there are today.

I also thought, that these small "test" assignments might be a trick to get (some part of) the work for free.

In ten hours for free plus ten hours at five per cent, times the number of eager programmers, you can get a lot of footwork done.

> Not likely though, since then they'd offer to pay more than the minimum wage

The minimum wage could be helpful to get applications only from a certain type of programmers: Those who don't mind a low salary and care more about the Lisp experience and learning new things. I myself would probably like to have that kind of people on my team.

If anyone here takes the job, please let us know how it goes. ;-)

I'd also recommend Ruby and suggest you take a look at Shoes (http://shoooes.net/) which makes it very easy to code GUI-apps with all sorts of fun-stuff in them like animations, downloading data from the web, videos.

The most important part in teaching a 13 year old programming is to let him have fun and a give him a sense of achievement. The rest will come.

Why? It's often a good idea to google for an answer. See the second result for "number of gas stations in the us", for example:

http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-gas-stations-us-1995...

If you want the candidate to show his reasoning abilities by making good guesses based on reasonable assumptions, you should tell him to do so beforehand.

A very important point is comprehensibility of any voice and readability of all the text in your video. Some demo videos I've seen are not too great at these.

The joke wasn't too bad, was it?

  or, you can just do like others and learn rails or python.

I suggest learning Ruby, not Rails. Unless you know Ruby, you will not be able to really understand how Rails works. Ruby is way more than just Rails.

One could argue, that "raw foodism" isn't really technology. In your example the technology would be "fire" or "cooking".

"Wishful thinking" is a great technique to produce clear and concise code. I use it whenever possible. It's absolutely recommendable!

I don't recall if PG used the term, but Gerald Sussman uses it in the SICP video lectures.

The long compilation time is due to the optimization options. Without optimization it compiles in a few seconds.

Yet, the macros leave plenty of space for optimization. See the size of your executable compared to the unoptimized one of qwph above.

"Like Perl, C++ is a swiss army chainsaw of a programming language. Unlike Perl, it's got all the blades simultaneously and permanently cast in a fixed half-open position. Don't turn it on."

Priceless.

At least one, considering that PG wrote he used vi.

Apart from that, I think an 'easy' editor would help beginners. I you know neither Emacs nor Lisp, Emacs is quite a tough beast.

He said "All English-speaking countries are in top 10", not "All countries in the top 10 are english-speaking".

I want to master the way of the Lisp Jedi.

  "These are your father's parentheses. Elegant weapons, for a more ... civilized age."

http://xkcd.com/297/

Yes, the price on Amazon is just insane. I printed the pdf, which worked quite well.

Absolutely!

But although SICP teaches you a great deal about Lisp techniques, it doesn't teach Common Lisp. Abelson and Sussman use Scheme. If you are aware of the differences, it should be no problem, though.

This has been written 10k times here: The video lectures are great, the book is great (It's also free on the internet)! If you don't depend on Common Lisp, this is probably the best Lisp (and programming in genereal) introduction out there. As a follow-up, Paul Graham's "On Lisp" is a great choice.

At 1,000,000 items you have 20 (in the best case, at least) levels of recursion. I can assure you, your stack space is more than sufficient for that.

Also, you only have to push a handful of pointers to the stack, which doesn't seem to be expensive to me.