jgg

From the article:

EA's attitude toward this -- which is actually a part of company policy, it now appears -- has been (in an anonymous quotation that I've heard repeated by multiple managers), "If they don't like it, they can work someplace else." Put up or shut up and leave: this is the core of EA's Human Resources policy. The concept of ethics or compassion or even intelligence with regard to getting the most out of one's workforce never enters the equation: if they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.

But can they?

The EA Mambo, paired with other giants such as Vivendi, Sony, and Microsoft, is rapidly either crushing or absorbing the vast majority of the business in game development. A few standalone studios that made their fortunes in previous eras -- Blizzard, Bioware, and Id come to mind -- manage to still survive, but 2004 saw the collapse of dozens of small game studios, no longer able to acquire contracts in the face of rapid and massive consolidation of game publishing companies. This is an epidemic hardly unfamiliar to anyone working in the industry. Though, of course, it is always the option of talent to go outside the industry, perhaps venturing into the booming commercial software development arena. (Read my tired attempt at sarcasm.)

What you're doing now sucks. HTML and CSS are boring to write and, IMO, are better suited to being generated by a program than being explicitly written by hand. Vanilla Javascript isn't so terrible, but what you typically do with it is boring. PHP is terrible in so many ways I don't feel like naming them, and the type of thing you do with PHP is also fantastically boring.

You need to pick a high-level language that makes implementing things easy. You don't want to be bogged down in the details of implementation. You just want to think of something and have it work, right? Get started using Python/Lisp/Ruby/Perl/Whatevermakesyouhappy. Find a language that meshes with how you think and go with it.

Don't think I'm placing too much emphasis on language choice though. The important thing is to do something you want to do. Start writing the programs you want to see written, or that you think will be the most fun to write. I think the latter is more important in your case. You seem to enjoy the "thinking of" more than the "doing" part, a preference towards which I myself am inclined.

Good luck!

Pick a language. Python is easy to learn and rewarding.

Grab a book.

Write some code!

The basic idea was:

- take a bunch of existing CS theory

- spin it into elaborate framework, supported by what is basically just a thought experiment

- rant and rave for PAGES about what a genius you are, and how much better you are than the same scientists you just plagiarized (while aligning yourself with famous scientists such as Newton).

This seems eerily similar.

For anyone interested, there was an Amazon review ( http://www.amazon.com/review/RUGSCP3XBNBUV/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per... ) that actually seemed to track down precisely what Wolfram "borrowed" from when writing his book.

Compared to some things, yes. For instance, I think the type system of Haskell (combined with its purely functional nature) is a powerful abstraction technique not present in most languages. I'd like to hear what you think is missing from Lisp that makes it less powerful than other programming languages!

It ignores Noam Chomsky and a large amount of research and development in linguistics and CS that goes way back to the 1950's.

Could you please explain? I've read some of Noam Chomsky's stuff but haven't touched his linguistic material much (I intend to though). Keep in mind if you're going to call it "Blub", it helps your point if you play by the rules of the original Blub thought experiment. Namely, you probably should provide a language which is more powerful (see my response to your last point).

Sometimes I wonder if the MIT CS department was so hot on LISP in the 1970's as a way to spite Noam Chomsky for biting the hand that feeds them (DOD research $.)

This seems like a far-out conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't know if it's true or not.

Funny, modern work on machine understanding of language is pointing more and more to the primitive "markov chain" sort of models that Chomsky rejected in the 1950s; simple experiments prove that humans don't have recursive (LISP-like) mental models of language (or anything else) -- actually, ALGOL-type languages, much closer to natural languages, are a much better match for the human brain.

So the use of recursion makes the language less powerful because it isn't close to writing a human language (recursion is pretty relevant to a lot of activities, whether you realize it or not, but I'll play along)? I think from this discussion you can ask an interesting question: if you have a language with less abstraction ability that is more intuitive to use than a competitor, is it actually more powerful? So (playing along with what you wrote, not saying I agree) is Python better than Lisp because, despite the fact that it lacks some abstraction techniques of Lisp, it is easier to write? Doesn't that whole house of cards collapse when you realize there are:

a) human languages which syntactically and semantically probably don't resemble anything ALGOL-ish

and

b) there are people like me who find Lisp much more natural than Python

Despite the fact that part of your comment sounds absolutely crazy, I think there are tidbits in there that can provoke an interesting discussion. Thanks!

2) Assuming you mean Common Lisp, it isn't purely functional. You can do imperative, OO and functional programming with Common Lisp. If anything, languages like Haskell have more right to be offended, which leads me to my next point...

3) More languages than Lisp support the functional paradigm. Yes, the submitted page is dumb in the typical Wolfram way (everything I do is an assimilation of what other people have already done but it's SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING LIKE IT BLAH BLAH BLAH), but there's no reason to get defensive about Lisp in particular.

No one is going to take Lisp away from us. Chill out!

No, I'm not.

Getting a payment from someone is very different to trying to get something for free from a company, or trying to get acquired.

You promise the company payment. The guy in the e-mail was promised continued discussion at a specific point in time. The point I'm making is that if you shortchange a company, they have more power to punish you than if they shortchange you. Thus, I don't understand this casual attitude with companies, where if you don't get a response you just "give up".

I don't understand why everybody is emailing Steve Jobs all of a sudden, and I certainly wouldn't just start sending email to CEOs of companies.

What's wrong with sending an e-mail to a CEO? I genuinely don't understand this. We saw the same thing with that prick from AT&T. Why is it so taboo to jerk the chain of the person in charge? Is their time just so valuable that they shouldn't even have to bother with the lowly proles?

Oh, right. I forgot that in the business world, words suddenly don't have any fucking meaning whatsoever. You can bet your ass that if a corporation wanted something from you (i.e., payment) in a few days, they wouldn't leisurely wait a few weeks before e-mailing you.

There seems to be this unspoken rule in the Apple world that if you happen to get an e-mail from Steve Jobs, even if he threatens to dig up your dead mother and defile her corpse, you'd better drop down on your knees and thank him for even speaking to you.

Fuck that.

No, but when he explicitly promises something, and then doesn't deliver, it's more than fair for him to e-mail until that demand is met.

http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html

Right, so that way kids can be shoved off to another magical media device, and the parents can put the exposure of the child to "offensive content" in the hands of a giant company. We saw this same thing with music, movies and video games. Same shit, different day.

Its obvious that the iPod/iPhone/iPad platform (apps) is not a distribution channel for free speech.

Then why would anyone want to use it? Where do you draw the line? Can we censor pictures of the Iraq War in the App Store under the veneer of "respect for the families"? If Apple forbids content that questions the authority of the US government and hides behind the facade of "national security", is it still okay? Where is the right spot to draw the big red moral line? I think there isn't one, and Apple will just keep moving the goalpost until people stop refusing to buy their products. When faced with someone who isn't and won't be a customer due to a moral issue, you can either convince them to change their morals, or bend over backwards to shape your content to please them. Guess which is easier? Which leads me to my next point...

From a business perspective, I understand why Apple is doing this. Agreeing with it or not is another matter, and doesn't help understand Apple's reasoning.

I know what Apple's reasoning is - build an image to sucker in the largest number of consumers. It's the same thing every other company does; they want to make money! Is there really any interesting analysis to be had talking about their reasoning?

As Apple keeps getting more and more authoritarian, I find it hilarious that the hipster demographic that Apple originally marketed to is slowly having to become more and more conservative to remain fanboys.

Ahahahaha.

To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP."

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

No idea about Gates.

I've never hired anyone, so I wouldn't know. Is the pool of MS devs really that much bigger than, say, your PHP users?

>I think you're underestimating the number of existing businesses who have .NET at their core, in which case the question is what justifies moving off of .NET? In my experience .NET can be - while not as hip - a very solid framework.

I wanted to know why you'd deploy on that platform initially. Of course if you're already fucking using it, you're probably not going to switch.

I really don't want to read an idiot F# consultant's[1] view on how every language that isn't the one he uses is dumb.

[1] For reasonably diminished values of "consultant".

Point in case, here is his list of disliked submission on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/user/jdh30/disliked/

Ignore this guy.

Grow up.

Remember, you don't major in Physics to learn which brand of concrete you need to build a bridge. Not teaching a concept because it isn't "used in industry" is a sickening corruption of what academia is supposed to be about.

See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345596

It's true. (-: I submitted the paper mostly because it's a condensed "how-to" for optimizing Common Lisp code. I think the name of the paper itself is really, really sketchy.