jgg

Ah, you're right, that is bad. I had only looked at the raw PDF.

What do you mean? Is it the layout, the content or something else? I was able to read it just fine.

Snap has me very excited! My installation of cabal is rather messed up on my machine, so I haven't been able to install it yet.

Not trying to start a language war, but I'm so torn. I'm debating on a language to start a big project in, and although Common Lisp is probably my first choice, Haskell seems like it's gaining a lot of momentum (which means awesome libraries).

Mostly stuff for my own personal use inside Emacs; i.e., nothing important. I'm sure that disqualifies me from ever speaking of it again, but there are objective reasons I dislike it (the dead horse of "lack of lexical scoping" comes to mind).

Probably the biggest reason I don't like it, however, is this: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WhyDoesElispSuck#toc4

(-:

Hell, even Scheme would be a lot nicer than Emacs Lisp. Actually, if I could even get Yi ( http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yi ) to work, I'd use that. Elisp sucks.

>...but that seems rather irresponsible.

Imagine that.

The photo with the kids at the beach having to use a plastic pool was particularly striking.

Aphex Twin does a lot of interesting stuff. I recall watching an interview with him where he claimed that not only does he make all his music using software, but he actually has written some programs which compose the music for him. Can't remember where I saw that though.

I know the term "hacker" has been brutally misused for years, but damn.

When you think about a lot of what's considered to be "cool" math, logic or CS stuff, there's a good chance that Martin Gardner helped introduce it to people. He's up there with Douglas Hofstadter on my list of people who taught me that those things could be interesting (and even beautiful), even if most schools taught them to me as a disconnected set of silly rules to memorize for a multiple-choice test.

I just brought out the quote because I thought it was relevant. I never said I agreed with it 100%.

I know everyone's read it 100 times already, but:

Like the creators of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them. Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++. The good languages have been those that were designed for their own creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp.

From here: http://www.paulgraham.com/javacover.html

>I'm a bit upset with this because I doubt that they could remember anything from those tests but I felt I could remember them for months.

On one Calculus test I had, I didn't study or do any of the homework and pulled a ~90% score. When talking to someone who got a perfect 100%, he casually informed me that he forgot how to integrate between tests. I was shocked to hear this, but apparently it's the norm.

From his writing, I never got the feeling that Dijkstra himself hated programming, just that he hated most of the languages and ideas people used. Can you point to a particular essay that echoes this attitude, or is that just based on the (correct) observation that he was more a theorist, and they tend to scoff at the lowly programmer?

This is just ridiculous. I have already seen enough Apple fanboy bullshit on Hacker News to last a lifetime, but this crosses the threshold from "obsessive" into "seriously fucking irritating".

:)

Was it Dijkstra that advocated writing everything in assembly, or am I thinking of someone else? I know he was big on formally verifying the correctness of programs, but I thought I remember him saying that for implementation purposes, he advocated assembly. Or was that more of a "if you can't write it in assembly, you don't understand all the parts" deal? It seems he hated FORTRAN, APL, BASIC, and PL/1, and only later did he like LISP.

I wonder what he would have thought of Haskell. Standardization started in the 80's, so he would have been alive when it was being ironed out. A search in the EWD archives didn't reveal anything though.

EDIT:

http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12x...

It appears that he liked functional languages...

>The clarity and economy of expression that the language of functional programming permits is often very impressive, and, but for human inertia, functional programming can be expected to have a brilliant future, the more so because today's computers admit quite efficient implementations of functional programming languages.

but...

>In particular, evaluating a functional program with pen and paper is a pain in the neck!

So he spends the rest of the paper talking about the predicate calculus and relation calculus.

Of course no one is "forcing" you (at least in the general sense) to use Facebook. My point was that if you want a social networking site, switching to some fair, free and open alternative doesn't go as smoothly as switchin.g something like an e-mail client or a text editor

I never knew that I had to have a bachelors to be an "intellectual". I refused to join Mensa even after I could have, does that make me "not gifted"?

I think the truth of the matter lies somewhere in the uninteresting middle, and depends a lot on what school you go to, how much you apply yourself, and other factors. Sure, you might learn some things from school. Are these really things that you couldn't learn outside of university walls?

Just saying that a Bachelor's degree isn't helpful to a lot of people doesn't make anyone anti-intellectual, any more than advocating squeaking through a 4 year degree in "University Studies" at Podunk U. makes you pro-intellectual. Being an intellectual is a mindset. A Bachelors degree is a piece of paper that says you did whatever was required to get said piece of paper, which probably didn't involve being an intellectual 100% of the time. That what's I was trying to get at with my unfortunately-snarky-sounding Mensa comment above.

I realize that this part of your comment might actually have been suggesting that if we declare a Bachelors as useless for a bunch of people, the masses will decide that stupidity is an acceptable state of being. If that's the case, I think we should be honest and admit that someone squeezing through a crap degree just because everyone says he should isn't going to cure him of whatever problem allows him to look at learning and knowledge with such a care-free attitude. If someone isn't capable of understanding why learning is important or, worse, is looking for any excuse they can find to tear down people who value education, there's a problem that's being ignored way before they even think about entering college.

If I were lucky enough to be on the West coast, I'd be there. )-:

>Regardless of if the software if free, you do have the choice to use it.

The problem with something like Facebook, though, is that choosing to use a platform other than Facebook for Facebook's purposes is useless, because the entire purpose of a "social network" site is lost unless a large number of people are using it. Most people aren't very technical, so they're going to use one networking site, and guess what? It's going to be what "everyone else" is using.

So, sure, you still have the choice to use it. But it's not like, say, system software, in that if you don't like the primary offering, you can go implement your own or download somebody else's.

That being said, I've still found absolutely no reason to use Facebook, and as such I don't.

(Note that this response isn't an attack on you specifically, it's just my feelings towards this argument in general)

Where is the magical divide between "art" and "science" in the field? Do the adherents of either side even know what they're defending?

If I know what a finite state machine is and how to apply it, does that make me "scientific"?

If I hack together a web application in Scheme, instead of some Mathemagical, Dijkstra-approved language, does that make me an "artist"?

Why can't people just accept that you need some of both to be a good programmer?

Reading (of course), Go, cycling, recreational math.

That was one section where I felt that the divide was somewhat odd. Also, the part where he says (referring to the managers)

    ...and wants to connect with society and contribute.

really threw me off.

Hmm, even Digg wasn't too keen on your asshole comments, what made you think Hacker News would tolerate you? For someone who's so concerned with productivity, you sure seem to have a lot of time to waste telling other people what they should do.

It's so evil that I'm wondering why nobody has done it yet.

>All that to say schools that teach both do exists.

I'm not sure what you're trying to rebuke here. Did I say they didn't?

>Agreed for most schools but I will say that there are good schools that still teach at that level. The Intro to Programming Languages class at Northwestern has you implement an interpreter for a variety of different languages, including a variant of Scheme called Typed PLAI.

Very nice!

Ah. My bad. (-:

I think the implication that was people who program in just PHP are bad.