jpr

> will certainly wind up pissing people off/alienating people entirely

If someone else implementing a vaguely similar idea makes those people pissed off, well, it's certainly not the implementors fault.

I've had a zillion ideas only to find out that someone has already executed them. At first it somewhat pissed me off, like isn't there anything that hasn't been already done? Then I got over it and realized that you need a crapload of hard work, persuasion and elbow grease to make the ideas a product that people want to use badly enough that they pay you for it.

Can't seem to find the package on Ubuntu 10.10, do I need to enable some repository?

EDIT: Apparently it was included in the basic gdb package or something.

The company in this case is also a hospital. You just don't fuck around when people's lives are at stake.

A fitting username you have.

And now it says 11:00 am, when it's 23:25 here. Apparently quality of code didn't prevent Google from succeeding.

> It was the very first time that I used 'structured programming', a technique a friend of mine had shown to me.

Huh? How old is this guy? I thought structured programming was something that came out in the 30's or something.

It hardly matters what the laws are when politicians wipe their asses with the constitution.

Hmm, to me it says 3:00 am. Is there some localization thing going on? I'm looking at it from Finland.

> Code shouldn't be generating other code, it should be generating more structured values.

How is code not a structured value? Do you mean that instead of some properly typed AST you only have lists, symbols etc?

I have no idea what Rails actually does, but I recently wrote a web application for a school project in Common Lisp, using just libraries (Hunchentoot, LML2 and Postmodern mostly) that aren't really meant to work together in any significant way, and I can't imagine the programming of the application would've been made any easier by using any sort of "framework". And I only wrote one macro if I remember correctly. So perhaps in some sense Lisp doesn't need "rails", good libraries are enough. Anecdotal, I know.

I'm not sure what you were disagreeing with, but I have to disagree with your disagreeing because if 5/11 people crashed the thing in an hour, it's completely unusable for many people, me included.

Out of curiosity, what OS and browser? Opera on Ubuntu just displayed a big ass box of non-readable text but didn't gobble all my memory or anything.

> default scripting language for Rails

I guess I'm somewhat out of the loop when it comes to Rails, but why does something written in a scripting language need a scripting language?

It's easier than you think. Just invent something and declare it human right. Done.

studying my native language -> studying CS

Windows -> Linux

blub -> learning Lisp and Haskell

not knowing C -> knowing C

dial-up internet -> broadband

random editors -> emacs

19" and smaller monitors -> 24" monitor

Care to elaborate on the eating/lifestyle issue?

Why not just use const references as parameters? No excessive copying, immutability. Seems like a win to me.

I think Java and C++ et. al. get it wrong by overloading the . operator. On one hand it means "gimme this field of that object", and on the other hand it's "find this function in the method table of the class". These are completely different things. And it all goes downhill from this mistake.

It's rejects all the way down.

Yep. Some are in transition from "too skinny" to "too fat".

> Lack of some necessary features that other languages have (prior to 5.3, namespacing, clojures)

groan...

If "everything are files", then the whole concept of "file" is completely meaningless.

Isn't the whole "security industry" a prank gone bad?

Agreed. I believe that nuclear energy is safe and nice and dandy when properly managed, but the humankind has demonstrated with 100% certainty that it can't properly manage anything, ever. I don't want anyone to make decisions that can directly affect the health of many, many generations to come.

> I kind of assume that they're competent

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

I think it's shortsighted, naive and optimistic to expect that subsidization of "fresh produce" would produce any better results than the current system.

After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with corn or cattle when they are produced in traditional ways, ie. corn that is not optimized for yield, sacrificing it's taste, and cattle is fed on grass, not on corn (which makes it sick).

If C++ can be explained adequately with simple C code, why use C++ in the first place?

Am I the only one who is a little tired of the term "ecosystem" in the context of technology?

> Python's lexical scoping semantics are a little bit wonky and there are lots of scenarios in which the thread's stack frame is reified as an object.

Could you give an example of such a scenario? I'm having a hard time imagining what this means in code. I know that Python's scoping is a little weird, so this isn't really surprising...

Shouldn't this

    if fruit is 'apricot':

be

    if fruit == 'apricot':

?