jpr

> LET* indicates bad code, something I never understood

Neither did I, until I encountered something along the lines of:

    (let* ((foo ...)

           (foo ...)

           (foo ...)

           (foo ...)

           (foo ...)

           (foo ...)

           (foo ...))

        ...)

I haven't had my second cup of morning coffee yet, so I'm having trouble imagining how one would bootstrap that kind of thing.

"Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EW...

"What", exactly. If Go really deleted the object pointed to by x when you set x to nil, it would be seriously flawed (though I wouldn't actually be surprised if this was the case, it certainly is flawed in many other ways).

Yep.

I still haven't read one article from Go aficionados that hasn't made me bang my head against a wall repeatedly.

It seems that Rails is doing something horribly wrong. There should be no reason to use code-generating or evaluate strings in a dynamic language.

I have to admit that I'm not an expert on reader macros, so I can't say for sure. Your example seems to map some already used characters, so it wouldn't be a pure extension of the reader. I guess you could make a readtable that recognizes that syntax and transforms it to the tree-like semantics. FWIW, I don't find it more readable than the standard notation. Maybe I have become too accustomed to the standard CL-notation.

One thing that bothers me about Python's whitespace, is that it is not possible automatically indent Python code that has lost its indentation for some reason or another. You have to go back and read the original source to restore the meaning of the program even though you already have all the visible tokens it contains.

"too many parenthesis" is simply a flag that someone is speaking only about his initial emotional response, not out of actual use experience or measurement. When you actually count parenthesis in equivalent programs in C (or C-like syntax) and Lisp, they are almost exactly the same. When you include the ;.->*& -stuff, C starts to lose because `foo.bar();´ in C becomes simply `(bar foo)´ in Lisp.

Except you can, just use reader macros.

If not pressing libel charges makes you suspicious, doesn't not pressing sexual assault charges make you suspicious too?

If I were the guy and not guilty, I wouldn't really be all too interested in pressing charges, mostly because I'm too lazy and I hate lawyers etc.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, actually I would probably end pressing charges, but my initial reaction would be that of "wtf, why do I have to summon lawyers because someone did something stupid", with emphasis on the wtf.

Otherwise a good idea, but setting the cap in terms of cash can introduce an incentive to buy the cheapest possible beer so that you can buy more of it. I would suggest capping the total volume of alcohol instead.

Treadmills suck of course, if you are on treadmill, you could more easily and cheaply just go outside to walk/jog/run and get some fresh air while you're at it.

But I disagree on "lifting weights". I suppose that most people don't see it as a sport, which "lifting weights" isn't, granted. But things like powerlifting, olympic weightlifting, strongman competitions are sports, which require coordination, skills and progress to become better at them. And they can be very satisfying since they are so easily measurable. I still remember the first time I dead-lifted twice my body-weight. Feels good man.

Two hours is kinda long if you aren't used to it. I would try to build it up from half an hour or so upwards. Though I don't believe in any (continuous) exercise that is supposed to take more than an hour or so.

I would like to know why the designer thinks this is better than a normal bike that is properly outfitted for commuting purposes.

I still don't see why the variable names can't be interned somehow by the parser. This would mean that a global variable would be just a pointer in to the table, and "lookup" would be just dereferencing that pointer. AFAICT, this is how symbols and packages work in Common Lisp.

> Calling a function like "chr", which is looked up dynamically

Shouldn't that be just one or two pointer-dereferences? Or is Python putting globals in hash-table and looking them up each and every time?

FYI, in EU (or at least in Finland), euros are rounded to the nearest five cents and stores don't even accept the 1 and 2 cent coins, even though they exist.

So what's your advice for the time being? Keep on shoving cheeseburgers to our pieholes?

Here's a wood compiler:

http://bitbucket.org/cheery/z_woodc/overview

As a person who knows what a wm is and just tried out Unity, I can confirm this on my part.

That's funny, I don't consider twiddling bits of some gizmo programming.

Yet another one brainwashed by the breakfast mafia.

Great, more ammo for the helmet-nazis.

> I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad.

Some people, sometimes, probably. Me, most of the time, no. Currently I'd be rather happy if I were a janitor. Easy going job, lot's of time to think about neat stuff, no major stress and stable income. Or at least that's how I think it would be, reality might differ.

Well, pointers have fixed size, random structures may be arbitrarily big and involve a crapload of copying.

Even if that happened to work correctly (which I don't believe), you would still be missing a bunch of macro-related stuff that makes CL the programmable programming language it is, and Python isn't:

-reader-macros

-symbol-macros

-compiler-macros

-macrolet

-symbol-macrolet

EDIT: Fixed layout

A link for the lazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

Would be consistent with the tendency of majority of programmers to select the crummiest possible language because some platform that necessitates its use fluked into popularity.

It baffles my mind that Javascript isn't hated on more.