pcmonk

I actually wrote one of those a while back:

http://pcmonk.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/phlisped-an-experimen...

That's a good matrix for early-to-mid stage programmers. My only issue with it would be that it doesn't go high enough. I'm a level 3 in probably half of those categories, and I don't feel that I'm anywhere close to being a master programmer. I have a long way to go before I'll consider myself even a decent programmer. I think someone could be a 3 in nearly all of these categories without being particularly extraordinary.

As great as Project Euler is for learning programming, it's definitely not a good measure of most aspects of programming. It measures a very small subset of the required skills. This chart gives a more complete and nuanced way of evaluating one's skills.

"To believe that “plain language” programming would be more readable is Utopian, even intellectually dishonest. For if I say, “a linear function of a variable is equal to the sum of a constant and of the product of a variable and a second constant”, it is incontestably English but completely obscure, even incomprehensible!"

This is absolutely true. People try to make a big deal out of natural language for both programming and simply interacting with computers. Rarely would a natural language description be easier, clearer, or faster than a more precise interface (e.g. text for programming, mouse/keyboard for interacing with computers).

I disagree about insertions and deletions. The primary purpose of colors should be to communicate more information without us having to think about. Having standard color schemes is really helpful. If every service uses different insertion/deletion colors, that's just more headache for us.

Additionally, to me, red deletion doesn't mean "this was a bad action". It means "this was bad code, so we're crossing it out". Semantically, that makes total sense to me. Red is bad old code, green is new good code. Seeing a lot of red in code means the same to me as seeing a lot of red on a marked up copy of an essay (as long as it wasn't a professor who marked it up) -- I've identified a lot of improvements to make.

Probably random noise. Or else because it kind of tracks the arc of github going mainstream, and Java and Javascript are very mainstream.

In the world of tiling window managers, there are a few well-known names. Xmonad is one of them.

When I was thirteen, the dad of one of my friends was a software engineer, and he liked to tell stories about cool stuff he did (he's a pentester). I was interested, so he gave me a CD (7 or 8 years old, though I didn't know it) of Knoppix Linux and told me to look up C tutorials. I did, and was hooked. I still remember my first two compiler errors: (1) the version of gcc was old enough that it required a newline at the end of the file, which I had neglected, and (2) I thought I understood the idea of a function well enough to know that it didn't really matter what you called them, as long as you were consistent; turns out "main" is actually an important name.

So, we're going to try to stabilize our currency by tying it to every failing currency across the world? If bitcoin gets mainly used as a replacement for hyper-inflationary currencies, then it's never going to be a viable alternative to an even marginally strong currency. Tying all the world's currencies together isn't going to create a stronger currency than, e.g., the dollar or the euro. Thus, those who work in dollars or euros have economic reasons not to use bitcoins.

Why? Why wouldn't they just sell it immediately, for all the reasons why merchants sell it now?

Using bitcoin for transactions won't help if the merchants immediately sell them (all the buying pressure just got cancelled out). Right now, bitcoin is only held in large quantities for speculation. Speculation, as he notes, has only worked for temporary bubbles.

He says that bitcoin isn't failing, but I don't see how it can succeed. It doesn't make short-term economic sense for individuals to either mine or buy bitcoins, so it seems like the only people buying bitcoin will be those who are either speculating or who simply want it to succeed. That doesn't seem sustainable. Can anyone explain why he is still optimistic about bitcoin?

"Articulate programming" looks a lot like Lisp macros to me. Can anyone explain the difference?

That fixed it. Thanks.

Sweet, I didn't realize that. Sadly, the result flashes on and off and is essentially unusable for me (either in xterm or a TTY on Slackware64 14.0). I can tell it's working, though.

This also seems to work over ssh, though, which is cool.

For the record, that's not pure terminal (it opens up another window). This project works even in a bare vterm. I'd love to see this work over ssh.

There's no other word in English to say "from the US". When I'm talking with my Latino friends who don't like me using the word "American", I just say "gringo". But that obviously doesn't work well for general usage.

When I discovered it, I hadn't done much interactive fiction for a while, and for some reasons it really got to me. I had no idea what to expect going in, and the experience of exploring it, even if it's essentially non-interactive, was enlightening. I loved when it occurred to me to type "fly". It was liberating. Like all good art, the experience it gave me is essentially incommunicable.

For much art, the beauty is in the skillful use of a medium to say something that one wouldn't have expected to be able to say in that medium. Art is all about limitations. Photorealistic paintings are impressive because they aren't photographs. A well-written poem may be beautiful because it conjures up vivid images in the mind. In my opinion, text adventures can have a certain beauty because they tell a story in simple words (for a great example, see Photopia).

Of course, good art uses the limitations to its advantage. Most paintings aren't photorealistic because they're not trying to be photos -- they're trying to say something through their limitations. A good book or a good text adventure allows each reader to create their own images in their mind.

So, is there 'cheating' in art? Of course not. It's simply a change of medium. If you want to cross photographs with painting, go right ahead. That's a new medium, capable of saying new things. Don't pretend it's the old medium, and don't try to compare it directly to works in the old medium. But also don't dismiss it as 'cheating'. Take everything for what it is, not for how it compares to what you were expecting.

It was likely downvoted since it was essentially content-free. While we can all appreciate a good joke, they lower the signal-to-noise ratio. This isn't reddit. A good comment says something constructive about the product.

In the comments, someone gave this nice solution:

  for x in range(100):
    print x%3/2*'Fizz'+x%5/4*'Buzz' or x+1

Ah, well, that doesn't look so bad. I'll have to play around with it. Thanks.

When I learned about D3.js this was exactly what I wanted to use it for. Unfortunately, I've mostly avoided web development, so my javascript isn't good enough to quickly code anything up. You're right, though, this could be a good excuse to learn it.

(by the way, I love your blog)

I don't think that qualifies as "commonly-accepted". It's not a bad format (for trees -- it doesn't look like it generalizes to DAGs or graphs), but a standard format might be helpful.

Yeah, I guess that's essentially the ideal.

You can represent trees with matrices. You can also represent trees with bits. What we want is a representation that is both easy to read and easy to write.

This would be wonderful. Certainly a prerequisite for any serious programming.

This is certainly an important point. There seems to be more potential in mind mapping software than I thought, but extensibility is key.

To be clear, the syntax I suggested in the article is what I want it to look like, not what I want to type in. It takes far too long to type most of those (except the lisp-style one).

I would like to be able to add nodes as easily as I add cards in Trello.

Those graphs are good examples of what I want to be able to make. You bring up a critically important point, though: I must be able to write graphs very quickly, easily, and painlessly, like I use vim to write text or Trello for to-do lists. Most tree-editing interfaces are painfully inefficient and slow to use (and are far too reliant on the mouse).

I'd never really seriously considered mind mapping software, and while I still don't think it's exactly what I want, it actually seems to have more potential than it seemed. Thanks for the suggestion.