rtperson

The author answers the question himself in this paragraph:

> Just think of any progressive education professor who inveighs against most academic work in K-12 schools, describes academic work that involves a little memorization and practice as drill and kill, wants the world to institute unschooling and the project method en masse, has nothing but the purest P.C. contempt for the Western canon, advocates for vocational education for all but those who are truly, personally enthusiastic about academics, wants academic education to be as collaborative as possible rather than requiring students to read books, which are irrelevant to the fast-changing daily lives of students, and channeling Foucault rails against the hegemony of science and other experts. Well, such a person I would describe as an anti-intellectual intellectual. The person might well write perfectly-crafted articles with scholarly apparatus, read classics in her field, and so forth. It’s just that her opinions are unfortunately hostile to students getting knowledge (in my opinion).

The SICP, from the chapters I've read, does not rely on mathematical sophistication the way, say, Knuth does. There's a little bit of calculus, but not much. If you've had a semester of calculus, you're probably more than well prepared. If you haven't you can probably focus instead on the data structures and algorithms.

Your best bet is just to grab a Scheme interpreter and dive in.

> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively.

In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an ethical quagmire.

I take your point about holding Western governments to a higher standard -- we definitely should -- but don't assume all cultures had a similar starting point. Your average Canadian has never had to deal with the cultural memory of anything quite so devastating as the Mongol invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27).

It's CNN. This is the best they can do these days.

That scene in The Dark Knight is adapted from a storyline in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. If I recall the original, Batman's retirement makes people sufficiently nervous that a gangs of young kids dress like him and do their own crime fighting. The original Batman has to clean up after them as well.

> In the UK's example, nationalization fostered trade (the roads were all toll roads previously). In the case of the US railroads, nationalization can arguably be seen as a disaster so there are mixed results of this.

It's a mixed bag all around, this one. The railroads in the US were killed, for the most part, by the Interstate Highway system, an equally nationalized endeavor. But really, they were doomed by geographic reality. Population density in the US is such that in most parts of the country a car is an absolute requirement for every working adult. And gas is cheap enough (relative to the rest of the world) that it's cost effective to rely on trucks and airplanes to move merchandise.

If you privatized Amtrak tomorrow, you'd still see full rail service up and down the Boston-NYC-DC corridor. But running a train through "flyover" country is a waste of money from the get-go.

> whatever that means.

Let me put it this way. You're looking for a new CEO for a fashion outlet. You have two top candidates: one who has an encyclopedic knowledge of shoes, dresses, designers, and how to spot a knock-off from the genuine article. The other guy ran a very successful chain of grocery stores.

Now, on one level, selling clothes is just like selling anything else -- groceries, toothpaste, power tools. You have your marketing, your in-store experience, etc. But your grocery store guy will lack the one thing the fashion guy has: namely, an intuitive sense of what makes an otherwise rational consumer spend far too much on some shirt just because it says "Armani" on the collar. Your fashion guy knows who his customers are, who they talk to, what they read, and what motivates them to open their wallets. That does not mean the fashion guy will do a better job, but he does have a distinct competitive advantage over the grocery guy.

What happens when you don't have a guy like that at the top? Well, Apple nearly tanked after they pushed Steve Jobs out the door in 1986. Jobs' replacement, an ex-CEO of PepsiCo, simply didn't understand the Apple customer the same way Jobs did.

Hence "book people." People who understand why people buy books, and how books are different from socks and celery.

Actually, having used the interfaces to OpenGL, SDL, GLFW, and several other native C libraries, I have to say this isn't the case at all. Haskell's FFI is pretty clean, which shouldn't be too surprising, since Haskell compiles natively, and so isn't relying on some VM translation layer. The headaches you have with, say, Java's JNI simply don't happen.

The headaches you run into have more to do with getting Haskell to recognize where the relevant dev and runtime libraries are, especially on non-Unix systems where library locations are not standardized. It's possible, but you end up having to hack the Cabal package, a process that is not particularly well documented at the moment.

Another issue is simple bitrot. Many libraries in Hackage were developed by students who have no interest in maintaining their thesis work post-graduation.

Most of the time you're right. But I've done a fair bit of tinkering with Haskell's OpenGL library. Trying to get GHC to differentiate between a Float and a GLfloat inside a Vector is pretty much impossible without resorting to explicit typing. This definitely qualifies as a special case, but it's cropped up often enough as to make me a little gun shy. You don't need to explicitly type everything, just enough to give the compiler a credible hint as to what you're trying to do -- such as the last term in your vector.

The sad thing about the original article is that the writer is throwing his hands up and raging over what is really a small implementation hiccup. I kind of like that the compiler withholds judgment on whether '5' is a Float, Int, or Integer. It means that I no longer need to type ".0" after every Float.

> the facts it cites weren't new or surprising and the analysis wasn't insightful.

That I agree with. More interesting was the recent Pew study of what US citizens perceive as wealth distribution versus what it is in reality: http://baselinescenario.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-s...

It's increasingly depressing the extent to which this isn't news any more. But the truth is, it's not at all clear what, given the global economy, can or should be done about it. We could offer free education and health care to everyone, and that still wouldn't bring factory and construction jobs back.

The thing with Haskell is that it doesn't automatically coerce types the way other languages do. It uses Hindley-Milner type inference up front if you don't specify your types, but this is far from foolproof. Once it's decided you're using type Foo, you're stuck. You need explicit typing in many cases.

One of the first things you learn as a Haskell programmer is to treat type inference with suspicion.

Doesn't Warren Buffett advocate points two and three? What a socialist he must be! Either that or you're pretty good at throwing around the word "Socialist" to avoid points of view you'd rather not consider. After all, if you can build a straw man, why bother with the hard work of thinking?

Based on the evidence here, you seem to work less smart and less hard than those around you. So that means you're poor, right?

> I'd be surprised if that's an issue in Python, Ruby, or Lisp.

I'd be very surprised if there weren't similar issues in these languages, since these are all duck-typed and the topic at hand is "bugs prevented by rigorous up-front type checking." I don't have extensive experience in any of the above, so I couldn't include any examples of errors they are prone to.

I always thought that Haskell programmers provided so many math-centric examples because the language provides one of the cleanest mappings of math to code available in any language. You might as well code to the language's greatest strength.

I'm curious as to what you have in mind as a credible example in Haskell of a "buggy system over which you have little or no control." Haskell is such a marginal little language right now that it hasn't attracted the same level of programmer mediocrity as, say, Java has.

Also, the typing system tends to all but eliminate common errors in other languages -- your segfaults and NPEs and buffer overflows. Haskell tends to front-load the pain of development. If your code compiles, you can reasonably expect that any bugs in the code are due faults in your own reasoning rather than failing to accommodate some unplanned-for side-effect (like the uninitialized pointer in C). And unless you've made the mistake of locking up all your logic within the IO monad, finding and correcting these faults tends to be more straightforward, thanks to the math-like syntax.

My experience with Haskell is that, as hard a language as it is to learn, it is remarkably easy, once learned, to think in.

This is really no different from a publisher taking public domain works, putting a cover on it, and charging $12 for the paperback. There's a slight value-add for which Amazon is charging a slight price. I personally don't see the problem.

The consumer, who could roam the web and find free Mobi versions from Feedbooks.com or Gutenberg.org, decides to pay a few bucks for the app store convenience. That's their choice.

It also has what looks like a half inch of wasted margin space at the top and the right. It's shiny, but looks like a very big phone by today's standards.

Reddit is somewhat susceptible. I have no inside track on my info, but the admins seem to have built some sneaky mechanisms for dealing with problematic users. My favorite is the practice of "ghosting" accounts, where it looks to the account user like their comments, upvotes, etc. are being counted when in reality they are invisible to the rest of the community. It seems to work.

Of course, for all Reddit's antipathy toward Digg, they had the advantage of learning from Digg's mistakes.

I lived in New York for ten years (most of it in Washington Heights), and I can't agree with you enough.

Except for the home-cooked meal thing. My ex-girlfriend and I delivered an entire Thanksgiving feast to a friend's apartment when we discovered our stove had stopped working (and probably hadn't been working for months), but cooking food was a relative rarity. New York is the only place I have been where people throw birthday parties for each other in a local bar.

I had exactly the same feeling reading this. The only thing I'd add is that this is exactly the sort of clumsy FUD that the Chinese government might throw out there to cover their tracks, especially given what a diplomatic cluster-you-know-what this has become for them.

He would also have suggested a comma after "sadly," so that it's obvious that it's the writer's comment, rather than a modifier on the way Safire died.

I went to Amherst, and I think you're spot-on with the east-coast mentality. In my experience, most of the students there just got onto the law-school/grad-school/Wall-Street bus and sailed comfortably into their next gig.

It's also worth noting that Harvard used to actively encourage undergraduates to take a year off to recharge their batteries and get a better sense of life outside of college.

He was writing satirically -- see comment 23.