twopoint718

Have used roundup for a while. Pretty bare-bones, but it is being used in a helpdesk-type environment rather than bug tracking. It has e-mail, command line, and web interfaces to suit different types of users.

That's exactly my point (which was not meant to be a technical suggestion for implementation, I'm aware of the problems involved). My question is basically, "where do e-books and DRM leave the public library?"

In my opinion, if a business model requires there to be no public libraries or a substantially reduced public library, then so much the worse for the business model. There needs to be an analogue between the world where books are things made of paper and the world where books are made of bits.

What about a system where you can download an e-book for free, read it for a month or so with the option of rolling-over that term for another month -- as long as someone else hasn't requested it? In short, where are libraries going to be in this?

I know it is somewhat jargony, but FLOSS, meaning Free (Libre) and Open Source Software, is what "Free software" means. I think that makes clear that OSS is FLOSS without the "FL." The problem (often mentioned) is that "free" is overloaded in English.

I feel like Clojure is CL-flavored Scheme. It's a lisp-1 with strong emphasis put on functional style (except for TCO, but loop/recur are a good explicit workaround) and then it has tons of libraries (via Java) and CL-style macros and more syntaxy things (literal maps, vectors, etc). It's sorta a cool lispy mashup.

I had a similar experience, if I'm interpreting this correctly, in that my university was pretty focused on the theory. I had a lot of CS courses where we were programming in "pen and paper." When we did write code it was often Java, but you knew that any course you took the professor could swap in pretty much anything else. Depending on the AI professor, you'd work in Java or Scheme. Compilers class could be a C-like language targeting MIPS with the compiler written using C++ or it could be a Java-like language targeting the JVM with the compiler in Java (though I should say these "little languages" were probably very similar because they were a very small subset of their respective languages).

I think if you learn the fundamentals (and that often means having a good grasp on C) it shouldn't be too terrifying to pick up at decent grasp on lots of languages.

Or as Guile http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html suggests, if you're going to add a scripting/extension language to a program, they have a way of growing in size and complexity; just use guile.

Emacs actually does have a kind of DSL for dates. In diary-mode you can specify recurring dates like this:

    %%(diary-anniversary 14 2 1940) Dad turns %d

Check out the EmacsWiki for more examples: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/DiaryMode#toc11

That is really an amazing article, I couldn't agree more.

I get the irony, but I suppose here it is so that the ads all get a second hit.

Clojure would look something like this:

    (defstruct mountain :name :latitude :longitude :country) 
    (struct mountain "Zugspitze" 47.416667 10.983333 "Germany")

That's exactly it. You can't trademark "Sci-Fi" and you can't trademark "Domain", but these things, you can.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/07/sci-fi-channel-reboot...

Same here, but it seems that all the Lisp and functional action happens on the coasts.

Or a new programming language that we haven't even heard of. Emacs (and Vi(m)) will typically have a programming editing mode long before v 1.0 of the lang comes out (c.f. clojure-mode)

I think it depends on the category, but yes, I can see that.

In the more technical areas there are the predictable "Here's a homework question that I'm sort of trying to disguise" and, what the article said, "How do I build a forum." What Yahoo Answers REALLY needs is an FAQ in each category. But, I suppose, then it would be IRC.

I still love that motto.

I've seen something like this in restaurants before. They have some kind of grease-pencil/crayon and a black-backed pane of glass that's lit with UV light. It glows pretty nicely. Does anyone know what this is exactly?

I was thinking the same thing. Having a chain of signed PGP keys that allow you to infer the trustworthiness of someone hasn't seemed to catch on. Are there any good articles on how this idea developed, and succeeded and or failed (I'm sure it was/is in very heavy use somewhere or among some group)? Heck I once went to a signing party... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party

or http://dodgit.com/

On #5, the code isn't doing what the author may think:

     (let [#^int a 2
           #^int b 3]
       (cons a b))

a and b are not hinted to be primitive types. Type hinting is purely for objects. Use hinting to make it clear to the compiler what sort of objects you are passing into something (e.g. a constructor that takes a String). If there is confusion, clojure will do reflection.

The right thing to do in this case, is the second thing that the author mentions:

   (let [a (int 2)
         b (int 3)]
     (cons a b))

a way to see that a and b are really primitive is:

    (let [x (int 5)]
      (.shortValue #^Integer x)) ; exception: "can't type hint primitive..."

There's a post on the mailing list that goes over this much better than I did (and where I drew the examples): http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

I understand that this is really beside the point, that the author finds type hinting syntax unattractive, but I just wanted to clear up confusion (if there was any).

EDIT: clarity

Textbooks are indispensable for really getting the material down, but I've found it much easier to read lectures.

Feynman has great examples of this type of work: "The Character of Physical Law" or "The Feynman Lectures on Computation" are both excellent. I've found that these books walk somewhere between textbook and popular science book. Easy to read but all the while teaching you the material.

I've found this type of work to be the crucial link between pop. science and a textbook. You learn enough that you can find your footing when you're in a textbook and and also the inspiration to actually read it.

International Editions have saved me a ton of money. I found out about this when I started seeing big C++ books (the really thick ones) around the lab with a big sticker on it that read "not for sale in the USA" (or similar). These are the same book, though usually a bit more cheaply made, but at sometimes 10-20% of the price.

Maybe it also has something to do with the Rubber Duck method: http://lists.ethernal.org/oldarchives/cantlug-0211/msg00174....

I agree completely, the notion of the "inscrutable macro" is often brought up when arguing against a Lisp. Whatever one could say is dangerous about macros, I would argue, could be said equally of functions.

But I think something else is going on here, the Inscrutable Macro idea serves as a kind of "intuition pump" (of the negative kind) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump to try and demonstrate macros' badness. If someone isn't very familiar with lisp they'll offer code that's merely not idiomatic, when someone is familiar with lisp then they'll offer up something that's just downright pathological, and I'll be the first to admit, that a pathological macro can be really pathological. At this point, equipped with their executable straw man, they claim "this macro is insane, and so macros are unmanageable."

If the measure for unmanageability is just that impossible-to-understand code can be written in some language then the IOCCC means C shouldn't be used.

In practice the Inscrutable Macro just isn't written.

It looks like this is good news for anything that targets the JVM though, as it looks like the path to Dalvik bytecode is:

    .java -> [javac] -,-> .class -> [dx] -> .dex
                     /
    ??? ------------'

Has anyone done this, with Clojure, for example?

It does. What would be the rationale for this? Is it just that they didn't want the standard Java ME runtime?

This is exactly what I thought: "Uh, what if the reason Twitter developers aren't using Twitter much is because they are developing Twitter?"

That could very well be the case: http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...

    "Whether stability is such a good thing in a downturn,
    though, is a different matter. A decade ago Andrew Oswald
    of Warwick University argued that owning your own home
    makes you more reluctant to move, so labour markets tend
    to become more rigid as home ownership increases. He
    claimed that increases in the level of home ownership
    (though not necessarily the level itself) are associated
    with rises in unemployment. Ireland, Greece and Spain all
    saw large increases in home ownership in the 1980s and
    1990s, and had relatively high unemployment. America and
    Switzerland had stable ownership rates, and escaped the
    long-term rise in joblessness."

I've used this: http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/ It puts out pretty good looking resumes and it can render to HTML, plain text, or PDF. It is written in Java and uses Apache FOP http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

I work in a university department and the situation is exactly the opposite. When a new grad student arrives, they're set up with a Scientific Linux machine (a version of RHEL modified by CERN and Fermilab).

My feeling is that a lot of science jobs will rely on the Linux/Unix platform. Backend or system control type things are on Linux and a lot of personal computers are OS X.