winxordie

Of course there's nothing wrong with it. If you love it though, you'll probably wind up a deviation or two better than the average.

Just understand what you love. If programming is a day job, then that's just that. I happen to love this craft.

I think this is more of a meta-level write-up on being a programmer. For example, take a look at the "How to Know When to Apply Fancy Computer Science" and "How to Talk to Non-Engineers" sections.

Furthermore, I think that the writing is clear and succinct. I wish I had this when I started programming.

It's interesting to note that GPGPU is on there but general-purpose computation on FPGAs isn't. It amazes me how the former has taken so much mindshare.

You bring up an interesting phenomenon: well-developed open source environments share a cut-throat competitive culture for consumer mindshare rather similarly to multinational corporations. I wonder if there is a scalability issue in human management where at some point we go berserk trying to define the mainstream.

This type of lazy thinking in generalizations amazes me. Inefficient at what? If you mean it's inefficient for rapid decision making, I wholeheartedly agree. If you mean inefficient at allowing people to express themselves, I disagree.

I highly encourage playing with Processing.js: http://processingjs.org/ It's art on a web browser!

Atomo's an EDSL in Haskell. I think I'd have to consider Clojure to be a Java dialect by your definition.

Money is exchanged for the rite of ceremonial burial. Most people don't just stick their mum into the ground - it's just not "proper". Social factors require a ritual market in most societies.

You should read more of Chazelle or Tarjan; they both write their maths very clearly.

Thank you for an amazing series of faux-blog posts on this thread. As an undergraduate hoping to enter math research, these have been invaluable to me. I can't upvote you enough times.

For me at least that's equivalent to solving the knapsack problem, but hey - if it's easy for you to optimize usage of absurd amounts of capital according to your utility function, then more power to you.

Turning programmers into mathematicians and mathematicians into programmers.

I don't know about that. The first wave of 20th century combinatorialists were pretty much all Hungarians (Bollobas, Erdos, Polya, Szekeres). Hungary hasn't stopped churning them out either.

I'd argue that their education system's just fine.

"This better way of computing variance goes back to a 1962 paper by B. P. Welford and is presented in Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Vol 2, page 232, 3rd edition. Although this solution has been known for decades, not enough people know about it."

I'd generalize that to "although Knuth's book has been around for decades, not enough people have read it yet."

They disappeared off the face of the earth about 5 years apart, but other than that, I can't tell too much of a difference. :)