2 ms·
You'd think a reasonable math person--or any halfway competent programmer--would not throw in a call to math.random in the definition of their monoid! (Or, real
by tikhonj 14y ago
You'd think a reasonable math person--or any halfway competent programmer--would not throw in a call to math.random in the definition of their monoid! (Or, really, deep inside any normal code at all.) He deserved to be fired just for that :P.
Anyhow, if we're playing at parables, chances are Harry took advantage of the job market and his knowledge and went to work for a trading shop or hedge fund, making more money than any developer at the old company (150,000, really?) and not being hated for knowing stuff. And hopefully using a nicer language like Haskell or OCaml.
Also, if Dick's a "systems" programmer, chances are his code would actually be written in C, longer than the monoid Scala code and harder to read. It would be fast though.
- groby_b 14y agoIf Dick is a systems programmer, his code would look pretty much exactly like Harry's, except he'd call it a priority queue of capacity 1. And he'd have written it over breakfast, while Harry was still pondering the side problem of analytically defining the volume of his bath tub :)
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago> You'd think a reasonable math person--or any halfway competent programmer--would not throw in a call to math.random in the definition of their monoid! Yeah, just pick 'a'; if he was in the database before 'b' chances are that he is the one who has been with the company for the longest time; and if that's a lie then is just as random as math.random anyway.
- darkrho 14y agoI agreed. Harry can't talk about a Monoid with that non well-defined function. He deserved to be fired :D (As I pointed out in my comment: http://www.jasq.org/2/post/2013/01/the-mathematician-the-monoid.html/#comment417394799938876705 http://www.jasq.org/2/post/2013/01/the-mathematician-the-mon...)