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Five Dollar Programming Words
- viggity 18y agoI really do like Jeff Atwood, I think for the most part he has been beneficial to the community. But for the love of god, I wish he would stop making half of his post quotes from someone else's post. I don't mind that he gets an idea to write something based off of another person, but he could at least add something substantive to it.
- iron_ball 18y agoI see him as a sort of Reader's Digest of programming. Not sure if that's good, mind you.
- biohacker42 18y agoReader's Digest of programming is the perfect description!
- screwperman 18y agoI really do like HN, I think for the most part it has been beneficial to the community. But for the love of god, I wish half of the comments on Coding Horror submissions here would stop being the same old ad hominem attacks on Jeff's writing style. At least the HN community could add something substantive to Jeff's arguments.
- jwilliams 18y agoad hominem Is it? If he had said "this writing style is bad because Jeff uses it", perhaps.
- screwperman 18y agoAh, my bad.
- pchristensen 18y agoI think his biggest service to the community is taking great ideas from lesser well-known sources and publicizing them. I've found so many classic essays and posts because he wrote about them. He pointed me to where I can dig deeper. Also his high page rank makes his articles extremely easy to find.
- viggity 18y agoI'd like to add that Jeff didn't always write this way, most his content was his own in the earlier days. I'm not uber pissed or anything, I understand that he has a new kid and a new business to tend to and therefore his writing time has surely diminished. The word best used to describe my feelings towards his posts as of late is probably "disappointed". I'd rather see fewer, but higher quality posts.
- Hexstream 18y ago"A function is "idempotent" if the result of doing it twice (feeding the output of the first call into the second call) is exactly the same as the result of doing it once. (Or, in other words, every output of the function is idempotent under it.)" Uh?? According to this definition this wouldn't be idempotent: (defun add-one (x) (+ x 1)) CL-USER> (values (add-one 5) (add-one (add-one 5)) (= (add-one 5) (add-one (add-one 5)))) 6 7 nil edit: What the... Wikipedia seems to be agreeing with him. It seems I mixed up idempotence and referential transparency, I thought they were equivalent concepts. I'm confused...
- rgoddard 18y agoA good example of an idempotent function is the absolute value function. abs(-1) = abs(abs(-1) since both equal 1
- a-priori 18y agoHis definition of idempotence is correct. As an example, a hash table with idempotent delete would work fine if I did this: (setf h (hash-new)) (hash-insert h 'foo '(1 2 3 4)) (hash-delete h 'foo) ;;; some time later (hash-delete h 'foo) A non-idempotent implementation might complain that 'foo doesn't exist in the table.
- jcromartie 18y agoI think Jeff conveys the wrong sense of idempotence. He has somehow extracted the purely mathematical sense, while the source he quotes goes on to explain the programming angle.
- gamache 18y agoYeah, I had never heard 'idempotence' used in a mathematical sense before. I just think of that as a function hitting a fixed point.
- newt0311 18y agoMathematically: For a map m from set A to itself (it is trivially obvious why this must be the case), we have m(m(x)) = m(x) for all x in A. Unfortunately, programming is nowhere this clean (unless you happen to work with haskell...)
- extension 18y agoSciolist One who knows many things superficially; a pretender to science; a smatterer