Homunculiheaded

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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
Whenever I introduce people to functional programming, I always list the standard benefits you'll hear and then put emphasis on powerful abstraction being the most important feature that makes fp worth learning. Common Lisp is great becaus
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
First off, even removing line breaks it is still verbose. I can't think of another language that's even close. Even C++ would give you a shorter version. Far more important though is how much stuff is in that one line of code that needs to
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
While I think this article makes some decent points, I have to say that in all the recent discussion around the value of a phd and whether or not the system is broken the only really strong defenders of the way things are have been those wh
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
But for common lisp emacs+slime is the way to go. This is similar to writing .NET in anything but visual studio, or java without eclipse or intelliJ. Of course you can do these things, but it's very likely you'll find some frustration. Of c
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I currently work in Higher-ed and I'm really excited to see what the long term effects of things like OCW and the Khan academy are going to have on education. The simplest benefit is mediocre teachers will have a harder time hiding their i
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I think your premise, "that we can't all be creative freaks... but we can all work really really hard" is not actually true. Dig up the biographies of any of the people you listed and you'll find that they devoted enormous amounts of time
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
Sorry for the late reply (was a bit busy today), wanting to preserve a bit of my anonymity, I essentially found a position fusing both my previous master's subject area and my programming skills (in academia). Since it actually pays less t
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I didn't start until I was 25, after doing an undergrad in english and a master's in a completely non-technical field. I didn't really think I could become a "real" programmer just that I could learn enough to automate some things. I loved
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
this is where package management is great. The user that will enter their root password to win $$$ is also the user who is way less likely to open up a config file and add an untrusted repo. Not to mention the benefit of automatic software
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
As someone who has spend a fair amount of time with Haskell, Scheme, Common Lisp etc, can someone give me some insight into what's really exciting about Scala? There seem to be a lot of people I respect using it, but most of the articles I
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I've always had a bizarre idea that it would be awesome to apply for some low level data entry job at a low-tech company with no programming staff. Then automate the task and get loads of work done while not actually being at the office, re
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
In general I find that if you ask "Ah, but can smalltalk do Y?" the answer is yes, and better than what's considered standard elsewhere and also 5-30 years earlier. Whenever smalltalk comes up I'm always surprised that I don't use it more o
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I'm pretty comfortable with functional programming, but have never touched Scala, and after a quick skim through I can get a pretty good sense of what's going on in most of the problems. The beauty of functional programming is that there i
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
The problem with this argument is that it's one of the key reasons most lispers like lisp and where the language draws many of it's strengths. You're essentially writing an AST, which gives you lots of flexibility and makes things like adv
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
While I don't use Haskell that often to solve problems, I have a lot of interest in the language. I've given talks on why Haskell is important to groups of very average, very 'real world' programmers and it is precisely because of that tha
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
This question seems to be pulled straight from the classic 'Fermi estimate' [1]. However I have to say these are actually very useful in quickly assessing options given limited information. I remember doing something like this when discus
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
The Little/Seasoned Schemer books where the first programming/technical books that when I finished them I had that same feeling you get when you finish a good novel. Land of Lisp is the first book I've picked up since then that's given me
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I just started learning Prolog recently and I strongly agree with it's status as being 'underrated'. One thing I've found worth noting is the increasing interest semantic web technologies with no noticeable uptick in the interest in logic p
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
not to be overly nit-picky but I think you're using 'nonplused' to mean the opposite of what it does. The word means to be bewildered or at a loss for words, in this context you seem to be saying that Steve Jobs would be 'unfazed' or 'unim
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I have the smaller kindle and I've been pleasantly surprised by the number of technical ebooks that read nicely on it (they have to be .mobi though as pdf are not nearly as pleasant). I've also found that I now prefer ebooks on my laptop f
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
"Disbelievers in genius are hereby invited to prove their point by sitting down and creating an equally great work of art. You have until 2020 to comply. Any takers?" This is conflating the claim that expertise can be acquired in 10,000 hou
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
To be fair 'Social Text', the journal Sokal submitted his article to was not peer reviewed at the time, so it's not really a good representation of consensus of the academic community in that area. Additionally similar hoaxes (cited at the
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
It's also very important to note alcohol is one of the very few chemicals where withdraw can actually kill you. If you currently drink heavy and are thinking of quitting cold turkey or cutting it out from your day entirely definitely consul
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
There was even a study of this. Some, but very few, alcoholics have been able to stop at 'just a few'. But it turns out that after a decade members of that group either relapsed or became entirely abstinent. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I know that since 'the good parts' it's almost become the ironic t-shirt of the programming world, but I really love JavaScript, here's some of my reasoning: 1. By now everyone knows of JavaScript's functional features, which I must admit a
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
>1. Being able (or expected) to enjoy your work is a relatively new thing in human society. I don't know how true this is, one of Marx's key criticism of Capitalism was the idea that, under capitalism, workers were alienated from their
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
As for reddit's size compared to digg here's the infographic: http://i.imgur.com/jiHka.png you can google around and find other sites that go into greater detail on this. And they currently have 5 engineers (believe this is their entire
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I worked for a company that did a lot of DARPA/DoD work, there were plenty of amazingly bright people who spent all of their time making things to make the military better. Sure many were for defense, and often found uses outside of the mil
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by Homunculiheaded 16y ago
I have a master's and have also taken all the prereqs for, and am halfway through a 2nd master's. Even if I had paid for all this, all of my education would not have come close to 100k (I know this has been addressed in other comments). A