edw

25 ms·

241.
by edw 15y ago
Hey guys, I was thinking about my implementation of Sass (apparently, it's not supposed to be in all caps) and came to the conclusion that it's not simple enough. I wrote a version that obviates the need for a bunch of the parentheses. You
242.
by edw 15y ago
1. It was the Java people who pooh-poohed Rails. The rest of us just got to work cloning it, sans any issues we had with it, in our favorite languages. I haven't seriously programmed in Java for almost ten years. 2. Syntactic sugar isn't
243.
by edw 15y ago
No, asshole , I was using it in the dictionary definition sense. I even took the time to look it up before I wrote my comment, because I didn't want to be accused of precisely what you're accusing me of. (And before you accuse me of conduc
244.
by edw 15y ago
I know nearly nothing about HAML, but if it's "just" syntactic sugar, then I'll stand by my statement that it's conceptually useless. Or maybe conceptually barren . HAML can very well be useful without introducing any new concepts. It's
245.
by edw 15y ago
This post is a great example of what I dislike about Ruby culture, making a big deal out of pretty simple stuff. At least the article didn't mention DSLs. This SASS thing, it seems interesting… I'm a Scheme programmer. I'd like something li
246.
by edw 15y ago
Is your time worth so little that you're wringing your hands over saving ten or twenty dollars on an iPad 2? You claim that you want one so that you can develop applications on it and make money off its users, who are "obviously willing to
247.
by edw 15y ago
I'm always struck by how down-to-earth and pragmatic Linus is, compared to a lot of the Linux peanut gallery. One thing in particular made me very happy: He sees Linux as a Unix, and not some "Unix-like" operating system. (Yes, let the lawy
248.
by edw 15y ago
That's an interesting point: a republic is by definition "by the people," so saying that it's the people's republic would constitute redundant piling-on. But since it's a lie, Mao or whoever named the country should be awarded the Goebbel
249.
by edw 15y ago
I was going to mention the etymology of "Nazi" as a protective measure against comments like yours, but I figured that it was unnecessary. Apparently not. "Socialism" is an infinitely malleable and borderline meaningless term that does noth
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by edw 15y ago
They have more than one product. Which one, in your considered opinion, BLOWS?
251.
by edw 15y ago
OK, I think I can die now, because, someone just called the military a socialistic culture, which is something I thought I'd never hear. This is even better than my friend, who was educated at University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, believi
252.
by edw 15y ago
I don't disagree that there are too many bin Laden stories, but I'd be hesitant to make any algorithmic changes based on a story that is a once-a-year magnitude event. The problem isn't that there are too many bin Laden stories: it's that t
253.
by edw 15y ago
I will grant you that people are doing interesting things in languages other than lisp, and in that in many of those situations, when the results are interesting, you see lispers smugly replicating those systems and saying, "That was easy;
254.
by edw 15y ago
The performance of the site was so poor when I signed up—and received my password—as part of a labyrinthine, ill-conceived sign-up process—that I couldn't find a way to send feedback. So I just fumed until I forgot about it. A week or so la
255.
by edw 15y ago
I've never really expected—nor do I know anyone who expects—a lack of bias from Arrington. People have been accusing him of playing favorites for a long time. I would be less upset—though it's not like I'm upset about this anyway—if he hadn
256.
by edw 15y ago
This product fails my first test: it exposes my personal information irresponsibly: http://twitter.com/edw/status/63300073005662208
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by edw 15y ago
I think CoffeeScript is easier for certain values of "easier" . My position is that there are important senses in which easier can mean harder. You know, like how worse can be better. I literally meant a lisp. I'm a big fan of mostly-funct
258.
by edw 15y ago
I agree and disagree with you. Vehemently. Most programming tasks will not require writing macros because most programming tasks amount to solving understood problems. But those programming tasks will be accomplished and made tractable an
259.
by edw 15y ago
I'm really not being that much of a hater. If I had the freedom to choose one language and use it for everything, I might not have a problem with a language that possessed the terseness of APL or Perl or Haskell or whatever. If a language
260.
by edw 15y ago
My experience stems from learning the language of the week for twenty years until getting serious about learning lisp, and coming to see that syntactic innovation at the language parser level is a waste of time. Syntactic innovation should
261.
by edw 15y ago
I've looked into CoffeeScript, and while I really like the sentiment—routing around JavaScript's warts—I fundamentally disagree with the technique employed to achieve the goal. What the world needs is less syntax, not more. Perl, Ruby, an
262.
by edw 15y ago
Seems like there are a lot of Nokia people doing a lot of rationalizing about whether Nokia's the top or bottom in their new relationship with Microsoft. Exhibit A: "In this question [Kai Öistämö of Nokia] revealed that Microsoft has actual
263.
by edw 15y ago
Well, TCO seems to work: (define (count x) (let loop ((x x) (sum 0)) (if (zero ? x) sum (loop (- x 1) (+ sum x))))) (count 100000) ; ==> 5000050000 (doesn't blow up) I'm very tempted
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by edw 15y ago
This—as well as Logo, however fond my memories of it are—are a bad idea because turtles graphics are by nature imperative : you're programming exclusively for side effects. What the world needs is an approachable version of a system like t
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by edw 15y ago
You're wrong. You're not even wrong, to be more precise. Your comments are filled with inconsistent use of terminology and drift between discussions of individual people, cultures (semi-coherent bodies of artistic, intellectual, and artisti
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by edw 15y ago
I agree. I've almost forgotten how disappointed I am that sites like HN, Reddit, and so forth don't use my up votes as signals for a collaborative filter and suggest which comments and stories I might find interesting. (And by "interesting,
267.
by edw 15y ago
Are laws purely a cultural phenomenon? Do laws have no association with morals? Your sentiments sound more like the product of an ideology and less like conclusions based on an anthropological, historical, philosophical, or any sort of
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by edw 15y ago
A lot of words that can be boiled down to this: Cloud service providers are going to be forced to compete on operational excellence, uptime, and SLAs, not on nifty features, because no one wants to be stuck with an app that's locked into a
269.
by edw 15y ago
This is slightly off topic, but the author is lucky no one snapped his PlayBook out his hands and beat him senseless with it. It's becoming increasingly rare to be able to go to a live show and not be distracted by people like the author. T
270.
by edw 15y ago
Well, Google didn't buy Wufoo; SurveyMonkey did. Based on my experience with the two companies, Wufoo seems to plain "get it" way more than SurveyMonkey does, and if I were a CxO of the latter company and if the company had some money or eq

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