ericssmith

10 ms·

31.
by ericssmith 11y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I was interested to see they credit Paul Hudak's "Haskell School of Expression" for inspiration. I will have to take a fresh look at that given my newfound appreciation of HTDP (due to stumbling
32.
by ericssmith 11y ago
How to Design Programs 2E http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ This book is much more than the intro to programming that it appears to be. It is a foundational approach for producing robust programs,
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by ericssmith 11y ago
"I loved the hieroglyph page; I think that functional programming failed for years as an engineering discipline because of the culture of that style of code." I don't quite follow your observation, but if you are suggesting t
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Here is the first program I ever entered into a computer. 1 8 + A 5 + 0 0 + 6 5 + 0 1 + 8 5 + F A + A 9 + 0 0 + 8 5 + F B + 4 C + 4 F + 1 C I remember how much like some kind
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by ericssmith 11y ago
I am 53 and started programming in 1977. I feel EXACTLY the same as you.
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by ericssmith 11y ago
"If you haven't watched a 12 year old play Minecraft, you need to do so. It's the ultimate fantasy universe, and the way you combine elements to make something new is very analogous to programming in the vanilla game." W
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by ericssmith 11y ago
I have used Scala for building business solutions since 2012. I had been maintaining PHP and Rails systems of 50k to 150k LOC prior to the switch. I still have to maintain PHP and Rails systems. The move to Scala was driven by the need for
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LA Schools demand refund for iPads(latimes.com)
10 points by ericssmith 11y ago|7 comments
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by ericssmith 11y ago
What timing. I'm currently reading "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" by M. Mitchell Waldrop. And when I got to the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference this weekend, I went a
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by ericssmith 12y ago
"A software monoculture at least gives reviewers a fighting chance of spotting issues with software that might affect the validity of results." If I understand it correctly, this observation shows just what a short distance we&#x2
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by ericssmith 12y ago
Why is he interested in programming? It must seem cool to him for some reason. I'd try to tap into that in order to find a direction to go in. And for a 14 year old, it would be helpful to find some heroes. Without the cool and the her
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by ericssmith 12y ago
Yes. Continuing beyond monads to learn about category theory is mostly because it is interesting. It is definitely not a prerequisite. The historical relationship is that Eugenio Moggi wrote a paper in 1988 "Computational lambda-calcul
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by ericssmith 12y ago
The following two books are a fascinating look at Heaviside's contributions and extraordinary life: http://www.amazon.com/Maxwellians-Cornell-History-Science/dp... http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Heav
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by ericssmith 12y ago
If you want an actual introduction to the topic, "Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories" by Lawvere and Schanuel is the right choice.
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by ericssmith 12y ago
Since I have painstakingly gone through the series of proofs in Landau's book, I feel I need to weigh in here. On the surface, this book does appear to start from sets and convincingly proceed up to real numbers etc. It's interest
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by ericssmith 12y ago
Warning: These are not beginner books. "Learning Java" http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001805/index.ht... seems to be a decent review of the language and ecosystem, although it doesn't
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by ericssmith 12y ago
"why hang on to a dead word?" Because it doesn't refer to a key. It's more of a identifier. It would be considerably more confusing to substitute whatever key you think it should be. Cmd? Alt? Opt? Esc? When I see "
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by ericssmith 12y ago
Sinner here. But I could only identify with four of the seven. Mostly because I couldn't make sense of his rhetoric for the other three. > I imagine that my passions are still rather thinly veiled in places You got that right. But I
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by ericssmith 12y ago
FWIW, Peter Landin sowed the seeds in "Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions" in 1964 in his description of recursive discriminated union for lists: A list is either null or else has a head (h) and a tail (t) which is a list. Rod B
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by ericssmith 12y ago
I want to add some color to the other answers saying "no". If your medium-term goal is to use FP for business problems (e.g. perhaps you are responsible for technology decisions), then the OP's path of "Scala for the Imp
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by ericssmith 13y ago
Also started with the 6502 in the late 70s, but it was entered in hex through the KIM-1. I was a teenager, and part of my brain was wired while understanding that computer.
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "equivalent", but historically, the "computer science problem" that lambda calculus has been used to address is understanding the meaning of expressions in programming languages. The fi
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I agree with the author about History of Mathematics and Journey Through Genius, so I did what he said and bought The Mathematical Experience immediately.
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I have a 4yo and 6yo. The 4yo can add 2 to some numbers up to about 20. The 6yo can add any single digit to any number below 100. Most of the time. They both can read pretty well. We practice both math and reading every 'school' n
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I have to back him up on iTunes. I hate it. I've always hated it. I'm not sure it dooms Apple, but I've seen lots of products die as a result of infuriating design choices. It takes a while, but it does happen.
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I think DSLs, heavy use of operators, and Unicode characters as identifiers isn't abuse. It's unfamiliar. In Haskell, for instance, syntax is taken much more seriously than in other languages, which tend to just copy previous lang
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by ericssmith 13y ago
I've worked with C++ going back to the mid 90s, and program Scala full-time in addition to managing a team of programmers. Such a comparison has never occurred to me. Scala is arguably a simple language in its core design. It enables
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by ericssmith 13y ago
"you need capable programmers in order to not fuck it up, because it contains every paradigm ever invented." My team has just the opposite experience. Scala offers a lot of structure and discipline that you can take advantage of w
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by ericssmith 13y ago
Pattern matching, immutability, option types, combinators, traits are not advanced features in Scala. They are fundamental concepts. To be productive in Scala, write in Scala. Otherwise, you will needlessly waste a huge chunk of your life,
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by ericssmith 13y ago
Indeed. I just found this yesterday, and it is an interesting project. Not sure I'll be able to contribute in the next few months, but I certainly will "play around" with it.

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