ericssmith

10 ms·

91.
by ericssmith 14y ago
A motorcycle turns by 'falling over'. For me, that and the acceleration are the main attractions. Can't imagine this will get many motorcyclists to convert.
92.
by ericssmith 14y ago
"I ask because my brain really cant absorb too many languages,... the next 5 years outlook." Well, the early days of computing had domain specific languages, and I'm afraid we are getting back to that. The days of a one-size-fits-all langua
93.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I got it to work by using the 'nightly build' for Juno http://scala-ide.org/download/nightly.html#scala_ide_helium_...
94.
by ericssmith 14y ago
"I've written plenty of lisp (Clojure and non-Clojure) and I haven't observed it to be significantly shorter than Scala/Haskell." Same here. Although I've found Haskell to be noticeably shorter than Scala. But there are trade-offs. Java rea
95.
by ericssmith 14y ago
"churches spend part of the money on social assistance" As a vehicle for proselytizing. Organizations that are dedicated to social assistance have reporting requirements that churches don't. It's not transparent at all what churches spend t
96.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I'm very glad to see articles like this: accessibly written on a topic (types) that in the past may have been considered largely academic, but are now entering mainstream engineering mindshare. I've been thinking recently about why function
97.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I want to echo this last remark. We often need to sync with the server and our UI can get to be relatively complex. Backbone is an outstanding tool for us. However, we don't have single page apps (yet) and we've removed any routers from our
98.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I'm a programmer and have two young children. I can't help but be moved to donate as it is relatively easy for me to see myself in his shoes.
99.
by ericssmith 14y ago
The 4 yo was excited about getting a computer, but didn't care at all about using it. She just didn't 'get' the steam locomotive. She was willing to participate (and was interested) in typing characters on the screen and having something ha
100.
by ericssmith 14y ago
Surprisingly, out of all the comments, this one caught my eye. I've been hiring programmers since 2005 that have to maintain or extend PHP systems. In 2005, it was difficult to find programmers that knew only PHP (or Perl, which was still u
101.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I have a 34month old and 4yo, and this has inspired me to give them a old machine tonight. They will love 'sl'. I will also try the xmonad and tuxpaint stuff with the 4yo. She will like having her own computer and will be tickled to be 'wor
102.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I'm opposed to standardized tests more than most people, however I have to take issue with this article. The author of this article stated early on that this was a 'reading comprehension question', and then goes onto to critique the questio
103.
by ericssmith 14y ago
Parsec was Haskell's 'killer app' for me, but I tend to do most tasks in it now that involve some kind of data processing. Economical syntax, strong support for function composition, pattern matching, and type classes are the main draws for
104.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I'm looking forward to going through this book. Hudak's 'Haskell School of Expression' is one of the books that helped me understand FP, and Haskell in particular. Multimedia applications are not among my current interests, but there were m
105.
by ericssmith 14y ago
In my work, I read in XML, parse its elements, attributes, and data, producing new XML. Along with Parsec, Hexpat is well-suited to the task. I haven't had to parse HTML in Haskell. I use BeautifulSoup for that. I wouldn't be surprised if t
106.
by ericssmith 14y ago
I use hexpat and it works nicely. I wasn't able to get very far with either haxml or hxt before having grief.
107.
by ericssmith 14y ago
That would not be obvious to me. I often have to process quite large and messy XML files and a functional approach works well. I'm not even sure how inserting print statements would be helpful.
108.
by ericssmith 14y ago
" was trying to express my frustration at not being able to insert a little impure code temporarily to tweak behaviour and help with debugging." Why would you want to do that? Haskell is a functional language. You evaluate expressions, whic
109.
by ericssmith 15y ago
HN threads on this topic already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3781829 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443316
110.
by ericssmith 15y ago
"worst material to write was probably math simply due to the dry nature of the subject" Math is one the most fascinating, creative, and empowering pursuits of our species.
111.
by ericssmith 15y ago
You've been corrected already on your misinterpretation of the slide without watching the video (at 38:08), but I wanted to add that Simon has repeatedly made the point (including this presentation) that prior to IO Monads, the designers of