nessus42

28 ms·

181.
by nessus42 14y ago
> One of my goals was to eliminate the modes that plagued contemporary editors and attract people interested in ease of use and efficiency. I certainly bought into this line of reasoning when I learned Emacs instead of vi all those ye
182.
by nessus42 14y ago
The mouse was completely intrinsic to the Lisp Machine. Though I'm sure that most people would consider the GUI rather ugly and primitive by today's standards. Think Emacs for X11. The mouse was a three button mouse. The way it worked certa
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by nessus42 14y ago
Not that I have anything against The Silver Searcher, but I've been using the following script I wrote for years, and it is even faster than ag from my very recent limited experience: #!/bin/sh -u dir="$1" shift # This d
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by nessus42 14y ago
MIT never made Lisp Machines as a product. The ones made at MIT were hand-made for use only at MIT. (Well, there was a robotic wire-wrapping machine that did a lot of the work automatically, and there was another robot that would automati
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by nessus42 14y ago
At MIT we had perfectly usable and reliable mice on Lisp Machines long before the Mac or Lisa existed. It is true that they were not mass-produced, however.
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by nessus42 14y ago
I wonder how long it will be before there are Google Glass porn sites. (No doubt someone already has proposed it as an "If I had Glass proposal.)
187.
by nessus42 14y ago
> Scala doesn't support top-level functions (only singleton objects) This is neither here nor there. Scala has "package objects" and functions put into a package object are scoped directly at the top level of the package. They are not
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by nessus42 14y ago
> It seems to me the Play developers moved to Scala more for personal fun than for their users (nothing wrong with that, just making an observation). Maybe they moved to Scala because Scala is a superior language. And where I work, we
189.
by nessus42 14y ago
I was going to say the same thing, but I'll just second you. When you use "sbt ~run", sbt compiles each file as soon as it changes. I.e., as soon as you save out the editor buffer. By the time you click on the reload button, sbt has usually
190.
by nessus42 14y ago
> it most commonly refers to Common Lisp That's not my experience at all. "Common Lisp" is used to refer specifically to Common Lisp. "Lisp" refers to the entire Lisp family. When I took SICP at MIT, Sussman and Ableson referred to Sc
191.
by nessus42 14y ago
> Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I don't understand how anyone who has studied programming language history could not understand that Lisp, and APL to no
192.
by nessus42 14y ago
> Before you make a predictable objection, remember that in real science, fields are united by theory, not divided. You are ignorant on the history of science. Read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . It will set you str
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by nessus42 14y ago
> The functional approach is obviously cleaner and clearer for per-function-call parameterization, while the OO based approach is cleaner and clearer (unsurprisingly) for per-object or per-class parameterization. Having programmed hea
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by nessus42 14y ago
> There may well be more to understanding something than what science can know about it. I'm pretty sure I mentioned that. But who knows? Maybe I just did too much acid back in the hippy days. The amount of literature on The Knowledge
195.
by nessus42 14y ago
The canonical thought experiment from philosophy is called "The Knowledge Argument". In it, you are asked to imagine a super-intelligent but color-blind since birth scientist named Mary who knows everything there is to know about human pe
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by nessus42 14y ago
> The issue is correctly documenting the required features. I'm not sure where the disconnect here is. First of all, "correct documentation" might exist in an ideal world, but it rarely exists in the real world. Given this imperfect
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by nessus42 14y ago
> This is not a problem with using classes or overriding methods, its a problem either with either failure to document behavior on the part of the library author or failure to read documentation on the part of the library consumer. Mi
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by nessus42 14y ago
When I first learned Newtonian mechanics, I found it much easier to solve certain problems thinking in terms of centrifugal force, rather than centripetal force, and thinking so did me none the worse, as long as I kept in mind the caveats r
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by nessus42 14y ago
> This is true, but likewise, its not safe to parameterize functionality by passing callbacks unless you know what the function you are passing the callback to expects of callback functions Of course; this goes without saying. But whe
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by nessus42 14y ago
Yes, I know, but it's not nice to mess with the lysdexics.
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by nessus42 14y ago
> With first class function, you hardly need class polymorphism. Just pass the function as argument already, don't bother with writing a whole new class just to override one method. Here, here! After returning to functional programmin
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by nessus42 14y ago
> You can still break up your algorithm into a class with multiple template methods Template methods are an abomination. They are only widely used because many OO languages don't have first-class functions. A template method means tha
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by nessus42 14y ago
> That's a centripetal force It's also centrifugal force, if you are working in the rotating reference frame of the ball, which in the case of calculating the internal pressure, is probably a bit easier to do. > it can only confu
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Consider the context In this context, I'm sure that determining the "centrifugal force" at each point on the inside of the ball to calculate the pressure on the outside wall, and comparing that to the tensile strength of the outside
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Not centrifugal force (a fictional force) but centripetal force So-called "fictional forces" are used all the time to simplify calculations. Furthermore, if you are going to be pedantic, in GR centrifugal force is just as real as
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by nessus42 14y ago
> There is no such nexus. The brain can be studied scientifically, the mind cannot be. This would be like creating a new cosmology department at a university that stands at the nexus of astronomy and astrology. Okay, you go to the Dep
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Why would I do that? They study the brain, not the mind -- they're neuroscientists, not psychologists. They are not just neuroscientists and they do study the mind. You might have looked at the first sentence on the department's w
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by nessus42 14y ago
> its practitioners can be called out on the carpet if they violate scientific standards. Says who? Doctors routinely prescribe drugs off-label. No one calls them out on it, unless they are doing something particularly dangerous. As t
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by nessus42 14y ago
Much of clinical medicine is not done the way that you claim. E.g., when a surgeon wants to try out a new surgical technique, it doesn't go through clinical trials, etc. He just gets approval from the chief surgeon (or maybe not), and does
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by nessus42 14y ago
> If psychology were a science, I might take this claim more seriously. The problem is not that psychology is not a science. The problem is that psychology has not had its Einstein yet. Well, actually it has: Marvin Minsky and his Soc

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