sramsay

45 ms·

421.
by sramsay 14y ago
To summarize: Google killed off Google Reader because it no longer makes sense for their business. Rather begs the question, doesn't it?
422.
by sramsay 14y ago
"When I tried to think of a project suitable for learning JavaScript, a terrain flyover demo came to mind." Me too! But then I re-establish contact with the reality of my actual abilities and create a button which, when pressed, prints "He
423.
by sramsay 14y ago
Humanities professors (of which I am one) now take it for granted that their days are numbered -- that subjects like History, Philosophy, English literature, and Classics won't survive another fifty years as major parts of the university cu
424.
by sramsay 14y ago
I take it all back.
425.
by sramsay 14y ago
Taken out of context, most "inspirational quotes" seems to me to be startlingly vapid. 1. "Be the change you want to see in the world." How? This might just mean, "It's up to you to change the world," (a questionable assumption), but this
426.
by sramsay 14y ago
Immediately put me in mind of this recent HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5232643
427.
by sramsay 14y ago
You might look at 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School by Ben Klemens. It's very new (November 2012), and has some really nice stuff in it. It's getting mixed reviews, but I really found it useful (even if I, like others, disagree
428.
by sramsay 14y ago
"Does Backbone help you solve your problems?" This really bears repeating over and over again, and I think it's a corollary of "start by writing the dumbest thing that can possibly work." If you start with dumb, simple things, the probl
429.
by sramsay 14y ago
"The first time, to hate it. The second time, to start appreciating it. The third time, to understand it and get shit actually done." Not unlike the process of becoming addicted to heroin.
430.
by sramsay 14y ago
"you shouldn't underestimate the power of an open mind." I'm not sure your ideas are quite as bold and radical as you think. In fact, I would say that you're merely repeating the common liturgy of the industry. Young tyros are more "creat
431.
by sramsay 14y ago
I assume you're basing that on your direct experience with twenty-five year veterans who have used their complete mastery of a popular toolchain to ship a couple of dozen production systems to customers who were in turn delighted by the qua
432.
by sramsay 14y ago
(especially since there is no particular advantage to writing compilers or interpreters in C). Do you really believe there's no particular advantage to writing a compiler or an interpreter in C? Like, you could write it in Tcl or Perl
433.
by sramsay 14y ago
"smart programmers using this language are doing things people thought were impossible." I think the fact that a great number of new, hip, who'd-have-thought-it-was-possible languages are written in C answers this one rather nicely. Not to
434.
by sramsay 14y ago
It's never optimal, and often, it's the source of truly infuriating bugs. Yet for all that, people don't say, "Hey, let's skip the middle man and just call libcurl or libxml or whatever from C . Because you know, these are C libraries.
435.
by sramsay 14y ago
It is totally true. And it's very hard to understand this when you're twenty-six years old. My heart just breaks . . .
436.
by sramsay 14y ago
I can't really disagree with what you're saying. But I take the point of the article to be that what makes development easy or hard is not as related to the feature set of the language as we think. The common liturgy of language design is
437.
by sramsay 14y ago
So, there are problems that are so complex that they can only be dealt with in Haskell? That would explain why there are so few Haskell programs that anyone actually uses.
438.
by sramsay 14y ago
I feel like I'm always trying to make this point to people, and doing so with far less eloquence. The fact that Katz is (a) an experienced and accomplished developer and (b) someone with very non-trivial experience with hot, hip, super-hig
439.
by sramsay 14y ago
Right. Clojure isn't the first Lisp for the JVM, but it's definitely the first one to care so deeply about other languages and existing libraries. If you ask about C interop or creating standalone binaries on a Common Lisp board, you'll ge
440.
by sramsay 14y ago
I really think the biggest problem that new languages have is contending with the colossal hegemony of three stacks: C, Java, and Javascript. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, your language is going to be successful to the
441.
A year without caffeine (part 2)(bryanalexander.org)
231 points by sramsay 14y ago|124 comments
442.
by sramsay 14y ago
"it has it's particular domains which in my opinion are low-level programming and performant, portable code with a small footprint." I realize you're defending C, here, but I'd just like to use you for a moment to ask why this sort of thing
443.
A year without caffeine(bryanalexander.org)
76 points by sramsay 14y ago|82 comments
444.
by sramsay 14y ago
"I've looked at Scala. I think it's really neat. I think it is Perl." Or C++. Brilliant programmers will undoubtedly do brilliant things with it, but for a lot of folks, the word "multiparadigm" might as well read "radioactive." It's true
445.
by sramsay 14y ago
I think what this guy is trying to say is that Ruby on Rails is . . . on rails.
446.
by sramsay 14y ago
"I just wish I never become that guy." But hopefully you will, and I can tell you why. After a long and painful apprenticeship, you finally realize that being a great programmer has nothing to do with the language or its features. You ge
447.
by sramsay 14y ago
Languages are among the more religious topics in modern computing, and sometimes it can be hard to talk about them without immediately provoking a tedious flame war. I can only say that for myself, after programming for twenty years in eve
448.
by sramsay 14y ago
"once neural and sensory activity stops then you are dead, even if your body has not yet experienced the crushing gravitational effects." One of the few "no brainers" in quantum physics.
449.
by sramsay 14y ago
Is the reverse true? Would I, as a native speaker of English, find it easy to learn Danish?
450.
by sramsay 14y ago
I didn't study linguistics, but I'm an English professor and my first thought was of Beowulf -- an Anglo-Saxon poem that takes place entirely in Scandinavia. Grendel, in fact, lives in Denmark.

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