Memorizing Pi is a dumb old trick, like ripping a phone book in half. I can memorize Pi, I mean if I wanted to spend my time that way, but it's all a dodge: I'm just ripping a phone book in half, and the whole trick is to twist it just so that the entire heroic thing only ever happens over a few pages at a time, but quickly enough that people think you know how to do something really special.
I saw one of this guy's talks once - or at least, I think so, wasn't he at Rails Conf? Anyway: I think dude's talent is a form of stagecraft. Can we please blow this guy off and get back to inventing the future ??????? On Jul 17, 2011, at 2:51 PM, BGB <[email protected]> wrote: > On 7/17/2011 2:33 PM, Craig Latta wrote: >> That talk would have been a whole lot better if he had grounded it >> with a discussion of how constraints are good for creativity. It's how >> he should have spent the time where he went on about memorizing Pi for >> no good reason... > > if memorizing pie is a measure of programmer status, it likely puts down > those of us who only know 10s of digits of Pi... > > granted, it is probably not that terribly important to know far more digits > of pie than can be reasonably represented in a sanely-sized floating point > constant. > > > funny though is I don't really believe in taking things away from languages, > rather just providing ideally clean and concise constructs to take over the > role of more hairy constructs. > > for example, if/while/for/... don't mean goto shouldn't exist in a language > or should be branded as "evil" as a result, rather they provide better > alternatives such that things like goto are more of a "break glass in case of > emergency" feature (or can be taken as a sign that, when one finds themselves > using it, then likely things have already gone fairly far south as far as > this particular code is concerned...). > > > so, I think it is more about providing better and cleaner alternatives to > common problems than in trying to take things away. > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
