On 03/30/2012 06:25 AM, Steve Howell wrote:
On Mar 29, 11:53 am, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
Well, what sort of language differences make for English vs Mandarin?
Relational algebraic-style programming is useful, but definitely a
large language barrier to people that don't know any SQL. I think th
Re-trolling.
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:49 AM, Steven D'Aprano
wrote:
>> As part of my troll-outreach effort, I will indulge here. I was
>> specifically thinking about some earlier claims that programming
>> languages as they currently exist are somehow inherently superior to a
>> formalized natur
> The "building cabinets" problem is interesting:
>
> 1. To actually build a cabinet, there's a lot of domain knowledge
> that's probably implicit in most circumstances. A carpenter might
> tell another carpenter which hinge to use, but they won't have to talk
> about why doors need hinges or how
> Long personal note ahead.
> tl;dr version: Computers are such a large shift for human civilization
> that generally we dont get what that shift is about or towards.
Another option: since *computers* are such a general device, there
isn't just one notion.
> In the long run I expect computing sci
On Apr 3, 11:19 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:39:14 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
> > Much like
> > with the terminal to GUI transition, you will have people attacking
> > declarative natural language programming as a stupid practice for noobs,
> > and the end of computing (even
On Apr 3, 11:42 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> Lets start with some analogies. In cooking, chefs use recipes to
> produce a meal; the recipe is not a tool. In architecture, a builder
> uses a blueprint to produce a building; the blueprint is not a tool.
> In manufacturing, expensive machines use plans
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:49 AM, Steven D'Aprano
wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:17:18 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
>
>> I have never met a programmer that was not completely into computers.
>> That leaves a lot unspecified though.
>
> You haven't looked hard enough. There are *thousands* of VB, Java,
On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:39:14 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
> Much like
> with the terminal to GUI transition, you will have people attacking
> declarative natural language programming as a stupid practice for noobs,
> and the end of computing (even though it will allow people with much
> less experien
On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:17:18 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
> I have never met a programmer that was not completely into computers.
> That leaves a lot unspecified though.
You haven't looked hard enough. There are *thousands* of VB, Java, etc.
code monkeys who got into programming for the money only
On 03/04/2012 19:42, Nathan Rice wrote:
I view "computer science" as applied mathematics, when it deserves
that moniker. When it doesn't, it is merely engineering.
Is it still April first in your time zone?
--
Cheers.
Mark Lawrence.
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
> > On 4/3/2012 8:39 AM, Nathan Rice wrote:
> >
> > > Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
> > > to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does
> > > a chef describe a recipe? How does a
> -Original Message-
> From: Mark Lawrence [mailto:breamore...@yahoo.co.uk]
> Sent: Wednesday, 4 April 2012 3:16 a.m.
> To: python-list@python.org
> Subject: Re: Number of languages known [was Re: Python is readable] -
> somewhat OT
>
> On 03/04/2012 15:56, Chri
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 8:39 AM, Nathan Rice wrote:
>
>> Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
>> to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does a
>> chef describe a recipe? How does a carpenter describe
On 4/3/2012 8:39 AM, Nathan Rice wrote:
Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does a
chef describe a recipe? How does a carpenter describe the process of
building cabinets? Aside from specific words,
>> > A carpenter uses his tools -- screwdriver, saw, planer --to do
>> > carpentry
>> > A programmer uses his tools to to programming -- one of which is
>> > called 'programming language'
>>
>> > Doing programming without programming languages is like using toenails
>> > to tighten screws
>>
>> I w
All this futuristic grandiloquence:
On Apr 3, 10:17 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> The crux of my view is that programming languages exist in part
> because computers in general are not smart enough to converse with
> humans on their own level, so we have to talk to them like autistic 5
> year-olds. T
On 2012-04-03, Dave Angel wrote:
> And I worked on a system where the microcode was in ROM, and
> there was a "patch board" consisting of lots of diodes and some
> EPROMs. The diodes were soldered into place to specfy the
> instruction(s) to be patched, and the actual patches were in
> the EPROMs
On Apr 3, 9:15 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:51 AM, rusi wrote:
> > On Apr 3, 5:39 pm, Nathan Rice
> > wrote:
>
> >> Don't think "underlying", instead think "canonical".
>
> >> Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
> >> to see. How does a surge
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> Did you miss the part where I said that most people who learn to
>> program are fascinated by computers and highly motivated to do so?
>> I've never met a BROgrammer, those people go into s
On 04/03/2012 11:16 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 03/04/2012 15:56, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Grant
>> Edwards wrote:
>>> Anybody remember DEC's VAX/VMS "patch" utility? Apparently, DEC
>>> thought it was a practical way to fix things. It had a built-in
>>> assemb
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:51 AM, rusi wrote:
> On Apr 3, 5:39 pm, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>>
>> Don't think "underlying", instead think "canonical".
>>
>> Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
>> to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does a
>>
On 03/04/2012 15:56, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
Anybody remember DEC's VAX/VMS "patch" utility? Apparently, DEC
thought it was a practical way to fix things. It had a built-in
assembler and let you "insert" new code into a function by
auto-allo
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:01 AM, Ian Kelly wrote:
> Real programmers are much more complex.
Are you saying that some part of all of us is imaginary??
ChrisA
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 6:39 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> Did you miss the part where I said that most people who learn to
> program are fascinated by computers and highly motivated to do so?
> I've never met a BROgrammer, those people go into sales. It isn't
> because there aren't smart BROmosapiens
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> Anybody remember DEC's VAX/VMS "patch" utility? Apparently, DEC
> thought it was a practical way to fix things. It had a built-in
> assembler and let you "insert" new code into a function by
> auto-allocating a location for the new code an
On 2012-04-03, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Mark Lawrence
> wrote:
>> On 03/04/2012 14:51, rusi wrote:
>>> Doing programming without programming languages is like using toenails
>>> to tighten screws
>>
>>
>> The latter is extremely difficult if you bite your toenails
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 03/04/2012 14:51, rusi wrote:
>> Doing programming without programming languages is like using toenails
>> to tighten screws
>
>
> The latter is extremely difficult if you bite your toenails :)
I agree, thumbnails are far better suited. M
On 03/04/2012 14:51, rusi wrote:
On Apr 3, 5:39 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
Don't think "underlying", instead think "canonical".
Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does a
chef describe a recipe? How d
On Apr 3, 5:39 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
>
> Don't think "underlying", instead think "canonical".
>
> Ultimately, the answers to your questions exist in the world for you
> to see. How does a surgeon describe a surgical procedure? How does a
> chef describe a recipe? How does a carpenter describe
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 1:40 AM, alex23 wrote:
> On Apr 3, 2:55 pm, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> I don't care what people do related to legacy systems.
>
> And that's what earns you the label 'architecture astronaut'. Legacy
> systems are _part_ of the problem; it's very easy to hold to a purist
> app
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 8:05 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:48:53 -0700 (PDT), Steve Howell
> declaimed the following in
> gmane.comp.python.general:
>
> REXX is inhibited by the architectures to which it has been ported
> -- limiting the ADDRESS targets to variations
On Apr 3, 2:55 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> I don't care what people do related to legacy systems.
And that's what earns you the label 'architecture astronaut'. Legacy
systems are _part_ of the problem; it's very easy to hold to a purist
approach when you ignore the bulk of the domain that causes th
On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 11:18 PM, alex23 wrote:
> On Mar 30, 3:37 pm, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> We live in a world where the tools that are used are based on
>> tradition (read that as backwards compatibility if it makes you feel
>> better) and as a mechanism for deriving personal identity. The wor
On Apr 2, 2:50 pm, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 2:48 AM, Steve Howell wrote:
> > I agree with you on the overall point, but I think that Python
> > actually does a fine job of replacing REXX and PHP. I've used both of
> > the latter (and, of course, Python). REXX and PHP are
PHP is a language that I wish would die off quickly and
gracefully. I feel like the good things of PHP have already
been subsumed into the ecosystems of stronger programming
languages (including Python).
The one killer feature PHP has to offer over other languages:
ease of efficient deployment
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Steve Howell wrote:
> On Mar 30, 1:20 pm, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> Totally. That's why we're all still programming in assembly language
>> and doing our own memory management, because we would lose a lot of
>> personal value if programming stopped being so diffi
On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 6:23 AM, Steve Howell wrote:
> On Mar 31, 1:13 pm, Tim Rowe wrote:
>>
>> I know 10 languages. But I'm not telling you what base that number is :)
>>
>
> Well, that means you know at least two programming languages, which
> puts you ahead of a lot of people. :)
That's enoug
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 2:48 AM, Steve Howell wrote:
> I agree with you on the overall point, but I think that Python
> actually does a fine job of replacing REXX and PHP. I've used both of
> the latter (and, of course, Python). REXX and PHP are great at what
> they do, but I don't think their s
On Mar 31, 6:30 am, Neil Cerutti wrote:
> See, for example, Inform 7, which translates a subset of English
> into Inform 6 code. I never thought too deeply about why I
> disliked it, assuming it was because I already knew Inform 6.
I've always respected Inform 7 while being also unwilling to use
On Mar 30, 3:37 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> We live in a world where the tools that are used are based on
> tradition (read that as backwards compatibility if it makes you feel
> better) and as a mechanism for deriving personal identity. The world
> is backwards and retarded in many, many ways, this
On Apr 1, 8:30 pm, alex23 wrote:
> On Mar 31, 2:02 am, Steve Howell wrote:
>
> > Steven, how do you predict which abstractions are going to be useless?
>
> A useless abstraction is one that does nothing to simplify a problem
> *now*:
That's the very definition of short-sighted thinking. If it d
On Mar 30, 11:25 pm, Lie Ryan wrote:
> On 03/21/2012 01:44 PM, Steve Howell wrote:
>
> > Also, don't they call those thingies "object" for a reason? ;)
>
> A subject is (almost?) always a noun, and so a subject is also an object.
It's true that words that can act as a subject can also act like
ob
On Mar 31, 2:02 am, Steve Howell wrote:
> Steven, how do you predict which abstractions are going to be useless?
A useless abstraction is one that does nothing to simplify a problem
*now*:
> being so fixated on over-arching abstract
> concepts that, far from those abstractions making it easier t
On Mar 31, 1:13 pm, Tim Rowe wrote:
>
> I know 10 languages. But I'm not telling you what base that number is :)
>
Well, that means you know at least two programming languages, which
puts you ahead of a lot of people. :)
Some folks, when confronted with a problem, decide to solve it with
binary
On Mar 30, 4:37 am, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Nathan Rice
>
> wrote:
> > Well, a lisp-like language. I would also argue that if you are using
> > macros to do anything, the thing you are trying to do should classify
> > as "not natural in lisp" :)
>
> You would r
On Mar 30, 1:20 pm, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > Really? Or could it be that algorithms for natural language
> > processing that don't fail miserably is a very recent development,
> > restricted natural languages more recent still, and pretty much all
> > commonly used programming languages are all
On Mar 29, 8:36 pm, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> The Romans had perfectly functioning concrete without any abstract
> understanding of chemistry.
If I ever stumbled upon a technology that proved how useless abstract
thinking was, do you know what I would call it?
"Concrete."
Damn, those clever Rom
On Mar 29, 9:42 am, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > You can't merge all of them without making a language that's
> > suboptimal at most of those tasks - probably, one that's woeful at all
> > of them. I mention SQL because, even if you were to
On Mar 30, 9:02 pm, Steve Howell wrote:
> Steven, how do you predict which abstractions are going to be useless?
>
> There was a time when imaginary numbers were just little toys that the
> mathematicians played around with in their ivory towers.
A non-science/math analogous question:
When Beet
On Mar 29, 9:38 pm, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> The mathematics of the 20th century, (from the early 30s onward) tend
> to get VERY abstract, in just the way Joel decries. Category theory,
> model theory, modern algebraic geometry, topos theory, algebraic graph
> theory, abstract algebras and topologic
On Mar 29, 11:53 am, Devin Jeanpierre wrote:
> Well, what sort of language differences make for English vs Mandarin?
> Relational algebraic-style programming is useful, but definitely a
> large language barrier to people that don't know any SQL. I think this
> is reasonable. (It would not matter
On Mar 29, 7:03 am, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:44 AM, Nathan Rice
>
> wrote:
> > We would be better off if all the time that was spent on learning
> > syntax, memorizing library organization and becoming proficient with
> > new tools was spent learning the mathematics, log
Tim Rowe wrote:
On 22 March 2012 19:14, Chris Angelico wrote:
In any case, though, I agree that there's a lot of people
professionally writing code who would know about the 3-4 that you say.
I'm just not sure that they're any good at coding, even in those few
languages. All the best people I'v
On Sat, 2012-03-31 at 18:55 -0400, David Robinow wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Tim Rowe wrote:
>
> > I know 10 languages. But I'm not telling you what base that number is :)
> The fact that you know there are bases other than 10 puts you in the
> top half of the candidates already!
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Tim Rowe wrote:
> I know 10 languages. But I'm not telling you what base that number is :)
The fact that you know there are bases other than 10 puts you in the
top half of the candidates already!
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
On 22 March 2012 19:14, Chris Angelico wrote:
> In any case, though, I agree that there's a lot of people
> professionally writing code who would know about the 3-4 that you say.
> I'm just not sure that they're any good at coding, even in those few
> languages. All the best people I've ever know
On 31/03/2012 06:56, Lie Ryan wrote:
On 03/18/2012 12:36 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:59:34 +0100, Kiuhnm wrote:
In the second example, most English speakers would intuit that "print(i)"
prints i, whatever i is.
There are two points where the code may be misunderstood,
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Lie Ryan wrote:
> On 03/21/2012 03:55 AM, Nathan Rice wrote:
>>
>>
>
> I think you've just described that greedy algorithm can't always find the
> globally optimal solution.
Right. Using gradient descent on an algebraic surface is probably the
most natural examp
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> It seems to me that Indented blocks of text are used pretty frequently
> to denote definition bodies, section subordinate paragraphs and
> asides. The use of the colon seems pretty natural too. Parentheses
> are fairly natural for small asid
On 03/21/2012 01:44 PM, Steve Howell wrote:
Also, don't they call those thingies "object" for a reason? ;)
A subject is (almost?) always a noun, and so a subject is also an object.
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
On 03/21/2012 03:55 AM, Nathan Rice wrote:
In mathematics, when you perform global optimization you must be
willing to make moves in the solution space that may result in a
temporary reduction of your optimality condition. If you just perform
naive gradient decent, only looking to the change tha
On 03/18/2012 12:36 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 20:59:34 +0100, Kiuhnm wrote:
In the second example, most English speakers would intuit that "print(i)"
prints i, whatever i is.
There are two points where the code may be misunderstood, a beginner may
think that "print i" prin
On 3/30/2012 6:47 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
Spolsky has written at least three times about Architecture Astronauts,
and made it abundantly clear that the problem with them is that they
don't solve problems, they invent overarching abstractions that don't do
anything useful or important, and hyp
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> Programming
>> language designers purposefully try to make their language C-like,
>> because not being C-like disqualifies a language from consideration
>> for a HUGE portion of progr
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> Programming
> language designers purposefully try to make their language C-like,
> because not being C-like disqualifies a language from consideration
> for a HUGE portion of programmers, who cower at the naked feeling they
> get imagining a wo
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> I think you'd find that these "non coders" would do very well if given
>> the ability to provide instructions in a natural, interactive way.
>> They are not failing us, we are failing
On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 07:20:39 +1100
Chris Angelico wrote:
> ... That's why we're all still programming in assembly language and
> doing our own memory management, because we would lose a lot of
> personal value if programming stopped being so difficult. If it
> weren't for all these silly new-fang
On 2012-03-30, Nathan Rice wrote:
> Restricted natural languages are an active area of current
> research, and they clearly demonstrate that you can have an
> expressive formal language that is also valid English.
See, for example, Inform 7, which translates a subset of English
into Inform 6 code
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> I think you'd find that these "non coders" would do very well if given
> the ability to provide instructions in a natural, interactive way.
> They are not failing us, we are failing them.
The nearest thing to natural-language command of a comp
> This is more a matter of being unable to express themselves
> appropriately. If I allowed them to write an exact process of steps to
> do what's required, those steps would either be grossly insufficient
> for the task, or would BE pseudo-code. There are plenty of people who
> cannot write those
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 5:15 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> It is true that program complexity is correlated with problem
> complexity, language and environment complexity is undeniable. If you
> want to prove this to yourself, find someone who is intelligent and
> has some basic level of computer lite
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> I believe in the idea of "things should be as simple as possible, but
>> not simpler". Programming as it currently exists is absolutely
>> convoluted. I am called on to help peopl
> > My aunt makes the best damn lasagna you've ever tasted without any
> > overarching abstract theory of human taste. And if you think that
> quantum
> > mechanics is more difficult than understanding human perceptions of
> > taste, you are badly mistaken.
>
> Taste is subjective, and your aunt p
On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 12:46 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> I believe in the idea of "things should be as simple as possible, but
> not simpler". Programming as it currently exists is absolutely
> convoluted. I am called on to help people learn to program from time
> to time, and I can tell you that
>> Mathematics is all about abstraction. There are theories and structures
>> in mathematics that have probably gone over a hundred years before being
>> applied. As an analogy, just because a spear isn't useful while farming
>> doesn't mean it won't save your life when you venture into the woods
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:38:26 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
He did no such thing. I challenge you to find me one place where Joel
has *ever* claimed that "the very notion of abstraction" is
meaningless or without use.
>> [snip quote]
>>> To me, this directly indicates he views higher ord
>> Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you have a project tree on
>> your file system which includes files written in many different
>> programming languages. Imagine that the files can be assumed to be
>> contiguous for our purposes, so you could view all the files in the
>> project as one
>>> He did no such thing. I challenge you to find me one place where Joel
>>> has *ever* claimed that "the very notion of abstraction" is meaningless
>>> or without use.
> [snip quote]
>> To me, this directly indicates he views higher order abstractions
>> skeptically,
>
> Yes he does, and so we al
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 22:26:38 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
>> He did no such thing. I challenge you to find me one place where Joel
>> has *ever* claimed that "the very notion of abstraction" is meaningless
>> or without use.
[snip quote]
> To me, this directly indicates he views higher order abstract
> He did no such thing. I challenge you to find me one place where Joel has
> *ever* claimed that "the very notion of abstraction" is meaningless or
> without use.
"When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns.
They look at the problem of people sending each other word-proc
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:48:40 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
> Here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you have a project tree on
> your file system which includes files written in many different
> programming languages. Imagine that the files can be assumed to be
> contiguous for our purposes, so y
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 7:37 PM, Devin Jeanpierre
wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> Well, a lisp-like language. I would also argue that if you are using
>> macros to do anything, the thing you are trying to do should classify
>> as "not natural in lisp" :)
>
> You
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 14:37:09 -0400, Nathan Rice wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Albert van der Horst
> wrote:
>> In article , Nathan
>> Rice wrote:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog18.html
> Of course, I will give Joel one point: too many things related to
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> Well, a lisp-like language. I would also argue that if you are using
> macros to do anything, the thing you are trying to do should classify
> as "not natural in lisp" :)
You would run into disagreement. Some people feel that the lisp
philoso
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> Of course it's POSSIBLE. You can write everything in Ook if you want
> to. But any attempt to merge all programming languages into one will
> either:
In that particular quote, I was saying that the reason that you
claimed we can't merge lan
> >> You can't merge all of them without making a language that's
> >> suboptimal at most of those tasks - probably, one that's woeful at all
> >> of them. I mention SQL because, even if you were to unify all
> >> programming languages, you'd still need other non-application
> >> languages to get t
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Albert van der Horst
wrote:
> In article ,
> Nathan Rice wrote:
>>>
>>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog18.html
>>
>>I read that article a long time ago, it was bullshit then, it is
>>bullshit now. The only thing he gets right is that the Shann
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 3:42 AM, Devin Jeanpierre
wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> You can't merge all of them without making a language that's
>> suboptimal at most of those tasks - probably, one that's woeful at all
>> of them. I mention SQL because, even if y
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Devin Jeanpierre
wrote:
> Agreed with your entire first chunk 100%. Woohoo! High five. :)
Damn, then I'm not trolling hard enough ಠ_ಠ
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> transformations on lists of data are natural in Lisp, but graph
>> tr
Agreed with your entire first chunk 100%. Woohoo! High five. :)
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> transformations on lists of data are natural in Lisp, but graph
> transformations are not, making some things awkward.
Eh, earlier you make some argument towards lisp being a uni
On 03/29/12 12:48, Nathan Rice wrote:
Of course, this describes Lisp to some degree, so I still need to
provide some answers. What is wrong with Lisp? I would say that the
base syntax being horrible is probably the biggest issue.
Do you mean something like:
((so (describes Lisp (to degree so
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:44 AM, Nathan Rice
> wrote:
>> We would be better off if all the time that was spent on learning
>> syntax, memorizing library organization and becoming proficient with
>> new tools was spent learning the mathema
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> You can't merge all of them without making a language that's
> suboptimal at most of those tasks - probably, one that's woeful at all
> of them. I mention SQL because, even if you were to unify all
> programming languages, you'd still need
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 12:44 AM, Nathan Rice
wrote:
> We would be better off if all the time that was spent on learning
> syntax, memorizing library organization and becoming proficient with
> new tools was spent learning the mathematics, logic and engineering
> sciences. Those solve problems, l
In article ,
Nathan Rice wrote:
>>
>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog18.html
>
>I read that article a long time ago, it was bullshit then, it is
>bullshit now. The only thing he gets right is that the Shannon
>information of a uniquely specified program is proportional to the
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 9:33 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Rodrick Brown
> wrote:
>> The best skill any developer can have is the ability to pickup languages
>> very quickly and know what tools work well for which task.
>
> Definitely. Not just languages but all
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Rodrick Brown wrote:
> The best skill any developer can have is the ability to pickup languages very
> quickly and know what tools work well for which task.
Definitely. Not just languages but all tools. The larger your toolkit
and the better you know it, the mor
At my current firm we hire people who are efficient in one of the following and
familiar with any another C#, Java, C++, Perl, Python or Ruby.
We then expect developers to quickly pick up any of the following languages we
use in house which is very broad. In our source repository not including t
On 25 March 2012 11:03, Tim Chase wrote:
> On 03/24/12 17:08, Tim Delaney wrote:
>
>> Absolutely. 10 years ago (when I was just a young lad) I'd say that I'd
>> *forgotten* at least 20 programming languages. That number has only
>> increased.
>>
>
> And in the case of COBOL for me, it wasn't just
On 03/24/12 17:08, Tim Delaney wrote:
Absolutely. 10 years ago (when I was just a young lad) I'd say that I'd
*forgotten* at least 20 programming languages. That number has only
increased.
And in the case of COBOL for me, it wasn't just forgotten, but
actively repressed ;-)
-tkc
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