That's why you teach scheme. The syntax is basically nonexistent, and can be introduced very slowly as it becomes needed. The whole focus can be on the ideas.
The 'Arwen/Aragorn love affair' is also there in the books, it's not like Jackson pulled that out of thin air. They make it more obvious in the film, but that's a change I can live with.
Indeed. As far as that goes, I'm having a lot of fun with the book "Numbers and Proofs". It mostly focuses on number theory, but is primarily about the process of proving, and proof techniques. It's not a heavy duty serious textbook for university level work, but it's a nice book pre-university (which is where I am).
And the similar anarchist truism: "If voting changed anything, it would be illegal."
Ah well, I don't think there's anyone who could ever feasibly enforce this for more than five minutes. Indeed, I might start taking part in P2P if this thing is signed, but _only dealing with free content_.
No, that's not it. That Python code is incomprehensible to you because it's using a higher level of abstraction that the languages you're used to (It's incomprehensible to me because I don't know Python, which is quite a different factor).
At it's heart, computer programming is all about abstracting out what's happening to the appropriate degree --- that's why very few people write in raw machine code any more. Most programmers are comfortable with the abstractions they're used to, but the python example there is using another level, those being lambda and map.
Both are well known to schemers, lispers, haskell guys, etc. Lambda creates an anonymous function, while map uses two* arguments, a function and a list, and returns the list constructed by applying the function to each item in the list.
So > (map odd? '(1 2 3 4));to take scheme syntax => '(#t #f #t #f) The function odd? is applied to each element of the list, and a new list is constructed out of the return values. Interestingly, this is actually fundamentally different to the idea of iterating through the list and doing something to each element. Firstly, the list isn't damaged by it --- if we had mapped that over the list l, we would still have that list unchanged. Secondly, there's no implication about the order things are done in. This makes some stuff trickier --- say you wanted to increment all remaining values every time you found a prime one, but makes others easier --- running it in parallel across a few dozens cores, for example, because the map function doesn't necessarily have to be run on each item in turn.
The machine I use most at the minute has all of 4 gigs for that sort of stuff. I'm not going to be wasting any on masses of extra stuff like gnome and kde libs if I can help it.
Just for the hell of it, let's take an example. The killer feature I need is tiling of some sort. I don't want to have to hand-manage all my windows.
Anyway, take Gnome, KDE, and a couple of the more mainstream lightweights --- for example, fluxbox and aewm. They can do a lot of stuff, but not one of those does tiling. So maybe add Ion to the list. Except that also doesn't behave the way I like. Possibly quark, which is nice, but not so usable on such a tiny screen. Maybe the way to go would be tinywm and whaw or something similar.
Anyway, I've ended up with wmii. But the real point is that there are dozens or hundreds of window managers for a reason. A lot of the minor ones are just trying to do similar things to the big ones, but in a smaller way. However, a lot more of them are exploring all sorts of interesting other ideas --- there's whole families of tiling window managers which do various things with that metaphor. There's stuff like matchbox, which exist for a very particular niche. There's ones that add tabbing, or do unusual things with window borders, or look for replacements to the idea of workspaces (flux, wmx, wmii, in that order).
So yeah. There's a bunch which are just out there reinventing the wheel. Sometimes this isn't a bad thing --- fvwm is still a floating window manager, but horrendously and scarily configurable. WindowMaker and Afterstep and the like are borrowing a different idea, and doing a lot of nifty stuff with it. IceWM is just a standard floating window manager, taskbar, etc, but very lightweight and quite nice to tweak. But there's also a load that are doing all sorts of other stuff, often in ways that other projects simply can't match. Or the projects that are working on doing some integrated stuff with new widget toolkits, and produce all sorts of nifty eye candy as a result (Enlightenment is the big one here).
But yeah, the diversity is good. The whole tiling idea would be very hard to originate and develop in something like Gnome, because it's such a different method. However, with little minor projects that develop this, dozens of approaches can be tested and tried out in parallel, making sure that basically everyone has a system they like using.
Interestingly, the spaceship one did actually work. They built chemical propellant models that flew successfully.
The main issue, as noted, is something to do with the fallout and the like. For some reason it was considered unfriendly.
Go have a read of Freeman Dyson's book "Disturbing the Universe" which, among other things, contains some accounts of his work on the project.
Re:Generally, I disregard these
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 1
No, not true. For a start, there are many well written IF games that run in the second person.
Have a try at something like Galatea sometime, see what games can be like. No graphics, no shooting, but what is probably the best NPC ever written, and a wonderful style.
No, the important difference is that literate programming goes Documentation->Code, while Javadoc/Doxygen goes Code->Documentation. There's an important mindset difference between the two.
Yes, they're essentially the same, but the mindset difference is very important. To write a good CWEB program you need to thoroughly understand what you're doing. Go look up something like TeX the Program sometime. You can see that Knuth really understands what's happening with each part of it. It's not cobbled together to work, it's the product of being properly thought about and written up.
In contrast, Doxygen/Javadoc produce references for whatever hacked up stuff you've written. There's no corresponding increase in the amount of thought required to write it.
Yes, you do. You tell LaTeX what the key parts of your table are, and then it goes and formats them. If you want lines between columns, you tell it about that. Personally, I find it a heck of a lot nicer than having to mark up every table cell bit by bit, like HTML.
I think it's a fugly syntax and way too many magic characters. And about the telling it if you want lines: That would belong into a stylesheet IMO. Hm, to each their own. Note, however, that the LaTeX way allows you to have lines on some but not all of the columns and rows, and double it up on others if you want. Which is a little more flexible than 'lines or no lines'
No, you do have stylesheets. At the top of the document, that \documentclass{something} command? That's loading a style file. Which defines the fonts, text size, all sorts of layout stuff, etc. If you want to change it, you can produce your own style files, or you can define your own commands in the preamble. In web lingo, it's like making a stylesheet, or including CSS in the header. It's just that in TeX most people use one of a bunch of prewritten stylesheets, and tweak them as necessary.
Okay, so I probably was wrong there, sorry. The way I'm describing it is how LaTeX was told to us and how my colleagues use it. Yeah. The main reason for that is that there are a large number of very well written stylesheets already around. For most minor changes, such as an extra command, the way to go is to just use \newcommand in the preamble. For something more major, fully replacing the fonts or adding a bunch of extra stuff, the way to go is generally a \usepackage command, for stuff someone else has already produced.
Having said that, I do know a bunch of people who roll their own packages/document classes with all their personal commands in. So a bunch of extra mathematical commands, or stuff you use a lot. Generally, however, these are done by modifying something like article.
The compiler warnings are generally useful, in my opinion. If I'm working on a book, for instance, the compiler happily warns me about lines it's had to mung in order to make things work, and I can go find them and check them. If there's a major error in something, it'll fail to compile, and tell me where and why.
In my experience this isn't always true. For example: Once I forgot to put a \end{something} somewhere in the middle of the document and the compiler told me about an error at the bottom. Sure, I see why this happens but dang, HTML validators can do it right. Hm. In general, when that happens it will suggest why, or so I've found.
Much better than HTML, where I see the document is broken, and then have to comb through it to find the error.
Then you're doing it wrong. There are many tools out there (like http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/)that help you find errors exactly where they are. I've never come across that before. I don't tend to write particularly complex HTML, but that will still be useful. Thank you.
Go look up a few CWEB examples. You describe, bit by bit, the program, explaining how each bit works, and illustrating it with code snippets. These are in the logical order for the documentation. CWEB then does some magic on it* to turn it into code that will compile.
So the program gets written as a result of writing excellent documentation on how you're solving the problem.
*Reordering as necessary, removing extra markup, and stuff like that.
No, he's telling the truth. You write documentation describing the program, introducing the source code as it becomes relevant, and then run the resulting file through a program called (iirc) tangle. Which produces the valid source code.
Basically, you write the documentation, and use a program to pull out and compile the source. As someone else said, it's like writing a document, and then adding comments that tell the computer what to do.
\begin{tabular}{ l | c || r | }
\hline
1 & 2 & 3 \\
4 & 5 & 6 \\
7 & 8 & 9 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
WTF? You have to type shit like l | c || r | to tell LaTeX how many columns you want and how to format them? This is ugly, especially for large tables. |||||||||| my ass! Yes, you do. You tell LaTeX what the key parts of your table are, and then it goes and formats them. If you want lines between columns, you tell it about that.
Personally, I find it a heck of a lot nicer than having to mark up every table cell bit by bit, like HTML.
Example 2: Content mixed with Presentation
We know how stupid it was to write things like
In LaTex it's even worse. No support for stylesheets and defining or even getting colors is a pain in the ass. Just look at that:
\definecolor{red}{rgb}{1.0,0.0,0.0} % this is frickin' floating point!
\large \textcolor{red}{I'm annoying!}
My Eyes!
No, you do have stylesheets. At the top of the document, that \documentclass{something} command? That's loading a style file. Which defines the fonts, text size, all sorts of layout stuff, etc. If you want to change it, you can produce your own style files, or you can define your own commands in the preamble. In web lingo, it's like making a stylesheet, or including CSS in the header. It's just that in TeX most people use one of a bunch of prewritten stylesheets, and tweak them as necessary.
Example 3: Compiler Warnings aren't helpful
Okay, I lied, no example here. But trust me: If you ever had difficulties interpreting the output of validator.w3.org you will hate LaTeX.
I really don't get why LaTeX is still so popular among students, especially with those who don't have to type formulas all the time. It's not like there were no alternatives. DocBook looks nice for exampe.
And now you can mod me flamebait or even troll, I don't care. That's why I'm posting anonymously after all;) The compiler warnings are generally useful, in my opinion. If I'm working on a book, for instance, the compiler happily warns me about lines it's had to mung in order to make things work, and I can go find them and check them.
If there's a major error in something, it'll fail to compile, and tell me where and why. Much better than HTML, where I see the document is broken, and then have to comb through it to find the error.
Worst Summary Ever Thanks. I really appreciate the amount of respect and appreciation I get from this site.
Donald Knuth is not "playing hardball." Nobody needs to call the interview "raw and uncut," or "unplugged." Wow, where exactly did I (or CmdrTaco) use any of those phrases?
Calling something a "complete waste of time" is, in my book at least, "ripping" on something. I didn't "sully his good name," I posted what I found interesting. You should also point out he has prostate cancer and I left that out. God, what horrible spin I used! You'd think I was talking about someone whose life wasn't at risk, the way I spun that summary! Well, speaking for myself, I did find the summary fairly heavily spun. In general, it seemed to take statements out of context somewhat, turning "I generally don't find unit tests useful" into "Knuth rips on unit tests". He mentions that there are definite applications for multicore work, but that he's not in that field. Basically, the summary struck me as being spun to make his statements seem more controversial.
Knuth is a well-respected figure who makes moderate, thoughtful statements. I happen to disagree with his stances on multi-core chips and unit testing. I didn't find anything thoughtful about what he said and really wish he would have elaborated on why unit testing is a complete waste of time. Look, shall we quote what he said about unit testing?
As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when Iâ(TM)m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesnâ(TM)t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up." That doesn't look like he ripped on it. He said, basically, that he doesn't find it useful, and that it tends to waste time because of the sort of work he's doing.
In other words, he considered the question, and provided the answer that described what he found for his work. Not what you'll find for your work, or anything like that. Just what he finds works for him.
From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler. Actually, after reading the article, I did find him to be a bit preachy. Apparently you and everyone else find him unquestionably correct in all his statements from that interview. I'll admit to having generally found him right. When he's talking about a subject he's not an expert on, he mentions that. He says why his opinion isn't the best on all topics. He seems to be generally careful about what he's saying.
Where what he says is likely to be personal bias, he mentions that. So weight it as you think is relevant, given who he is.
Yes, there's stuff in there I reckon is probably wrong. There's also an awful lot that's probably right, and he's generally been careful and thoughtful about what he's saying.
And also, people are claiming he said these things "in passing." Which I find to be a phrase used when you want to avoid owning up to something you said. If I call you a "whiney bitch in passing" that doesn't lessen it one bit. Knuth claims no one should listen to him. Why is he publishing books if no one should listen to him? No, he said, quite regularly, that his opinion on some things wasn't going to be very useful, as he wasn't that good at them. His books are about the topics he is good at. He doesn't write them about software development best practice, or economic, or parallel computation. He deals with the topics he knows, and that's all he expects to be listened to about.
The guy said some inflammatory comments. If you read the following posts, you'll realize that I wasn't the only one that found them inflammatory or controversial. No. Knuth generally was cautious about his statements. Do please find me some actually inflammatory comments from there. Go on, direct quotes, not just rephrasings or spin.
Literate programming in the context mentioned refers to a hybrid of a programming language and TeX, designed for the documentation first, and the actual program incidentally. It's not a buzzword by a long way.
And yes, there is a system for combining it with C.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, \LaTeX\ works as well, and is quicker to type.
No, data is the plural. Datum is the singular.
Databases and typesetting systems, respectively. Whaddya mean, those don't have real world applications?
That's why you teach scheme. The syntax is basically nonexistent, and can be introduced very slowly as it becomes needed. The whole focus can be on the ideas.
While not the GP, I can in my browser.
I'm using conkeror, and C-x b gives me iswitchb-mode to change buffers, with searching through, tab completion, etc. Easiest way to do it ever.
The 'Arwen/Aragorn love affair' is also there in the books, it's not like Jackson pulled that out of thin air. They make it more obvious in the film, but that's a change I can live with.
You may have ALSA instead. Try
/dev/urandom
aplay <
For example
Indeed. As far as that goes, I'm having a lot of fun with the book "Numbers and Proofs". It mostly focuses on number theory, but is primarily about the process of proving, and proof techniques. It's not a heavy duty serious textbook for university level work, but it's a nice book pre-university (which is where I am).
And the similar anarchist truism: "If voting changed anything, it would be illegal."
Ah well, I don't think there's anyone who could ever feasibly enforce this for more than five minutes. Indeed, I might start taking part in P2P if this thing is signed, but _only dealing with free content_.
It is a rather odd turn of phrase, isn't it? Ah well, it'll amuse the guys over at the Gaslamp Bazaar, I should think.
No, that's not it. That Python code is incomprehensible to you because it's using a higher level of abstraction that the languages you're used to (It's incomprehensible to me because I don't know Python, which is quite a different factor).
;to take scheme syntax
At it's heart, computer programming is all about abstracting out what's happening to the appropriate degree --- that's why very few people write in raw machine code any more. Most programmers are comfortable with the abstractions they're used to, but the python example there is using another level, those being lambda and map.
Both are well known to schemers, lispers, haskell guys, etc. Lambda creates an anonymous function, while map uses two* arguments, a function and a list, and returns the list constructed by applying the function to each item in the list.
So
> (map odd? '(1 2 3 4))
=> '(#t #f #t #f)
The function odd? is applied to each element of the list, and a new list is constructed out of the return values. Interestingly, this is actually fundamentally different to the idea of iterating through the list and doing something to each element. Firstly, the list isn't damaged by it --- if we had mapped that over the list l, we would still have that list unchanged. Secondly, there's no implication about the order things are done in. This makes some stuff trickier --- say you wanted to increment all remaining values every time you found a prime one, but makes others easier --- running it in parallel across a few dozens cores, for example, because the map function doesn't necessarily have to be run on each item in turn.
Floating windows doesn't work well on an 800x480 screen either, so I have wmii running on my Eee.
Much more effective than anything like Gnome could ever be on such a machine.
The machine I use most at the minute has all of 4 gigs for that sort of stuff. I'm not going to be wasting any on masses of extra stuff like gnome and kde libs if I can help it.
No, doesn't work.
Just for the hell of it, let's take an example. The killer feature I need is tiling of some sort. I don't want to have to hand-manage all my windows.
Anyway, take Gnome, KDE, and a couple of the more mainstream lightweights --- for example, fluxbox and aewm. They can do a lot of stuff, but not one of those does tiling. So maybe add Ion to the list. Except that also doesn't behave the way I like. Possibly quark, which is nice, but not so usable on such a tiny screen. Maybe the way to go would be tinywm and whaw or something similar.
Anyway, I've ended up with wmii. But the real point is that there are dozens or hundreds of window managers for a reason. A lot of the minor ones are just trying to do similar things to the big ones, but in a smaller way. However, a lot more of them are exploring all sorts of interesting other ideas --- there's whole families of tiling window managers which do various things with that metaphor. There's stuff like matchbox, which exist for a very particular niche. There's ones that add tabbing, or do unusual things with window borders, or look for replacements to the idea of workspaces (flux, wmx, wmii, in that order).
So yeah. There's a bunch which are just out there reinventing the wheel. Sometimes this isn't a bad thing --- fvwm is still a floating window manager, but horrendously and scarily configurable. WindowMaker and Afterstep and the like are borrowing a different idea, and doing a lot of nifty stuff with it. IceWM is just a standard floating window manager, taskbar, etc, but very lightweight and quite nice to tweak. But there's also a load that are doing all sorts of other stuff, often in ways that other projects simply can't match. Or the projects that are working on doing some integrated stuff with new widget toolkits, and produce all sorts of nifty eye candy as a result (Enlightenment is the big one here).
But yeah, the diversity is good. The whole tiling idea would be very hard to originate and develop in something like Gnome, because it's such a different method. However, with little minor projects that develop this, dozens of approaches can be tested and tried out in parallel, making sure that basically everyone has a system they like using.
Interestingly, the spaceship one did actually work. They built chemical propellant models that flew successfully.
The main issue, as noted, is something to do with the fallout and the like. For some reason it was considered unfriendly.
Go have a read of Freeman Dyson's book "Disturbing the Universe" which, among other things, contains some accounts of his work on the project.
No, not true. For a start, there are many well written IF games that run in the second person.
Have a try at something like Galatea sometime, see what games can be like. No graphics, no shooting, but what is probably the best NPC ever written, and a wonderful style.
I am reading your posts. I was just disputing that it's "essentially the same as Doxygen or Javadoc or whatever". Nothing much more.
No, the important difference is that literate programming goes Documentation->Code, while Javadoc/Doxygen goes Code->Documentation. There's an important mindset difference between the two.
Yes, they're essentially the same, but the mindset difference is very important. To write a good CWEB program you need to thoroughly understand what you're doing. Go look up something like TeX the Program sometime. You can see that Knuth really understands what's happening with each part of it. It's not cobbled together to work, it's the product of being properly thought about and written up.
In contrast, Doxygen/Javadoc produce references for whatever hacked up stuff you've written. There's no corresponding increase in the amount of thought required to write it.
Well, the file you produce won't compile as a program. So CWEB generates it in that sense, as it ends up producing valid source.
But yes, the program is written as you construct the documentation explaining it.
Having said that, I do know a bunch of people who roll their own packages/document classes with all their personal commands in. So a bunch of extra mathematical commands, or stuff you use a lot. Generally, however, these are done by modifying something like article.
In my experience this isn't always true. For example: Once I forgot to put a \end{something} somewhere in the middle of the document and the compiler told me about an error at the bottom. Sure, I see why this happens but dang, HTML validators can do it right. Hm. In general, when that happens it will suggest why, or so I've found. Then you're doing it wrong. There are many tools out there (like http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/)that help you find errors exactly where they are. I've never come across that before. I don't tend to write particularly complex HTML, but that will still be useful. Thank you.Go look up a few CWEB examples. You describe, bit by bit, the program, explaining how each bit works, and illustrating it with code snippets. These are in the logical order for the documentation. CWEB then does some magic on it* to turn it into code that will compile.
So the program gets written as a result of writing excellent documentation on how you're solving the problem.
*Reordering as necessary, removing extra markup, and stuff like that.
No, he's telling the truth. You write documentation describing the program, introducing the source code as it becomes relevant, and then run the resulting file through a program called (iirc) tangle. Which produces the valid source code.
Basically, you write the documentation, and use a program to pull out and compile the source. As someone else said, it's like writing a document, and then adding comments that tell the computer what to do.
WTF? You have to type shit like l | c || r | to tell LaTeX how many columns you want and how to format them? This is ugly, especially for large tables. |||||||||| my ass!
Yes, you do. You tell LaTeX what the key parts of your table are, and then it goes and formats them. If you want lines between columns, you tell it about that. Personally, I find it a heck of a lot nicer than having to mark up every table cell bit by bit, like HTML.
Example 2: Content mixed with Presentation
We know how stupid it was to write things like
In LaTex it's even worse. No support for stylesheets and defining or even getting colors is a pain in the ass. Just look at that:
My Eyes!
No, you do have stylesheets. At the top of the document, that \documentclass{something} command? That's loading a style file. Which defines the fonts, text size, all sorts of layout stuff, etc. If you want to change it, you can produce your own style files, or you can define your own commands in the preamble. In web lingo, it's like making a stylesheet, or including CSS in the header. It's just that in TeX most people use one of a bunch of prewritten stylesheets, and tweak them as necessary. Example 3: Compiler Warnings aren't helpful
Okay, I lied, no example here. But trust me: If you ever had difficulties interpreting the output of validator.w3.org you will hate LaTeX.
I really don't get why LaTeX is still so popular among students, especially with those who don't have to type formulas all the time. It's not like there were no alternatives. DocBook looks nice for exampe.
And now you can mod me flamebait or even troll, I don't care. That's why I'm posting anonymously after all
In other words, he considered the question, and provided the answer that described what he found for his work. Not what you'll find for your work, or anything like that. Just what he finds works for him.
From the summary, you'd think he was a trash-talking pro-wrestler. Actually, after reading the article, I did find him to be a bit preachy. Apparently you and everyone else find him unquestionably correct in all his statements from that interview. I'll admit to having generally found him right. When he's talking about a subject he's not an expert on, he mentions that. He says why his opinion isn't the best on all topics. He seems to be generally careful about what he's saying.Where what he says is likely to be personal bias, he mentions that. So weight it as you think is relevant, given who he is.
Yes, there's stuff in there I reckon is probably wrong. There's also an awful lot that's probably right, and he's generally been careful and thoughtful about what he's saying.
And also, people are claiming he said these things "in passing." Which I find to be a phrase used when you want to avoid owning up to something you said. If I call you a "whiney bitch in passing" that doesn't lessen it one bit. Knuth claims no one should listen to him. Why is he publishing books if no one should listen to him? No, he said, quite regularly, that his opinion on some things wasn't going to be very useful, as he wasn't that good at them. His books are about the topics he is good at. He doesn't write them about software development best practice, or economic, or parallel computation. He deals with the topics he knows, and that's all he expects to be listened to about. The guy said some inflammatory comments. If you read the following posts, you'll realize that I wasn't the only one that found them inflammatory or controversial. No. Knuth generally was cautious about his statements. Do please find me some actually inflammatory comments from there. Go on, direct quotes, not just rephrasings or spin.Literate programming in the context mentioned refers to a hybrid of a programming language and TeX, designed for the documentation first, and the actual program incidentally. It's not a buzzword by a long way.
And yes, there is a system for combining it with C.