How ironic that you mention Lisp, since it was the Lisp machines that had this capability to interact on such a level with the OS. Graphical and command-line interaction with every application and the OS itself.
Don't forget that one of the reasons it works so well is because of the proprietary hardware. It's a lot easier when you have control over that sort of stuff--less driver weirdness, better integration, etc.
Argh. Oh well. I haven't actually seen the series yet: I was planning on seeing it very soon though. I saw the OAV well before I ever conceived that I would consider watching a series such as Kenshin (it's such a commitment!). But having just finished Ranma 1/2, mostly, I guess I have no excuse anymore.
Ranma 1/2 in live-action... that would be amazingly high-budget and to no good purpose! The characters often defy physics but that isn't what the story is about.
(I'm trying to picture Akane getting mad at Ranma in live-action, and it's not working. Not to mention it would bring a whole new meaning to the term ``double'' =)
Another element you see in anime is the alteration of animation style as a device. I really liked the use of this in the end of Evangelion TV, and FLCL makes good use of it too.
I agree. Particularly because Rei, while I cannot recall exactly where I heard this, is supposed to be an albino. She's not ``just your average Japanese girl'' and anyone who's seen the series will know precisely what I mean, whether you agree on the albinism or not.
Many characters in Crest of the Stars have blue hair as well, but that is due to genetic modification. On the other hand, Akane in Ranma seems to have dark navy blue hair, and Shampoo has really bright blue hair, and I don't see any particular reason for it. But then again, it's Ranma.
I also think he's reading too much into character drawing. Eyes are drawn large in all animated features in order to express emotions more clearly. Eyebrows appearing on top of hair are also drawn for this purpose. The customs and habits of the characters generally seem to match whatever nationality they are supposed to be: if they are Japanese then they behave Japanese, whatever the look might be.
By cheap-action I meant shallow, short-attention span sorta thing. Like you find on TV. I don't discriminate against misogynists necessarily either. I've read Mencken and Bierce.
It's been a long time since I read it, so it's rather fuzzy, but I remember being deluged by details and not really knowing what was important or not. In War and Peace the details were interesting, at least.
It is only "intuitive" to use a pen on a tablet because that's how you learned to use a pen. If you learned how to use a pen to stab people's eyes out, then you would have no idea how to use a pen with a tablet.
Of the 6+ billion people on this planet, a very high proportion of them will never read or write. When I consider the definition of the word "intuitive", I think of trying to explain something that is "intuitive" to us in the developed world, to someone who did not grow in the same environment we did. Handing a person, taken at random from a sample of the entire world, a pen and a tablet will have unpredictable results. If you assume literacy (and then there's the language issue) then you are relying on prior knowledge.
As for the usage of the word "intuitive", I actually think that most usages of the word are incorrect. People use words in incorrect ways all the time, but we gather their meaning from context and common sense. When have you heard a usage of the word "intuitive" that, when applied to some concept, actually meant "intuitive" and not some better term such as "reminiscent"?
The computer keyboard is intuitive -- I've been using QWERTY keyboards for so long on typewriters, and I was taught english as a child.
Opening a door is intuitive -- I've been doing it since I was a kid and watched adults do it (dogs and cats can learn to open doors too)
Standing, sitting, walking are intuitive -- I don't remember falling on my ass trying to do all these things, imitating my parents, because I was too young to remember
Breathing is intuitive -- Actually, it's instinctual
What, then is the correct usage of "intuitive"? To describe that which is obtained through the process of "intuition". That is -- arriving at a conclusion without a clear reasoning path (The meaning of life is 42. How do I know? It's intuitive! I used my intuition to figure it out, but otherwise I can't explain.). Can that be relied upon to obtain the same results in different people? No! There will always be a sample of people that do not exhibit the same ability at intuition, and without a clear reasoning path they can easily arrive at different conclusions.
I found Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls sadly disappointing and boring, when I read it in high school. I wound up skipping through many of the pages. While I probably should, one of these days, give a shot at another Hemingway book, I am having a little trouble seeing why he's so great. Perhaps that was his one bad book. And no, I'm not the cheap-action type; I had previously read War and Peace and enjoyed it far more. My first exposure to Steinbeck was The Pearl which was horrid, but then I got to read The Grapes of Wrath which was excellent. I think you are discounting the ability of sci-fi and fantasy authors too much though. Asimov, Bradbury, Card, Herbert, Heinlein, Stephenson, Jordan, Tolkien, and others who I can't remember off the top of my head, are all fine authors with excellent books in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Just because the setting is fictional doesn't mean that the story is bogus. Sometimes, some things cannot be well orchestrated in the boundaries of "factual settings". Consider the whole theme of Dune. Prescience is not real, is it?
As for Piers Anthony, I enjoyed the usage of puns in Xanth. Eventually it got old and I stopped reading the series.
It's not elegance unless Perl allows you to add constructs such as "next if $foo;" to the language yourself, via the language.
Lisp does. Lisp has been around for 40 years. And I guarantee you that a Lisp will still be here 40 years from now. Languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby continually try to measure up to it, XML tries to imitate its data structure, and most people could learn a few lessons from it. Dynamic semantics and structured data/code aren't going to vanish on a whim, unlike certain other languages tied to a particular creator's looniness (not naming names, but you know who I mean).
The Cookie Monster:
Intuitition is not about knowing how to do something in the complete absence of any learned knowledge, it is knowing how to do something new because your brain has pattern-matched the problem with similiar situations you've dealt with in the past
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary:
Intuitive...
Knowing, or perceiving, by intuition; capable of knowing without deduction or reasoning.
If intuition means knowledge without reasoning, then that knowledge must vary from person to person. Without clear logical steps there is no way to duplicate the intuition of one person in another person. All one can hope for is that the results might be the same, due to environment. How much shared environment is there between all peoples? Ediger thought it was breast-feeding, but even that's not so (admittedly it was in a humorous vein). Therefore, how useful is such a term as "intuitive" in describing interfaces? Absolutely useless. It is a buzzword, at best.
Example: You are presented with a box and a plastic tube sticking out of it. What do you do?
Next, try recursively following your examples and you will see why Ediger said what he said (and another poster pointed out that even the nipple wasn't intuitive!):
First, you must abandon all your preconceptions. Make like Descartes.
A tablet - How long did it take you to learn how to write? Was it "intuitive"? Were you born knowing how to write, and use a tablet/writing surface? (presuming that this is what you mean, even)
A machine with one button that does only one thing - Button... hrm. What do I do with a button? Oh! They can be pushed! Great, I learned how to deal with buttons! Now I suppose I can generalize about all buttons, right? How do I put this shirt on... hrm..
In fact, the only conclusion I've been able to draw about the meaning of the adjective "intuitive" is that it applies to just about nothing but instinctive (ie. born with/genetic) reactions.
Everything else you learned at some point.
(Note, the noun "intuition" still has meaning: "knowledge without known reasoning", but you can't say a piece of knowledge is "intuitive" because there exists some person who doesn't think so--guarenteed)
When most people speak of "intuitive" interfaces, they really mean "reminiscent" interfaces. Interfaces that remind them of ones that they've already learned. The question of designing a good interface is of designing one that can rely on prior experience, can introduce new concepts in a tolerable fashion, that communicates with the user well, and is efficient to use.
Possibilities for box and plastic tube:
Suck on it
Blow into it
Bend it
Pull it
Push it
Cut it
Chew it
Step on it
Kick it
Pour something into it
etc...
So which one is "intuitive"?
Not that Unix/Linux people couldn't go a long way to designing better interfaces. But demanding "intuitive" is probably one of the reasons why it's taking so long. No one can code "intuitive" interfaces, if they can't even figure out what "intuitive" means! (Unfortunately, it looks like "intuitive" is coming to mean the ugly Windows interface more and more. It's now the most "reminiscent" for most people. So sad really, considering the advances that happened many years ago and were mostly forgotten.)
Perhaps you should be thinking in terms of "rational" and "irrational" numbers rather than ambiguous terms like "mixed number" and "decimal". Then you might realize how ludicrous it sounds to say: "Another great challenge would be to express the value of Pi absolutely using a rational number, rather than an irrational number." Given that the value of Pi is an irrational number, that statement doesn't even make sense!
I am assuming basic knowledge of the difference between rational and irrational numbers however. Rational basically means "can be expressed as a ratio". Irrational is the opposite.
Oh, and that Uncoveror puzzle is a rather tired old trick question that relies on the mind mixing up balances. $9 + $9 + $9 is $27 and the extra dollar for the maid is subtracted, not added, giving a total amount paid to the clerk of $26.
Carnegie Mellon University's Cluster services maintains general student body access Linux and Solaris machines as well as Windows and MacOS. Don't know of any studies, offhand, but it doesn't hurt to look.
The AX.25 amateur packet radio protocol works in a very similar fashion when multiple people attempt to transmit at the same time. Each waits a random number of milliseconds before retransmitting and whoever goes first gets through. But I don't think this is adequate for all types of data, or voice for example.
Also, regulating air is not such a daft idea. Even here on Earth with our bountiful air, we need pollution controls and such. Consider a possible Moon colony. Regulating air would become a life-or-death matter.
Common Lisp doesn't guarentee tail-call elision was my point =) It's just that all good compilers do it.
Are you aware of SBCL by any chance? It's a fork of CMUCL and while it's still very Unix-bound there's a lot of cleanup going on and development is quite active (so is CMUCL for that matter). Besides that there is OpenMCL, CLISP, and ECL all are being worked on, and even GCL might get its act together someday. You should visit CLiki and cCLan too, or stop by OPN #lisp. There are people out there making efforts, though they may not be as visible as someone like Paul Graham.
The only reason why Debian is having trouble with LSB compliance is because LSB was deliberately being Redhat-centric. After a number of flamewars (etc etc) and some constructive criticism, I believe there will now be more input from Debian developers in the LSB process.
As for the installer: Progeny Graphical Installer exists and has been packaged. I'm sure that help would be appreciated for turning this into a releasable, complete replacement for the current Debian installer. Efforts are already underway...
I was actually thinking of some of the issues with CMUCL MP but as you point out, load-balancing would solve that with little trouble.
I presume one wouldn't write lots of recursive functions when the iterative constructs can be used, either...
In my own web apps CMUCL's performance was much more than adequate but I'm pretty sure the server never has seen more than moderate usage.
What's the best way to get people to use CL for this? Use it yourself, and beat them at their own game. Maybe some Lisp-based tools for web developers? Get them out of the pointy-brackets syntax and into S-expressions =)
I bet CLIM would do pretty well for writing a web-page layout designer, for those who don't write by hand...
This is still bogus playing with statistics; of course the rich are going to pay more *percentage* of the total taxes.
Bob makes $10 million. Joe makes $10,000. Alice makes $20,000. Fred makes $30,000. Assuming all paid 30% income tax, that would be: Bob: $3,000,000 Joe: $3,000 Fred: $6,000 Alice: $9,000
Total tax: 3,018,000 Percentage paid by top 25% (Bob): 99.4% Percentage paid by bottom 75% (rest): 0.6%
Seems that Bob is paying 99.4% of the taxes! Yet he's getting the same rate as everyone else! If his tax rate were raised further, he would only wind up paying a greater percentage of the total tax.
That the rich are paying a high proportion of the tax does not necessarily imply that they are being taxed disproportionately.
What percentage they should pay is linked to the question of "how much to tax the rich?", which of course will get you different answers from different people.
Speaking of which, I find CMU Common Lisp w/IMHO to be a better web application environment than Tomcat or any crappy Java servlet-type thing. And it's easier to setup too, amazingly. I do not know how it would perform under extremely heavy loads though. Perhaps AllegroServe with Allegro CL would be better in that situation.
Obviously they should've written it in Common Lisp;)
CL-USER 1 > (/ 1 0)
Error: Division-by-zero caused by / of (1 0). 1 (continue) Return a value to use. 2 Supply new arguments to use. 3 (abort) Return to level 0. 4 Return to top loop level 0.
Type:b for backtrace,:c <option number> to proceed, or:? for other options
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How ironic that you mention Lisp, since it was the Lisp machines that had this capability to interact on such a level with the OS. Graphical and command-line interaction with every application and the OS itself.
Don't forget that one of the reasons it works so well is because of the proprietary hardware. It's a lot easier when you have control over that sort of stuff--less driver weirdness, better integration, etc.
Argh. Oh well. I haven't actually seen the series yet: I was planning on seeing it very soon though. I saw the OAV well before I ever conceived that I would consider watching a series such as Kenshin (it's such a commitment!). But having just finished Ranma 1/2, mostly, I guess I have no excuse anymore.
Ranma 1/2 in live-action... that would be amazingly high-budget and to no good purpose! The characters often defy physics but that isn't what the story is about.
(I'm trying to picture Akane getting mad at Ranma in live-action, and it's not working. Not to mention it would bring a whole new meaning to the term ``double'' =)
Another element you see in anime is the alteration of animation style as a device. I really liked the use of this in the end of Evangelion TV, and FLCL makes good use of it too.
Don't forget the Kenshin OAV---it's a superb story and excellent technically as well. It's a ``pre-quel'' to the main series.
I agree. Particularly because Rei, while I cannot recall exactly where I heard this, is supposed to be an albino. She's not ``just your average Japanese girl'' and anyone who's seen the series will know precisely what I mean, whether you agree on the albinism or not.
Many characters in Crest of the Stars have blue hair as well, but that is due to genetic modification. On the other hand, Akane in Ranma seems to have dark navy blue hair, and Shampoo has really bright blue hair, and I don't see any particular reason for it. But then again, it's Ranma.
I also think he's reading too much into character drawing. Eyes are drawn large in all animated features in order to express emotions more clearly. Eyebrows appearing on top of hair are also drawn for this purpose. The customs and habits of the characters generally seem to match whatever nationality they are supposed to be: if they are Japanese then they behave Japanese, whatever the look might be.
That astrologer guy was nuts. Everyone knows that Lilith is under Tokyo-3.
I wasn't aware that the human race had become so geeky in general that no one ever went outside anymore.
But they were invented in Belgium ;)
By cheap-action I meant shallow, short-attention span sorta thing. Like you find on TV. I don't discriminate against misogynists necessarily either. I've read Mencken and Bierce.
It's been a long time since I read it, so it's rather fuzzy, but I remember being deluged by details and not really knowing what was important or not. In War and Peace the details were interesting, at least.
It is only "intuitive" to use a pen on a tablet because that's how you learned to use a pen. If you learned how to use a pen to stab people's eyes out, then you would have no idea how to use a pen with a tablet.
Of the 6+ billion people on this planet, a very high proportion of them will never read or write. When I consider the definition of the word "intuitive", I think of trying to explain something that is "intuitive" to us in the developed world, to someone who did not grow in the same environment we did. Handing a person, taken at random from a sample of the entire world, a pen and a tablet will have unpredictable results. If you assume literacy (and then there's the language issue) then you are relying on prior knowledge.
As for the usage of the word "intuitive", I actually think that most usages of the word are incorrect. People use words in incorrect ways all the time, but we gather their meaning from context and common sense. When have you heard a usage of the word "intuitive" that, when applied to some concept, actually meant "intuitive" and not some better term such as "reminiscent"?
What, then is the correct usage of "intuitive"? To describe that which is obtained through the process of "intuition". That is -- arriving at a conclusion without a clear reasoning path (The meaning of life is 42. How do I know? It's intuitive! I used my intuition to figure it out, but otherwise I can't explain.). Can that be relied upon to obtain the same results in different people? No! There will always be a sample of people that do not exhibit the same ability at intuition, and without a clear reasoning path they can easily arrive at different conclusions.
I found Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls sadly disappointing and boring, when I read it in high school. I wound up skipping through many of the pages. While I probably should, one of these days, give a shot at another Hemingway book, I am having a little trouble seeing why he's so great. Perhaps that was his one bad book. And no, I'm not the cheap-action type; I had previously read War and Peace and enjoyed it far more. My first exposure to Steinbeck was The Pearl which was horrid, but then I got to read The Grapes of Wrath which was excellent. I think you are discounting the ability of sci-fi and fantasy authors too much though. Asimov, Bradbury, Card, Herbert, Heinlein, Stephenson, Jordan, Tolkien, and others who I can't remember off the top of my head, are all fine authors with excellent books in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Just because the setting is fictional doesn't mean that the story is bogus. Sometimes, some things cannot be well orchestrated in the boundaries of "factual settings". Consider the whole theme of Dune. Prescience is not real, is it?
As for Piers Anthony, I enjoyed the usage of puns in Xanth. Eventually it got old and I stopped reading the series.
It's not elegance unless Perl allows you to add constructs such as "next if $foo;" to the language yourself, via the language.
Lisp does. Lisp has been around for 40 years. And I guarantee you that a Lisp will still be here 40 years from now. Languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby continually try to measure up to it, XML tries to imitate its data structure, and most people could learn a few lessons from it. Dynamic semantics and structured data/code aren't going to vanish on a whim, unlike certain other languages tied to a particular creator's looniness (not naming names, but you know who I mean).
You didn't get it.
First:
If intuition means knowledge without reasoning, then that knowledge must vary from person to person. Without clear logical steps there is no way to duplicate the intuition of one person in another person. All one can hope for is that the results might be the same, due to environment. How much shared environment is there between all peoples? Ediger thought it was breast-feeding, but even that's not so (admittedly it was in a humorous vein). Therefore, how useful is such a term as "intuitive" in describing interfaces? Absolutely useless. It is a buzzword, at best.
Example: You are presented with a box and a plastic tube sticking out of it. What do you do?
Next, try recursively following your examples and you will see why Ediger said what he said (and another poster pointed out that even the nipple wasn't intuitive!):
First, you must abandon all your preconceptions. Make like Descartes.
In fact, the only conclusion I've been able to draw about the meaning of the adjective "intuitive" is that it applies to just about nothing but instinctive (ie. born with/genetic) reactions. Everything else you learned at some point. (Note, the noun "intuition" still has meaning: "knowledge without known reasoning", but you can't say a piece of knowledge is "intuitive" because there exists some person who doesn't think so--guarenteed) When most people speak of "intuitive" interfaces, they really mean "reminiscent" interfaces. Interfaces that remind them of ones that they've already learned. The question of designing a good interface is of designing one that can rely on prior experience, can introduce new concepts in a tolerable fashion, that communicates with the user well, and is efficient to use.
Possibilities for box and plastic tube:
- Suck on it
- Blow into it
- Bend it
- Pull it
- Push it
- Cut it
- Chew it
- Step on it
- Kick it
- Pour something into it
- etc...
So which one is "intuitive"?Not that Unix/Linux people couldn't go a long way to designing better interfaces. But demanding "intuitive" is probably one of the reasons why it's taking so long. No one can code "intuitive" interfaces, if they can't even figure out what "intuitive" means! (Unfortunately, it looks like "intuitive" is coming to mean the ugly Windows interface more and more. It's now the most "reminiscent" for most people. So sad really, considering the advances that happened many years ago and were mostly forgotten.)
Perhaps you should be thinking in terms of "rational" and "irrational" numbers rather than ambiguous terms like "mixed number" and "decimal". Then you might realize how ludicrous it sounds to say: "Another great challenge would be to express the value of Pi absolutely using a rational number, rather than an irrational number." Given that the value of Pi is an irrational number, that statement doesn't even make sense!
I am assuming basic knowledge of the difference between rational and irrational numbers however. Rational basically means "can be expressed as a ratio". Irrational is the opposite.
Oh, and that Uncoveror puzzle is a rather tired old trick question that relies on the mind mixing up balances. $9 + $9 + $9 is $27 and the extra dollar for the maid is subtracted, not added, giving a total amount paid to the clerk of $26.
Carnegie Mellon University's Cluster services maintains general student body access Linux and Solaris machines as well as Windows and MacOS. Don't know of any studies, offhand, but it doesn't hurt to look.
The AX.25 amateur packet radio protocol works in a very similar fashion when multiple people attempt to transmit at the same time. Each waits a random number of milliseconds before retransmitting and whoever goes first gets through. But I don't think this is adequate for all types of data, or voice for example.
Also, regulating air is not such a daft idea. Even here on Earth with our bountiful air, we need pollution controls and such. Consider a possible Moon colony. Regulating air would become a life-or-death matter.
First.. you mean suid-root apps.
Second.. someone else mentioned that the virus author sent a sample to 14 different AV companies. So that's how they could've gotten a copy.
Common Lisp doesn't guarentee tail-call elision was my point =) It's just that all good compilers do it.
Are you aware of SBCL by any chance? It's a fork of CMUCL and while it's still very Unix-bound there's a lot of cleanup going on and development is quite active (so is CMUCL for that matter). Besides that there is OpenMCL, CLISP, and ECL all are being worked on, and even GCL might get its act together someday. You should visit CLiki and cCLan too, or stop by OPN #lisp. There are people out there making efforts, though they may not be as visible as someone like Paul Graham.
The only reason why Debian is having trouble with LSB compliance is because LSB was deliberately being Redhat-centric. After a number of flamewars (etc etc) and some constructive criticism, I believe there will now be more input from Debian developers in the LSB process.
As for the installer: Progeny Graphical Installer exists and has been packaged. I'm sure that help would be appreciated for turning this into a releasable, complete replacement for the current Debian installer. Efforts are already underway...
I was actually thinking of some of the issues with CMUCL MP but as you point out, load-balancing would solve that with little trouble.
I presume one wouldn't write lots of recursive functions when the iterative constructs can be used, either...
In my own web apps CMUCL's performance was much more than adequate but I'm pretty sure the server never has seen more than moderate usage.
What's the best way to get people to use CL for this? Use it yourself, and beat them at their own game. Maybe some Lisp-based tools for web developers? Get them out of the pointy-brackets syntax and into S-expressions =)
I bet CLIM would do pretty well for writing a web-page layout designer, for those who don't write by hand...
(sorry for off-topic)
This is still bogus playing with statistics; of course the rich are going to pay more *percentage* of the total taxes.
Bob makes $10 million. Joe makes $10,000. Alice makes $20,000. Fred makes $30,000. Assuming all paid 30% income tax, that would be:
Bob: $3,000,000
Joe: $3,000
Fred: $6,000
Alice: $9,000
Total tax: 3,018,000
Percentage paid by top 25% (Bob): 99.4%
Percentage paid by bottom 75% (rest): 0.6%
Seems that Bob is paying 99.4% of the taxes!
Yet he's getting the same rate as everyone else!
If his tax rate were raised further, he would
only wind up paying a greater percentage of the
total tax.
That the rich are paying a high proportion of the tax does not necessarily imply that they are being taxed disproportionately.
What percentage they should pay is linked to the question of "how much to tax the rich?", which of course will get you different answers from different people.
Malleable syntax, closures, better OO, better exception handling, wow...
Speaking of which, I find CMU Common Lisp w/IMHO to be a better web application environment than Tomcat or any crappy Java servlet-type thing. And it's easier to setup too, amazingly. I do not know how it would perform under extremely heavy loads though. Perhaps AllegroServe with Allegro CL would be better in that situation.
Obviously they should've written it in Common Lisp ;)
:b for backtrace, :c <option number> to proceed, or :? for other options
:C 2
CL-USER 1 > (/ 1 0)
Error: Division-by-zero caused by / of (1 0).
1 (continue) Return a value to use.
2 Supply new arguments to use.
3 (abort) Return to level 0.
4 Return to top loop level 0.
Type
CL-USER 2 : 1 >
Supply first number: 12
Supply second number: 3
4
CL-USER 3 >