LaTeX actually has quite a low learning curve, for the usual applications. I've gotten by for ten years with nothing but the first Lamport book and the occasional google search.
You will definitely find yourself typing much less boilerplate than with an SGML descendant. I don't know of other plain-text formats, which to my mind is crucial.
Also, the huge number of tools for working with LaTeX, DVI, and PostScript files means there's virtually always a solution to your current problem.
TeX and LaTeX do have some disadvantages for the serious typesetting hobbyist, but for writing academic papers, I firmly believe that there is absolutely no substitute.
"72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be 'somewhat' or 'very' helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks..."
this is not the same thing "favoring" such a solution... i think that having every american citizen stopped at checkpoints every 10 miles on every highway would be 'somehwat' or 'very' helpful in preventing drunk driving, but i certainly don't "favor" it as a solution.
i abhor the idea of crypto backdoors, but i would've said "yes" on this poll as well...
my comments are specifically meant to provide a counterpoint to his comments regarding the "point" of a course on the fundamentals of computer science. his argument against java was based on his belief that a high school ap computer science course should be focusing on the fundamentals of computer science, and that those fundamentals are, essentially, architectural.
i disagree! i think the von neumann architecture is certainly fundamental, and worth studying in detail, but i think it is doing students a great disservice to educate them with that as the starting point. what about logic? what about the lambda calculus? what about mathematical computablility? what about type theory? object theory? another example: most people who program today faced concurrency as an afterthought, as an unfortunately ugly beast that they dealt with only when forced to... how much better would we all be at concurrency if we had dealt with it as a fundamental conceptural part of programming from the very beginning? and how many major software projects today can ignore concurrency? i think these are the fundamentals that sould be taught in an ap c.s. course.
most students taking such a course in high school can already write passable code in one or more languages. arm them with the concepts behind programming, and you're giving them a much stronger edge for further education, as well as introducing them to a far more widely applicable mode of thinking about computation.
however, i don't think that java is the right choice for illustrating those fundamentals, either. i'm not sure what is. if i were forced to choose, i would go with a modern functional language like standard ml or haskell.
all that said, obviously the whole point of ap classes in high school is to prepare the students for some kind of standard ap test, so the curriculum can only be chosen by the school within a very fixed set of margins... i'm not sure what organization actually decides the content of ap curricula, but i'm sure some astute reader does...
my understanding of the difference is that simulated annealing is basically an iterative optimization algorithm which adds a stochastic element to avoid getting stuck at a local extremum, while genetic algorithms use both stochastic methods (mutation) and a heuristic (natural selection) to choose from a possibly large number of candidates at each stage, and then expand those nodes that "survive."
i'm not sure that's clear... or correct either, for that matter...:)
that was not a fictional story! the system is called tierra, and while there's some not-particularly-exciting stuff associated with it, you can download the source code and have hours of fun with it... and there's some pretty interesting reading and so on: the tierra project. note: i haven't looked at this site in a couple of years (except just now to verify that it really still exists), so the project may be defunct... looks like everything's still there, though.
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LaTeX actually has quite a low learning curve, for the usual applications. I've gotten by for ten years with nothing but the first Lamport book and the occasional google search.
You will definitely find yourself typing much less boilerplate than with an SGML descendant. I don't know of other plain-text formats, which to my mind is crucial.
Also, the huge number of tools for working with LaTeX, DVI, and PostScript files means there's virtually always a solution to your current problem.
TeX and LaTeX do have some disadvantages for the serious typesetting hobbyist, but for writing academic papers, I firmly believe that there is absolutely no substitute.
Brunner's "Compleat Traveller in Black" is absolutely excellent, and in my opinion, well worth tracking down.
"72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be 'somewhat' or 'very' helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks..."
this is not the same thing "favoring" such a solution... i think that having every american citizen stopped at checkpoints every 10 miles on every highway would be 'somehwat' or 'very' helpful in preventing drunk driving, but i certainly don't "favor" it as a solution.
i abhor the idea of crypto backdoors, but i would've said "yes" on this poll as well...
i disagree! i think the von neumann architecture is certainly fundamental, and worth studying in detail, but i think it is doing students a great disservice to educate them with that as the starting point. what about logic? what about the lambda calculus? what about mathematical computablility? what about type theory? object theory? another example: most people who program today faced concurrency as an afterthought, as an unfortunately ugly beast that they dealt with only when forced to... how much better would we all be at concurrency if we had dealt with it as a fundamental conceptural part of programming from the very beginning? and how many major software projects today can ignore concurrency? i think these are the fundamentals that sould be taught in an ap c.s. course.
most students taking such a course in high school can already write passable code in one or more languages. arm them with the concepts behind programming, and you're giving them a much stronger edge for further education, as well as introducing them to a far more widely applicable mode of thinking about computation.
however, i don't think that java is the right choice for illustrating those fundamentals, either. i'm not sure what is. if i were forced to choose, i would go with a modern functional language like standard ml or haskell.
all that said, obviously the whole point of ap classes in high school is to prepare the students for some kind of standard ap test, so the curriculum can only be chosen by the school within a very fixed set of margins... i'm not sure what organization actually decides the content of ap curricula, but i'm sure some astute reader does...
i'm not sure that's clear... or correct either, for that matter... :)
that was not a fictional story! the system is called tierra, and while there's some not-particularly-exciting stuff associated with it, you can download the source code and have hours of fun with it... and there's some pretty interesting reading and so on: the tierra project.
note: i haven't looked at this site in a couple of years (except just now to verify that it really still exists), so the project may be defunct... looks like everything's still there, though.