I'm starting to wonder how much people like you actually like/., and how many are astroturfing for the american version of the taliban.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Come on, you are so transparently dumb that the only converts you'll get are more dumb people.
And that, ultimately, is the point. Pitch the message to get the converts that you can keep and control. Crowds you can control can lead to power and money. I'm reminded of Stephenson's "Snow Crash". Religion is big business.
Kenyon came to realize that if all this guidance was needed for such little results reached in the lab, that there must have been an intelligent designer.
But that's not a logical or scientific leap, that's a leap of faith. Many other possibilities exist, and many of them are much more likely. It's rather ridiculous, in fact, to try a few things in a lab over a timescale that's essentially zero in comparison to geological time, and then conclude that because in that fleeting instant of time, you couldn't duplicate some very foreign conditions that you actually have little direct knowledge of, there must be a magical universe-wide ghost who did it.
The fact is, nothing you can ever do is going to give scientific evidence of an intelligent designer, short of that designer revealing itself in ways that can be scientifically studied, repeatably. You have to accept that your belief in such a designer is faith (in any case, I thought She wanted it that way?) and give up on the idea that any gap in scientific knowledge can be twisted to help bolster your faith, or to convince other equally weak-minded people to join you in your faith.
The problem with Edmund Spencer's principle is that taken literally, it's a license for any idiot to have his kooky ideas taken seriously. That's not how life works, in practice.
Have you ever noticed how people deaf since birth can't talk properly? Why do you think that is?
Dyslexia doesn't stop most dyslexics from composing an organized thought, but it stops them from expressing them in an organized way in writing. Think of it as an I/O handicap. As compensation for difficulty reading and writing, dyslexics are often incredibly verbally accomplished, which is why you see dyslexic CEOs like Richard Branson of Virgin. The "letters switching" thing is just a tiny part of it. For people who have severe dyslexia, it's a serious disability, and it's sad to see how they're discriminated against by the sheer ignorance of most people.
I've always assumed the lack of literacy is highly correlated with a reduced amount of reading. Completely unscientifically and anecdotally, it seems that the average kid reads much, much less than they used to. Assuming that's correct, then all the homonyms and phonetic spelling are obvious and direct consequences of this - they've only ever heard the words, not read them, so how are they supposed to spell them?
As for the problem-solving skills, I imagine that they've developed those in the same sort of way that people used to develop spelling skills from reading: since the input that these kids have been exposed to is primarily audiovisual, they've learned to deal with and process information in that form. Besides, our thought processes don't typically involve spelling words.
Another post was someone asking if anyone out there had a "spare iPod" they wanted to give away...
Yeah... right... I got spare iPods just floating in my shit...
Funny, I have a spare iPod mini, still in its unopened box, that I have no plans to use. Admittedly, it's more likely to end up in the hands of my g/f's nephews or nieces than being given to a random stranger on freecycle or Slashdot. Still, you never know what people might have that they're willing to give away.
In ordinary (not drugged) sleep, your body usually moves enough to prevent any lasting damage from restricted bloodflow. In the Megadeth case, the guy fell asleep in a chair, with his arm over the back of it. That's a bit different than ordinary sleeping in a bed. Moral of the story: if you're going to play it cool and strike a casual pose, don't fall asleep while doing it.
Intel has shipped CPUs with bugs, like the floating point division bug. They have an incredibly comprehensive set of tests of all kinds. If you think your system would prevent such bugs, then you can make billions of dollars showing Intel and other companies how to do it.
The point is, bug-free applications are only possible in practice in the case of either simple applications, or applications that are highly amenable to testing (e.g. all inputs can be provided, or a subset of inputs is sufficient to rule out bugs even for inputs that haven't been tested). As a simple and common example of a case which is not so amenable to testing, I'm guessing you're not talking about systems with complex user interfaces, since those are notoriously difficult to test, even with the entire industry of UI testing tools that's available.
The success you claim is probably largely due to the kinds of applications you work with.
Flash memory isn't even remotely competitive with RAM memory in terms of performance, so flash won't replace RAM any time soon, not even in PDAs, never mind notebooks. It also has to be erased in blocks, i.e. you can't change a single byte at a time, which leads to serious inefficiencies if used as regular RAM. Finally, it supports a limited number of rewrites, so using it in place of RAM means that it would die really, really quickly. The reason they're only talking about using flash to replace hard disks in certain situations, like notebooks, is that because in other situations, it's just not viable.
However, a variation on your idea about "instant-on" is already being used by PDAs. Some PDAs back up their RAM to flash to achieve instant-on. There's a mention of that in the Wikipedia article on flash memory
Re:I hate books like this
on
Insider Threat
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· Score: 1
"Whatever it says is legally the truth"? If you're going for sarcasm, the rest of your post was a little over the top, but if you're serious, your claim is rather irrelevant to the issue in question.
First, what is "legally the truth" in South Africa certainly has no force over Wikipedia -- otherwise, Wikipedia would have to publish only glowing reports about countries like North Korea, or about e.g. China's human rights records, where the "official truth" is rather at odds with the known facts.
In this particular case, there seems little doubt that Botha's administration was responsible for executing the bombing(s) in question, but the claim that Botha directly ordered any of them is little more than an allegation by Adriaan Vlok and Johan van der Merwe. That doesn't mean it's not true, but it's not a fact that has been verified on the same level as "Nazis killed millions of Jews", etc. -- it's merely the testimony of a couple of people who had something to gain (amnesty).
Botha may very well have ordered the bombing -- I think it's highly likely that he did -- but the only fact we can be certain about is that it has been alleged that he did so. For all we know, the TRC pressured Vlok and Van der Merwe to make those specific statements. Absent a confession from Botha, or significant corroborating evidence from others, it is an allegation (are there facts I'm not aware of? If so, I'd appreciate a link).
Note that I'm not attempting to excuse Botha's many crimes against humanity. If it were up to me, he'd be in jail for the rest of his life. I think it's a pity that his refusal to testify didn't lead to such an outcome. However, that still doesn't mean you can assume facts about him just because, in essence, a couple of people said so.
We need more smart people, be they men, women or something in between, and it doesn't really matter to me how they dress or act as long as they're willing to do their best.
That makes sense, but it's not what this sort of social policy is aimed at. You're objecting from the perspective of an individual, intellectually gifted woman, that you don't like being tagged as needing special attention because of your gender. And of course you don't need that attention, because you're unusually smart. But not everyone who does the equivalent of a bachelor's in CS is that smart, and social policy aimed at leveling the playing field for women in CS and other technical fields isn't aimed at "smart people" other than the average college level, bachelor's (sic) degree students.
You mentioned in an earlier post the implication that "poor stupid little girls just couldn't handle having big smart intimidating boys around" -- but that's exactly what research seems to have shown, in general: that most women (at least women raised in the U.S.) will avoid situations in which they have to compete with "intimidating boys". You just happen to be an exception. In this context, reaching out equally to boys and girls misses the point -- if the boys naturally create an environment that's unattractive to girls, you have to do something to even the playing field if you want anything to change.
Those airheads you're concerned about are a product of an imbalanced system, and change has to start somewhere. Of course, I'm not claiming that every affirmative action measure taken in favor of women is perfectly optimal, but I do think you should recognize that actions being taken to address pervasive influences that affect women's life choices don't necessarily have to make sense in your individual case, but can still make sense for society as a whole.
It's the other way around - the British billion used to be a million million, i.e. 1000 American billions. They officially changed it, though - see here.
When you get right down to it, the original purpose cursive was to facilitate writing with a quill. Every lift and drop of the quill pen would leave a blob of ink.
Aha - obvious in hindsight, thanks!
I look forward to the day when the ubiquity of the keyboard finally drives a stake through the heart of cursive writing.
I've tried the "wait for it to die" approach on many things, but people are stubborn and change-averse, so it takes too long. I now prefer the "if I ignore it, it won't go away, but at least it won't bother me" approach. Then again, my boss(es) give me instructions in email or verbally, so I don't have to interpret anyone's cursive on a regular basis.
One other discovery was that printing (writing each letter separately) was practically as fast as writing joined-up, and again, much more readable, especially at speed.
I discovered the same thing in high school (a long time ago in a country far, far away...) My cursive writing was mediocre (unattractive) at best, and messy at worst, but switching to printing made it much more legible and attractive.
I agree, the practical benefits of cursive writing are overrated. It comes from an era in which royal personages such as the famed Earl of Higglesbottom (nonexistent, but you get the idea) would have his secretary write long missives in a beautiful, flowing script. Of course, the commoners wanted to emulate that, and teachers knew that if they taught their students how to write that way, then one day, they might be able to get a job as they Earl of Higglesbottom's secretary, which was a good gig if you could get it, a farthing a week and a half-day off on Sunday.
Teachers as a group, however, are terribly slow to adapt to change, and few of them seem to have noticed that the current Earl of Higglesbottom is drunk who had to sell his ancestral castle and now lives above the grocer's in a bedsit, so there's really no point to cursive any more.
The pound-me-in-the-ass line was pretty funny, in context. IIRC, one of the uses of the phrase was in discussion with a lawyer in the garden at a party, and it wasn't so much the line itself that's funny, but rather the behavior and interaction of the characters. The line then becomes a hook which reminds those who've seen and appreciated the movie, of the humor involved.
There, that explanation ought to do for all but the most extreme Asperger-syndrome-afflicted geeks on Slashdot.
Office Space is a brilliant movie. They could completely remove Jennifer Aniston and the (quite marginal) romance aspect from the movie and it would still be brilliant. However, to appreciate its brilliance, you do have to have some experience with the environment which it satirizes. If you don't have such experience, consider yourself lucky. If you do, and you still missed the point of Office Space, report immediately for adjustment of your sense of humor.
Which seems to be the operative factor. I notice you don't mention any modern functional language, and while I'm not necessarily advocating those (mainly because they're not "mainstream"), in many ways they are good fits for application domains such as physics. Mathematical formulae can be expressed very naturally in those languages - see the Sussman & Wisdom book I linked to.
bee-in-his-bonnet-Perl-hating Slashdot poster!!
I have never responded to anyone who says "I use Perl" to tell them that I don't like their choice of language. As I said, I responded to you because of your claim that physics grad students "really ought to know enough Perl...". It's precisely because these people aren't going to go on to be programmers that I'm saying that there are more appropriate languages to point them to. Perl has a lot of complexity with little payback, i.e. you can get the same stuff done with less of a "kitchen sink" approach.
Particularly for people who aren't necessarily programming every day, it's a poor choice. Programs written in Perl by ordinary programmers tend to be much less manageable and maintainable, and more buggy than similar programs written in other languages. I've seen this at my clients (I'm a contract developer), but you can also see evidence of this on the web, where so many web apps early on were written in Perl, until the problems with that surfaced (take a look at Slashcode sometime), and now a majority of development of such systems have moved to more tractable and appropriate languages, including Python and PHP (the latter being pretty much limited to web development, though).
Re: argument to self-authority, I sure as HELL am going to trust my judgement as to what will work well for my students
You're a professor, and you're setting up your students so they can do as well as you have, computationally speaking. Makes perfect sense, in a way. But you're also a scientist, so you probably have some concept of the value of theory, the scientific method, and for that matter, the formality of mathematics. People who have applied those kinds of ideas to programming languages have concluded that there are better ways to do things than Perl. That's my appeal to authority. But in a wonderful display of academic backbiting, you've already dimissed "CS geeks". I'm glad that I majored in physics and math, so I can't be counted as one of those.
As a physics professor, I would guess that I'm WAY better qualified to judge that than you are. Sorry about ruining your religion and all.
I'll agree with you, if you can tell me you've made an honest attempt to try other similarly high-level languages (i.e. not C) and found them wanting. If you're saying you use Perl because that's what you're familiar with, then you're on shaky ground for making choices for other people, or influencing their choices. You say you used to do this stuff with C but now find Perl better -- but what languages are your current students going to find better than Perl in future? How do you know those languages aren't already available? Have you looked?
Also, your appeal to self-authority on this matter doesn't mean much if other authorities have made very different choices. For example, Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary science at MIT and co-author of Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, seems to have chosen Scheme (although I don't doubt that Gerald Sussman would have had a strong influence on that choice).
To bring this back to why I responded in the first place, I responded to your statement that "They really ought to know enough Perl". I vehemently disagree with the "ought". I don't have a problem with your subsequent restatement, that you "don't care if they know Perl or something else".
However, if you're really out there influencing your students to use Perl, I don't think you're doing them any favors. If you don't want to go for something quite as "fringe" as Scheme or its functional cousins like Ocaml, SML or Haskell, I'd suggest that even Python would be a big step up from Perl in terms of ease of use for casual programmers, tractability and maintainability of programs, etc. Googling for "Python physics" indicates that you wouldn't be the first to go that route, and in fact googling for "Perl physics" seems far less fruitful. Argumentum ad googlum at least matches appeal to self-authority.;-)
I'm just emulating Linus.;) But really, I think history will prove my words right, and they can't really be fightin words if they're merely factual, can they?
Whether you enjoy Perl or not, Perl is interesting because it was developed by a linguist and modelled after human languages, rather than by a Math geek modelled after a strict theoretical model. It's fairly unique in that perspective.
I agree Perl is an "interesting" language. However, I think the "developed by a linguist and modelled after human languages" claim is way overrated. Larry may (be|have been) a linguist, and he may have attempted to model it after human languages, but frankly I think he did a pretty poor job. If the claim were true, it would be rather an amazing coincidence that the syntax and some of the semantics of Perl just happen to bear such a close similarity to shell scripting languages -- were those also developed by linguists and modelled after human languages?
Do you think that the "modelling after human languages" thing was a success? For example, can you show that large numbers of casual programmers (e.g. physics students, etc.) find Perl easier to use than other languages? From what I've seen, Perl is one of the worst languages in that respect -- casual programmers have a much easier time with languages like Basic and Javascript, despite their not having been designed by linguists. If being "modelled after human languages" doesn't make the language easier for ordinary humans to grasp, what does it actually mean?
The truth is that Perl has a few fairly trivial features that provide some flexibility not found in many other programming languages. Those features can arguably be related to features of human languages, but they're of incredibly little consequence in the bigger picture of programming language usability, and have absolutely no demonstrated benefit in terms of making the language more tractable for humans. The main use for such features seems to be to be able to say things like "Look! I can make Perl follow the sentence structure of Latin!" Pity that has no real relevance to programming.
That's kind of the point. You'd apparently like to push your language love onto poor unsuspecting physics students. I'm saying that Perl is not an appropriate choice of language for a physics student. I'm not saying that "I love my language". I'm saying that of the many languages I've programmed in, including Perl, Perl is one of the last ones I'd foist on someone else who's not a programming professional.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not a logical or scientific leap, that's a leap of faith. Many other possibilities exist, and many of them are much more likely. It's rather ridiculous, in fact, to try a few things in a lab over a timescale that's essentially zero in comparison to geological time, and then conclude that because in that fleeting instant of time, you couldn't duplicate some very foreign conditions that you actually have little direct knowledge of, there must be a magical universe-wide ghost who did it.
The fact is, nothing you can ever do is going to give scientific evidence of an intelligent designer, short of that designer revealing itself in ways that can be scientifically studied, repeatably. You have to accept that your belief in such a designer is faith (in any case, I thought She wanted it that way?) and give up on the idea that any gap in scientific knowledge can be twisted to help bolster your faith, or to convince other equally weak-minded people to join you in your faith.
The problem with Edmund Spencer's principle is that taken literally, it's a license for any idiot to have his kooky ideas taken seriously. That's not how life works, in practice.
Have you ever noticed how people deaf since birth can't talk properly? Why do you think that is?
Dyslexia doesn't stop most dyslexics from composing an organized thought, but it stops them from expressing them in an organized way in writing. Think of it as an I/O handicap. As compensation for difficulty reading and writing, dyslexics are often incredibly verbally accomplished, which is why you see dyslexic CEOs like Richard Branson of Virgin. The "letters switching" thing is just a tiny part of it. For people who have severe dyslexia, it's a serious disability, and it's sad to see how they're discriminated against by the sheer ignorance of most people.
Are you ignorant, insensitive, or did you just miss the part where Zephiria wrote "Ironically i'm also Dyslexic"?
I've always assumed the lack of literacy is highly correlated with a reduced amount of reading. Completely unscientifically and anecdotally, it seems that the average kid reads much, much less than they used to. Assuming that's correct, then all the homonyms and phonetic spelling are obvious and direct consequences of this - they've only ever heard the words, not read them, so how are they supposed to spell them?
As for the problem-solving skills, I imagine that they've developed those in the same sort of way that people used to develop spelling skills from reading: since the input that these kids have been exposed to is primarily audiovisual, they've learned to deal with and process information in that form. Besides, our thought processes don't typically involve spelling words.
I'm not sure a pun on the name "Butt" qualifies as "elaborate humour"! Except if you're deliberately playing to the short bus crowd, that is...
In ordinary (not drugged) sleep, your body usually moves enough to prevent any lasting damage from restricted bloodflow. In the Megadeth case, the guy fell asleep in a chair, with his arm over the back of it. That's a bit different than ordinary sleeping in a bed. Moral of the story: if you're going to play it cool and strike a casual pose, don't fall asleep while doing it.
Intel has shipped CPUs with bugs, like the floating point division bug. They have an incredibly comprehensive set of tests of all kinds. If you think your system would prevent such bugs, then you can make billions of dollars showing Intel and other companies how to do it.
The point is, bug-free applications are only possible in practice in the case of either simple applications, or applications that are highly amenable to testing (e.g. all inputs can be provided, or a subset of inputs is sufficient to rule out bugs even for inputs that haven't been tested). As a simple and common example of a case which is not so amenable to testing, I'm guessing you're not talking about systems with complex user interfaces, since those are notoriously difficult to test, even with the entire industry of UI testing tools that's available.
The success you claim is probably largely due to the kinds of applications you work with.
Flash memory isn't even remotely competitive with RAM memory in terms of performance, so flash won't replace RAM any time soon, not even in PDAs, never mind notebooks. It also has to be erased in blocks, i.e. you can't change a single byte at a time, which leads to serious inefficiencies if used as regular RAM. Finally, it supports a limited number of rewrites, so using it in place of RAM means that it would die really, really quickly. The reason they're only talking about using flash to replace hard disks in certain situations, like notebooks, is that because in other situations, it's just not viable.
However, a variation on your idea about "instant-on" is already being used by PDAs. Some PDAs back up their RAM to flash to achieve instant-on. There's a mention of that in the Wikipedia article on flash memory
6 feet wide? That was an American.
<ducks>
"Whatever it says is legally the truth"? If you're going for sarcasm, the rest of your post was a little over the top, but if you're serious, your claim is rather irrelevant to the issue in question.
First, what is "legally the truth" in South Africa certainly has no force over Wikipedia -- otherwise, Wikipedia would have to publish only glowing reports about countries like North Korea, or about e.g. China's human rights records, where the "official truth" is rather at odds with the known facts.
In this particular case, there seems little doubt that Botha's administration was responsible for executing the bombing(s) in question, but the claim that Botha directly ordered any of them is little more than an allegation by Adriaan Vlok and Johan van der Merwe. That doesn't mean it's not true, but it's not a fact that has been verified on the same level as "Nazis killed millions of Jews", etc. -- it's merely the testimony of a couple of people who had something to gain (amnesty).
Botha may very well have ordered the bombing -- I think it's highly likely that he did -- but the only fact we can be certain about is that it has been alleged that he did so. For all we know, the TRC pressured Vlok and Van der Merwe to make those specific statements. Absent a confession from Botha, or significant corroborating evidence from others, it is an allegation (are there facts I'm not aware of? If so, I'd appreciate a link).
Note that I'm not attempting to excuse Botha's many crimes against humanity. If it were up to me, he'd be in jail for the rest of his life. I think it's a pity that his refusal to testify didn't lead to such an outcome. However, that still doesn't mean you can assume facts about him just because, in essence, a couple of people said so.
That makes sense, but it's not what this sort of social policy is aimed at. You're objecting from the perspective of an individual, intellectually gifted woman, that you don't like being tagged as needing special attention because of your gender. And of course you don't need that attention, because you're unusually smart. But not everyone who does the equivalent of a bachelor's in CS is that smart, and social policy aimed at leveling the playing field for women in CS and other technical fields isn't aimed at "smart people" other than the average college level, bachelor's (sic) degree students.
You mentioned in an earlier post the implication that "poor stupid little girls just couldn't handle having big smart intimidating boys around" -- but that's exactly what research seems to have shown, in general: that most women (at least women raised in the U.S.) will avoid situations in which they have to compete with "intimidating boys". You just happen to be an exception. In this context, reaching out equally to boys and girls misses the point -- if the boys naturally create an environment that's unattractive to girls, you have to do something to even the playing field if you want anything to change.
Those airheads you're concerned about are a product of an imbalanced system, and change has to start somewhere. Of course, I'm not claiming that every affirmative action measure taken in favor of women is perfectly optimal, but I do think you should recognize that actions being taken to address pervasive influences that affect women's life choices don't necessarily have to make sense in your individual case, but can still make sense for society as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
It's the other way around - the British billion used to be a million million, i.e. 1000 American billions. They officially changed it, though - see here.
I discovered the same thing in high school (a long time ago in a country far, far away...) My cursive writing was mediocre (unattractive) at best, and messy at worst, but switching to printing made it much more legible and attractive.
I agree, the practical benefits of cursive writing are overrated. It comes from an era in which royal personages such as the famed Earl of Higglesbottom (nonexistent, but you get the idea) would have his secretary write long missives in a beautiful, flowing script. Of course, the commoners wanted to emulate that, and teachers knew that if they taught their students how to write that way, then one day, they might be able to get a job as they Earl of Higglesbottom's secretary, which was a good gig if you could get it, a farthing a week and a half-day off on Sunday.
Teachers as a group, however, are terribly slow to adapt to change, and few of them seem to have noticed that the current Earl of Higglesbottom is drunk who had to sell his ancestral castle and now lives above the grocer's in a bedsit, so there's really no point to cursive any more.
The pound-me-in-the-ass line was pretty funny, in context. IIRC, one of the uses of the phrase was in discussion with a lawyer in the garden at a party, and it wasn't so much the line itself that's funny, but rather the behavior and interaction of the characters. The line then becomes a hook which reminds those who've seen and appreciated the movie, of the humor involved.
There, that explanation ought to do for all but the most extreme Asperger-syndrome-afflicted geeks on Slashdot.
Office Space is a brilliant movie. They could completely remove Jennifer Aniston and the (quite marginal) romance aspect from the movie and it would still be brilliant. However, to appreciate its brilliance, you do have to have some experience with the environment which it satirizes. If you don't have such experience, consider yourself lucky. If you do, and you still missed the point of Office Space, report immediately for adjustment of your sense of humor.
Which seems to be the operative factor. I notice you don't mention any modern functional language, and while I'm not necessarily advocating those (mainly because they're not "mainstream"), in many ways they are good fits for application domains such as physics. Mathematical formulae can be expressed very naturally in those languages - see the Sussman & Wisdom book I linked to.
I have never responded to anyone who says "I use Perl" to tell them that I don't like their choice of language. As I said, I responded to you because of your claim that physics grad students "really ought to know enough Perl...". It's precisely because these people aren't going to go on to be programmers that I'm saying that there are more appropriate languages to point them to. Perl has a lot of complexity with little payback, i.e. you can get the same stuff done with less of a "kitchen sink" approach.
Particularly for people who aren't necessarily programming every day, it's a poor choice. Programs written in Perl by ordinary programmers tend to be much less manageable and maintainable, and more buggy than similar programs written in other languages. I've seen this at my clients (I'm a contract developer), but you can also see evidence of this on the web, where so many web apps early on were written in Perl, until the problems with that surfaced (take a look at Slashcode sometime), and now a majority of development of such systems have moved to more tractable and appropriate languages, including Python and PHP (the latter being pretty much limited to web development, though).
You're a professor, and you're setting up your students so they can do as well as you have, computationally speaking. Makes perfect sense, in a way. But you're also a scientist, so you probably have some concept of the value of theory, the scientific method, and for that matter, the formality of mathematics. People who have applied those kinds of ideas to programming languages have concluded that there are better ways to do things than Perl. That's my appeal to authority. But in a wonderful display of academic backbiting, you've already dimissed "CS geeks". I'm glad that I majored in physics and math, so I can't be counted as one of those.
I'll agree with you, if you can tell me you've made an honest attempt to try other similarly high-level languages (i.e. not C) and found them wanting. If you're saying you use Perl because that's what you're familiar with, then you're on shaky ground for making choices for other people, or influencing their choices. You say you used to do this stuff with C but now find Perl better -- but what languages are your current students going to find better than Perl in future? How do you know those languages aren't already available? Have you looked?
Also, your appeal to self-authority on this matter doesn't mean much if other authorities have made very different choices. For example, Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary science at MIT and co-author of Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, seems to have chosen Scheme (although I don't doubt that Gerald Sussman would have had a strong influence on that choice).
To bring this back to why I responded in the first place, I responded to your statement that "They really ought to know enough Perl". I vehemently disagree with the "ought". I don't have a problem with your subsequent restatement, that you "don't care if they know Perl or something else".
However, if you're really out there influencing your students to use Perl, I don't think you're doing them any favors. If you don't want to go for something quite as "fringe" as Scheme or its functional cousins like Ocaml, SML or Haskell, I'd suggest that even Python would be a big step up from Perl in terms of ease of use for casual programmers, tractability and maintainability of programs, etc. Googling for "Python physics" indicates that you wouldn't be the first to go that route, and in fact googling for "Perl physics" seems far less fruitful. Argumentum ad googlum at least matches appeal to self-authority. ;-)
I'm just emulating Linus. ;) But really, I think history will prove my words right, and they can't really be fightin words if they're merely factual, can they?
I agree Perl is an "interesting" language. However, I think the "developed by a linguist and modelled after human languages" claim is way overrated. Larry may (be|have been) a linguist, and he may have attempted to model it after human languages, but frankly I think he did a pretty poor job. If the claim were true, it would be rather an amazing coincidence that the syntax and some of the semantics of Perl just happen to bear such a close similarity to shell scripting languages -- were those also developed by linguists and modelled after human languages?
Do you think that the "modelling after human languages" thing was a success? For example, can you show that large numbers of casual programmers (e.g. physics students, etc.) find Perl easier to use than other languages? From what I've seen, Perl is one of the worst languages in that respect -- casual programmers have a much easier time with languages like Basic and Javascript, despite their not having been designed by linguists. If being "modelled after human languages" doesn't make the language easier for ordinary humans to grasp, what does it actually mean?
The truth is that Perl has a few fairly trivial features that provide some flexibility not found in many other programming languages. Those features can arguably be related to features of human languages, but they're of incredibly little consequence in the bigger picture of programming language usability, and have absolutely no demonstrated benefit in terms of making the language more tractable for humans. The main use for such features seems to be to be able to say things like "Look! I can make Perl follow the sentence structure of Latin!" Pity that has no real relevance to programming.