> Python can't realistically support Lisp-style macros, doesn't support true closures, and many > other things of Goodness that make Lisp languages so good for rapid coding.
Strange that Python doesn't support Fortran type line numbers or BASIC type OPEN statements either. If you want to use Lisp, use Lisp. Python is its own animal.
> Python is slow. So we have a slow language. So what?
Exactly. So what. The speed of the interpreter is usually not the bottle-neck in most app domains. If it is, use a different language. Python is fast enough for most uses, and can easily bind to libraries in C or what-have-you for those parts of your app that need performance.
In the meantime, you can develop your program faster and more error-free, by a factor of 5x or 10x depending on which study you believe. Getting a project done, on time, on budget, and working correctly is more impotant than speed almost always.
> A malformed object oriented system.
I am not a purist. I like to get work done, and have other people understand what I am doing and why. Python has a highly usable object-oriented architecture that works very easily for 99% of what I need, and can be hacked (thanks to its marvellous introspection) for the other 1%.
Python is easy to learn, easy to write, easy to read, and produces bug-free code faster than any language I have ever used. The number of rules I have to keep in my head is approaching zero.
Really, your comments demonstrate that either a) you have never programmed a real-world project in Python, or b) you are too attached to Lisp to give Python a fair shot.
Either way, you apparently care more for theoretical concerns than practical, and so are not a good candidate for Python anyway.
This is a ridiculous over-generalized list that could do with a lot of trimming. Its primary purpose is apparently self-promotion.
The revolutions in Electronics and Computers basically rely upon the integrated circuit and lasers, one of which is already on the list. To include the Automobile and justify it by saying that it may "be the ultimate symbol of personal freedom" merely highlights the deluded state that supporters of the car are in, completely ignoring the deleterious effects on our limited natural resources, the environment, personal interaction, and our mental health. Not to mention that the automobile was invented two centuries before the 20th. As described, Agricultural Mechanization reduces to the Automobile, so I say we drop it. The Telephone was invented in the 19th century. As for Highways, go talk to the Romans about them! Water Supply and Distribution? I believe the hand-cranked pump and the Archimedes screw did more for this endeavour that anything we've come up with recently. Electrification? Hello?
Spacecraft are of debatable importance in the exploration of space, Imaging technologies being much more powerful and less invasive. Sorry Star Trek fans, but every time the space shuttle punches another hole in the atmosphere we lose a significant part of our precious ozone layer. This is not a sustainable technology. Let's not even get into Nuclear Technologies, which countries are abandoning en masse as they are far too expensive in the short term, let alone the incalculable costs in the longer term.
Two very general categories are Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies and High-performance Materials. Let's just say "plastics" and be done with it. Health Technologies reduces primarily to other categories. Since we've already got the laser, let's specify Imaging as Microwaves. This also helps cover Household Appliances, a very broad category that includes lots of advances made before last century.
Reordering what remains gives us:
1. Internet 2. Laser 3. Airplane 4. Integrated Circuit 5. Radio and Television 6. Refrigeration 7. Microwaves
vast majority of testers could not even hear the difference between CD audio and MP3 audio.
This is quite sad, since the difference is obvious with all except the very best codecs.
And even then, CD audio is hardly the be-all and end-all of audio formats, been noticeably inferior to DAT, vinyl, reel-to-reel, and other standard formats.
Let's not limit ourselves to CD quality audio.
'Twould be like limiting ourselves to McDonalds quality beef.
-----
Re:Miraculous experiment you can do
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
What I mean is like this: take several decks of cards, shuffle and deal them all out. Wow! The odds against THAT particular deal happening are tremendous! It's a bloody miracle that, out of all the possible deals, THAT one occurred!
Furthermore, if it is true that only one "deal" would result in us humans, then none of the others are open to observation. The one "deal" we are in would appear miraculous no matter which one it was.
Good example.
-----
Re:Is it so hard to accept the possibility?
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
I think it is humankind's hubris, though, that we are some special thing and that the universe revolves around is. The universe doesn't give a damn about us, and our own stupidity could very well get us all exterminated.
I am in agreement.
Because we see the universe from our and only our perspective (with limited senses, reasoning ability, problems [and joys] of flesh, and attendant limits) it is only natural for the lazy to assume that the universe was made for us. Davies makes this very mistake.
If we were planaria we might just as well reason the universe was made for planaria. Look! It's two dimensional, just like us! It's wet for sliding, provides us with just the food we need, feels great on our cilia, and entertains us with light!
This is not to criticize Davies' other contributions to the literature of science.
-----
Re:Davies is a good author, but...
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
When Stephen Hawking published his "Brief History of Time", he was fond of recounting how his publishers warned him against using mathematical formulae in the book - that each formula would result in the corresponding loss of x-thousand sales. As a result, the only formula published in the final book, IIRC, was E=mc^2.
...so we can assume he lost sales proportional to the speed of light squared times the mass of his readers? [grin]
I've never even heard of Lynda Wienman, or her books, or even her website and I've been making webpages since '95 Just paid a visit to the site - what's the big deal?
Maybe you just don't get out much? [grin]
Lynda's contribution to web design rests mostly on her championing of the browser-safe palette and image optimisation -- basically a "less is more" philosophy that was very refreshing and influential at a time of massive web site bloat.
Her books emphasise design practice over theory or geek code fixation.
She is far from perfect as an HTML practitioner and herself does not believe the appellation "guru" is appropriate.
Of course, the better system to open source would've been GURPS from SJG, which is already designed to work for any era, genre, etc. GURPS, though not without its flaws, was just amazing because SJG put out an unbelievably cool line of expansions/world books to hit genres most people had never thought of (e.g. GURPS Russia, GURPS Vodoo)
Not to mention GURPS Prisoner, the long-out-of-print sourcebook based on the cool TV show.
Yes, GURPS is a great RPG, at least for those who like detailed rules-heavy systems. There are other good choices for RPG-lite lovers.
But I don't remember Steve Jackson as being all that partial to open source concepts. In particular I remember a lot of fuss on the INWO mailing list a couple of years back because he flipped out over people posting spoilers. That is, participants were not allowed to post the textual content of playing cards to the list, as these were copyrighted. Made it kind of hard to discuss the game in a detailed way. Other companies had no problem with spoiler lists -- in fact they were standard reference tools.
Guess what people, Speilberg is a great director. You can say what you want about his movies, but he has an uncanny way of filming movies the way they need to be seen.
Speilberg is a pedestrian director because he films movies the way people expect them to be seen. He caters to the lowest common denominator with his stereotyped characters, cliched plots, and boring filmic techniques. He manipulates the viewer's emotional states in the basest of ways, and provides little or no food for the intellect or soul. He is a barren director.
Everything Speilberg has tried to do has been done better by others. Night and Fog tops Schindler's List, The Thin Red Line is poetry to Saving Private Ryan's false realism, 2001 or Strangelove or any of Kubrick's films outshine Jurassic Park, ET, or any of Speilberg's.
Kubrick knew how to work with light, with the frame, with music, with unconventional actor choices, and with startlingly original narrative material. Speilberg knows how to merchandise. This is like comparing a master chef to the McDonald's food lab. (Pardon the cliche.)
Because they were filmed the right way by a camera under the direction of man who knows how to capture motion video.
Film is not video. Get your facts straight.
If you can do better than Spielberg, then you can talk.
Since you are "talking" I assume you can do better than Spielberg? Take a logic course.
It is sad to me to see such continuing evidence for the intellectual and aesthetic impoverishment of America.
P.S. I can see redeeming features in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Empire of the Sun had some nice set pieces. But I wouldn't compare these films to Kubrik.
If you decide to embrace progressive disclosure in your next project, please consider the power users and provide a way to easily switch to Full disclosure.
Let's make this a golden rule:
No matter how intelligent the software, assume the most intelligent part of the HCI network is the human and allocate them final control.
Anything else results in frustration for a significant number of users a significant amount of the time.
As for the importance of hierarchical storage systems, I agree that a standard system-wide browser with a rich feature set is the only way to make these usable. Every day I curse the designers of File Open dialogues and "Explorers".
Can we please have a mechanism for saving favourite folders and efficiently navigating them right in the dialogue itself?
Slashdot Mirror
> Python can't realistically support Lisp-style macros, doesn't support true closures, and many
> other things of Goodness that make Lisp languages so good for rapid coding.
Strange that Python doesn't support Fortran type line numbers or BASIC type OPEN statements either. If you want to use Lisp, use Lisp. Python is its own animal.
> Python is slow. So we have a slow language. So what?
Exactly. So what. The speed of the interpreter is usually not the bottle-neck in most app domains. If it is, use a different language. Python is fast enough for most uses, and can easily bind to libraries in C or what-have-you for those parts of your app that need performance.
In the meantime, you can develop your program faster and more error-free, by a factor of 5x or 10x depending on which study you believe. Getting a project done, on time, on budget, and working correctly is more impotant than speed almost always.
> A malformed object oriented system.
I am not a purist. I like to get work done, and have other people understand what I am doing and why. Python has a highly usable object-oriented architecture that works very easily for 99% of what I need, and can be hacked (thanks to its marvellous introspection) for the other 1%.
Python is easy to learn, easy to write, easy to read, and produces bug-free code faster than any language I have ever used. The number of rules I have to keep in my head is approaching zero.
Really, your comments demonstrate that either a) you have never programmed a real-world project in Python, or b) you are too attached to Lisp to give Python a fair shot.
Either way, you apparently care more for theoretical concerns than practical, and so are not a good candidate for Python anyway.
robin
A: a lego bulk store
B: the internet
-----
This is america, people.
Um, no, it isn't.
It's the Internet.
If it happens to be America where you type then my condolences. All you can do is emigrate.
Or do you have data that indicates that all halted E-Bay sales were by Americans on American soil?
-----
I would have been about 6 or 7 when I got on my TRS-80 (Model I) and entered:
10 PRINT "HI THERE"
20 GOTO 10
I would prefer the young ones to be typing:
while 1:
print "hi there"
-----
No, but it will be aired on the Scientology channel (repeatedly...) as early as... next week?
<grin>
-----
But then I'm an old fart who still thinks the greatest think George Lucas has ever done is THX-1138.
Most definitively it was his best film and "greatest think" -- highly appropriate slip of the "pen"!
The opening montage is better than what most other films manage in their entirety. Anyone who hasn't seen THX-1138 should do so immediately.
P.S. MI2 is dire crap -- and I am a John Woo (Hong Kong version) fan.
-----
This is a ridiculous over-generalized list that could do with a lot of trimming. Its primary purpose is apparently self-promotion.
The revolutions in Electronics and Computers basically rely upon the integrated circuit and lasers, one of which is already on the list. To include the Automobile and justify it by saying that it may "be the ultimate symbol of personal freedom" merely highlights the deluded state that supporters of the car are in, completely ignoring the deleterious effects on our limited natural resources, the environment, personal interaction, and our mental health. Not to mention that the automobile was invented two centuries before the 20th. As described, Agricultural Mechanization reduces to the Automobile, so I say we drop it. The Telephone was invented in the 19th century. As for Highways, go talk to the Romans about them! Water Supply and Distribution? I believe the hand-cranked pump and the Archimedes screw did more for this endeavour that anything we've come up with recently. Electrification? Hello?
Spacecraft are of debatable importance in the exploration of space, Imaging technologies being much more powerful and less invasive. Sorry Star Trek fans, but every time the space shuttle punches another hole in the atmosphere we lose a significant part of our precious ozone layer. This is not a sustainable technology. Let's not even get into Nuclear Technologies, which countries are abandoning en masse as they are far too expensive in the short term, let alone the incalculable costs in the longer term.
Two very general categories are Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies and High-performance Materials. Let's just say "plastics" and be done with it. Health Technologies reduces primarily to other categories. Since we've already got the laser, let's specify Imaging as Microwaves. This also helps cover Household Appliances, a very broad category that includes lots of advances made before last century.
Reordering what remains gives us:
1. Internet
2. Laser
3. Airplane
4. Integrated Circuit
5. Radio and Television
6. Refrigeration
7. Microwaves
-----
vast majority of testers could not even hear the difference between CD audio and MP3 audio.
This is quite sad, since the difference is obvious with all except the very best codecs.
And even then, CD audio is hardly the be-all and end-all of audio formats, been noticeably inferior to DAT, vinyl, reel-to-reel, and other standard formats.
Let's not limit ourselves to CD quality audio.
'Twould be like limiting ourselves to McDonalds quality beef.
-----
What I mean is like this: take several decks of cards, shuffle and deal them all out. Wow! The odds against THAT particular deal happening are tremendous! It's a bloody miracle that, out of all the possible deals, THAT one occurred!
Furthermore, if it is true that only one "deal" would result in us humans, then none of the others are open to observation. The one "deal" we are in would appear miraculous no matter which one it was.
Good example.
-----
I think it is humankind's hubris, though, that we are some special thing and that the universe revolves around is. The universe doesn't give a damn about us, and our own stupidity could very well get us all exterminated.
I am in agreement.
Because we see the universe from our and only our perspective (with limited senses, reasoning ability, problems [and joys] of flesh, and attendant limits) it is only natural for the lazy to assume that the universe was made for us. Davies makes this very mistake.
If we were planaria we might just as well reason the universe was made for planaria. Look! It's two dimensional, just like us! It's wet for sliding, provides us with just the food we need, feels great on our cilia, and entertains us with light!
This is not to criticize Davies' other contributions to the literature of science.
-----
When Stephen Hawking published his "Brief History of Time", he was fond of recounting how his publishers warned him against using mathematical formulae in the book - that each formula would result in the corresponding loss of x-thousand sales. As a result, the only formula published in the final book, IIRC, was E=mc^2.
...so we can assume he lost sales proportional to the speed of light squared times the mass of his readers? [grin]
-----
I've never even heard of Lynda Wienman, or her books, or even her website and I've been making webpages since '95 Just paid a visit to the site - what's the big deal?
Maybe you just don't get out much? [grin]
Lynda's contribution to web design rests mostly on her championing of the browser-safe palette and image optimisation -- basically a "less is more" philosophy that was very refreshing and influential at a time of massive web site bloat.
Her books emphasise design practice over theory or geek code fixation.
She is far from perfect as an HTML practitioner and herself does not believe the appellation "guru" is appropriate.
But she deserves the attention she has earned.
-----
Of course, the better system to open source would've been GURPS from SJG, which is already designed to work for any era, genre, etc. GURPS, though not without its flaws, was just amazing because SJG put out an unbelievably cool line of expansions/world books to hit genres most people had never thought of (e.g. GURPS Russia, GURPS Vodoo)
Not to mention GURPS Prisoner, the long-out-of-print sourcebook based on the cool TV show.
Yes, GURPS is a great RPG, at least for those who like detailed rules-heavy systems. There are other good choices for RPG-lite lovers.
But I don't remember Steve Jackson as being all that partial to open source concepts. In particular I remember a lot of fuss on the INWO mailing list a couple of years back because he flipped out over people posting spoilers. That is, participants were not allowed to post the textual content of playing cards to the list, as these were copyrighted. Made it kind of hard to discuss the game in a detailed way. Other companies had no problem with spoiler lists -- in fact they were standard reference tools.
-----
Guess what people, Speilberg is a great director. You can say what you want about his movies, but he has an uncanny way of filming movies the way they need to be seen.
Speilberg is a pedestrian director because he films movies the way people expect them to be seen. He caters to the lowest common denominator with his stereotyped characters, cliched plots, and boring filmic techniques. He manipulates the viewer's emotional states in the basest of ways, and provides little or no food for the intellect or soul. He is a barren director.
Everything Speilberg has tried to do has been done better by others. Night and Fog tops Schindler's List, The Thin Red Line is poetry to Saving Private Ryan's false realism, 2001 or Strangelove or any of Kubrick's films outshine Jurassic Park, ET, or any of Speilberg's.
Kubrick knew how to work with light, with the frame, with music, with unconventional actor choices, and with startlingly original narrative material. Speilberg knows how to merchandise. This is like comparing a master chef to the McDonald's food lab. (Pardon the cliche.)
Because they were filmed the right way by a camera under the direction of man who knows how to capture motion video.
Film is not video. Get your facts straight.
If you can do better than Spielberg, then you can talk.
Since you are "talking" I assume you can do better than Spielberg? Take a logic course.
It is sad to me to see such continuing evidence for the intellectual and aesthetic impoverishment of America.
P.S. I can see redeeming features in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Empire of the Sun had some nice set pieces. But I wouldn't compare these films to Kubrik.
-----
If you decide to embrace progressive disclosure in your next project, please consider the power users and provide a way to easily switch to Full disclosure.
Let's make this a golden rule:
No matter how intelligent the software, assume the most intelligent part of the HCI network is the human and allocate them final control.
Anything else results in frustration for a significant number of users a significant amount of the time.
As for the importance of hierarchical storage systems, I agree that a standard system-wide browser with a rich feature set is the only way to make these usable. Every day I curse the designers of File Open dialogues and "Explorers".
Can we please have a mechanism for saving favourite folders and efficiently navigating them right in the dialogue itself?
-----