People never dedicate attention to the really creative and innovative technologies, like Li sp Machines, so they're stuck in worshipping truly obsolete systems like Unix.
But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid. Technology is a tool. Do you worship axes? If you worship computers enough to write a history of an obsolete OS, why not write the history of the axe?
Id Software helped launch a gaming revolution that has had a signifigant impact on the computer graphics industry and which has brought many new people into the field.
BS. Violent 3D computer games are an industry plain and simple, not a "revolution", which is just a word which sadly is mostly used for meaningless glorification of accomplishments that, in the great scheme of things, are totally trivial. Just like other bullshit PR terms like "paradigm shift".
What are you talking about, mister 203477? It sure doesn't look like you've been here all that long, does it?
The user number in my old account (which I changed because I decided to post to/. with my real name) is under 10k. I've been around here far longer than you. I know what I'm talking about.
Even if Id isn't the one auctioning it, it still is news! I'm surprise to see an Origin2000 being auctioned!
So if it's the fact that it's a supercomputer, and not that it's Id that's auctioning it, that is news, how come what was reported is the fact that ID auctioned, and what they used it for, instead of its capabilities? This is completely irrelevant.
I repeat: anybody who gives a damn that Id is auctioning a computer they used to create a couple of games is a spoiled yuppie brat. Collectors item my ass. And Taco should not use his story posting priviledge to sell crap.
The history of the name comes from New Rome Roma = Rome nia = neo = new
Did you check that in an etymological dictionary? "-ia" is a common roman suffix for placenames, e.g., Hispania, Gallia, Italia, Anglia, Alemania, Dacia, etc.
Basically, Romania is what's left of a heavily colonized Roman province after the troops pulled out.
IIRC, modern Romania is not located where the ancient roman province of Dacia was; it is thought that the ancestors of the Romanias moved there from somewhere else. Witness the fact that there are other languages like Istro-Romanian (in Croatia, IIRC), Aromanian (northern Greece, Macedonia, southern Albania) and Megleno-Romanian (northwest of Salonica). These languages and Romanian are considered to have split from a common ancestor many hundreds of years ago (800? can't remember).
Read the writings of the pre-Revolutionary French Enlightenment, which were predominantly written by aristocrats or wealthy middle class gentlemen. post-revisionist claptrap.
You need to stop idealizing the French Revolution and look at what it actually did: a reign of terror, and terrible persecution of the typical French peasant. I'll just mention the fact that when the Revolution happened, only one third of the population of France actually spoke French; yet the Revolutionaries declared even the private use of any other languages illegal.
As a last note, everyone who has any doubts about Mr. Martinez's bias and racism and classism should follow the URL provided at the top of his user page here on/. It leads to a hate-filled tabloid which does nothing but portray white Americans as evil racists and Hispanics as poor downtrodden people who are oppressed by the evil white upper class.
You must truly enjoy misrepresentation, right? The top headline says "Mexican Migrant Workers Savagely Attacked by Racists in San Diego, California; Seven Skinheads Arrested". It doesn't say "white", it says "racists", "skinheads". How is that racist?
Next headline is about a Mexican Deputy who joins a bi-national mobilization to stop border violence. How is this racist?
The third headline, "US/Mexico Border Crisis" leads to an investigative report about the shooting of a Mexican in Arizona by organized white supremacist vigilante militias, which the local authorities don't investigate. Again, who is this racist?
Nowhere in the site you find anti-white statements. You find anti white supremacist statements. Statements against groups of the likes of American Patrol, which spout true racist propaganda.
This paints a very disturbing pattern about you. You are obviously given to cry out "racism" and "classism" whenever a non-mainstream social group that is being attacked tries to defend itself. You are given to, whenever you are countered with the sheer implausibility and unsupportedness of your accusations, to pointing to silly evidence like my saying "mi gente and everyone else" (if I'd written "my friends and everybody else", would you have called me a "friendist"?), or blatant misrepresentation of facts (like you did with La Voz de Aztlán's page).
And, let's linger on the term "social justice": it is typically used by those who seek to promote division between the races or classes
I'll just let others judge for themselves about the contexts in which the term Social Justice is used. (Also see here.)
Never forget that wealthy classes have, according to the history you so like to point to instead of the future, often assisted the proletariat in taking power, as many forward-thinking aristocrats did during the French Revolution
You are rewriting history. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. You can find this in any history book.
you put "mi gente" separately, and before, "everyone else," not just in that sentence but philosophically. That is evidence which supports the assertion that you are a racist.
What will you do next, add up the letters in my name and find out that they add up to 666? Please. You are utterly ridiculous.
Doublethink at its best. You shift topics, I follow you, and then you bring back the original topic to show that I'm "wrong".
In my original post I talked about "predominantly white cell phone users" and "predominantly poor communities with antenna towers". Thus the statement about poor communities had nothing to do with cellphone usage.
And you brought in the topic of who has the most cellphones with this:
In America, at least, there is no obvious correspondence between cell phone usage and socioeconomic status.
So I was addressing that particular statement, which in no way involves communities.
I'll leave aside your classist implications that prisons are not communities, and that America is a nation, not a continent.
Most of the cell phone usage i see is is the middle class or poorer part of town, but I'd hesitate to make a hard rule out of my experience. You, on the other hand, have no such compunction. You make assertions like that with no evidence whatsoever, and when you are called on it, you try to change the subject to men in jail.
Let's review my words:
(and, BTW,throw in the HUGE prison population of the US, immigrant farm workers, and such)
As far as I know, a parenthetical remark does not constitute a change of subject.
And this was in reaction to your "homeless" remark. So it is you that changed the topic, and now wish to accuse me of.
It is not irrelevant, or a straw man, if wealthier people are less likely to value cell phones, since that would mean they are less likely to use them.
If wealthier people value more cellphones this means just that they value them more. Nothing else.
BTW the cajuns were very much irrelevant to demonstrating that 'making it' is an ethnophobic construct, an original, but long-forgotten point.
Once again, you use doublespeak to attack me. Let's look at your own words again:
Oh I know, they have all absorbed a false 'white consciousness' from a Western media barrage.
This, of course, you said sarcastically. However, there is truth to it which you don't wish to recognize. The media are but one small part of the diverse pressures that mainstream US society puts on minority groups to assimilate them, as the Cajun example illustrates.
Of course, now you want to make it look like I just pulled that out of my ass for no reason. But no, I have responded to your raising issues that, sadly, have taken us far afield from what this thread is about.
I don't remember lynching anybody. And I don't drink, or take drugs, so I guess I should remember if it has happened.
You hate white people, so you are a racist.
Bullshit. I just said that Western cultures are powerful, and that this power is causing the assimilation of people from other cultures. This is a fact.
And this is extremely unfair, especially since race is eroding slowly but surely as a cultural divide, thanks in part to intermarriage and thanks to the global culture being created by the Information Age.
Still, ethnicity barriers are not breaking down much. So your point is?
What a load of bullshit. You just spouted a bunch of crap about ethnicity != race (which *I* said in the post you were replying to), and a bunch of unsubstantiated statements about me hating whites.
All this because I dared to say that more powerful ethnic groups assimilate other groups they encounter, which is a historical fact. And you consider this "racism"? Clearly you are the bigoted fool who can't recognize the effects of your society on others, even when others put them right in front of your nose.
Your assertion about money= cell phones is true perhaps if you are comparing the homeless with those who have jobs.
And of course, if you redefine "people" as "those who are not homeless" (and, BTW, throw in the HUGE prison population of the US, immigrant farm workers, and such), you can prove many very interesting results.
there really is no diff. in the use of cell phones, beepers, and all that between the middle classes and the wealthy.
You just proved my point above.
If anything, people with more money are less likely to value such a thing.
Don't stray from the point. You are dragging irrelevant thinks, like who values cell phones more or doesn't. We're talking about cell phone ownership vs. socioeconomic status.
you are welcome to your absurd explanations of why the prols don't act the way your failed theories predict they will.
Strawman. I haven't mentioned in this thread any theory of how workers will act. Therefore you can make no meaningful statements about how I expect them to act.
As for the Cajun example, it is very relevant. It is an example of how one moneyed group used political power to assimilate another. This is an example of precisely what we were talking about: how one culture does to assimilate another.
So 'white people' is whoever you decide to criticize. No longer restricted to skin color or ancestry, 'white' now means whatever Estanislao says it means.
No, it means belonging to a particular ethnic group. Etnia != race, basic anthropology.
In America, at least, there is no obvious correspondence between cell phone usage and socioeconomic status.
Bah. People with more money own more cell phones. It is something anybody can see just by walking around.
And if 'making it' is so ethnophobic, why do people of so many ethnicities desire it? Oh I know, they have all absorbed a false 'white consciousness' from a Western media barrage.
Well, this is the rough sketch of the best explanation. Those with power have always used their power against the cultures of those with less power. It's happened in the US itself-- look at the precarious situation of cultures like, for example, the Cajuns in Louisiana, where the anglos, once they secured power, proceeded in a campaign to exterminate the Cajun language and culture, by prohibiting the teaching of the Cajun French (i.e. teachers beating up kids in schools for talking in French). It's still not evident at all that this culture will recover.
It is well known that Western society, when it runs across a non-Caucasian who has successfully assimilated to its values, will treat said person as a "honorary white". Few, if any, open discrimination, but still the discrimination remains, only more subtle. Ask your successful non-white close friends to tell you when was the last time they were asked to say something "in representation of their race". Then ask your white friends.
Don't be deceived by the fact that many non-whites "make it" nowadays. The very concept of "making it" is ethnophobic, since it crucially involves surrendering native values to "civilized" Western values.
It's like PBS...you wouldn't call that socialist control would you?
The problem is that the poster is probably a believer of one of these "Libertarian" or "Objectivist" private totalitarianism minarchist religions that think that the government providing any service is evil, and that everything should be privatized. He'll probably say that PBS is just "a project in social engineering" or some other such unfounded, uninformed crap.
As for Canadian bilingualism - wake up folks! Multiculturalism was invented to capture votes in the 70s, particularly from Quebec - it has nothing to do with "respect" and "diversty" - those are only catchphrases to lull the idiots into thinking it is unassailable as an idea.
Rewriting history, huh? So it happened just because the people on top made it happen, eh?
So then, Quebecers demanding that their unique cultural and linguistic situation be protected had nothing to do with it, eh? Neither the efforts of corageous people like the FLQ, eh?
A government television station...hello, are we in Cuba?
WTF? This is is as absurd as saying that public schooling is fascist.
Canada really does mean well - its a sound premise - the best notions of American liberty with some sound social principles..but it was hijacked in the 70s and turned into a social engineering experiment the likes of which have hardly seen the light of day outside of Scandanavia or France.
First of all, you probably mean USian liberty. America is a continent, not a nation. (However, if you were thinking of El Libertador, Simón Bolívar, well, then I excuse myself. My experience is with small-minded USians who fail to see the world beyond their country.)
And what's wrong with Scandinavia? I have plenty of Scandinavian friends, and they love their governments.
France is a different story, though. It is a country where 20% of the population, the Parisians, are a bunch of arrogant bastards who look down on everyone else. Fascism is gaining ground terribly quick. Expect the worst.
*However* the author is clearly a clever chap, and has obviously come up with all this stuff himself, so I say let him keep his mod points. Original thought should be encouraged - even when its wrong.
Bah. The author is clearly not clever enough to know that he should know stuff before claiming in a public forum he knows the stuff. This was as "Informative" and/or "Interesting" as a 10 page long proof that 0=1.
[...] Could someone then explain the difference between Haskell and say... C++/Java?
The difference here is that between functional vs. imperative languages. You need to look at the languages, and think about what the expressions in these languages mean, i.e., the semantics of the language, and what concepts these meanings invoke.
The semantics of imperative languages invoke the concept of state, which we could paraphrase "the way things are at a certain moment". The quintessential imperative construct that occurs in practical languages is the notion of putting a value in a memory location, i.e., assignment statements. What does a statement like "x:=5" mean? "x" represents some memory location, "5" a value, and the statements means that the value in that memory location changes; the state here is the contents of memory, and executing the statement passing from one configuration of memory to a different one. This is the change of state. Thus the final result from doing "x:=x+1" will depend on a factor which is external to the statement, which is the state of the computer when it gets to that statement.
A (purely) functional language, in the other hand, makes no use of the notion of state in its semantics; only of that of function, in the mathematical sense, which is different from the sense you find in a language like C. A function is something that uniquely maps input values to a unique output value. This means that giving a function some input values guarantees that an unique value will be the output. (In C, "functions" aren't; calling a "function" twice with the same parameters may return different values each time). It was proven in the late 30s that for anything you can do with a state machine (Turing machines), you can write a mathematical function that will do the same thing, and viceversa. This is easy to see, since imperative programming can be captured in functional programming by writing functions that explicitly change states. Thus, if s, t are states, you could write a function "assign", which you could use this way: "t=assign(s,x:=5)", which could mean something like "t is the state that differs from s at most in having x equal to 5".
So this is the theoretical difference between the two types of languages, and the reason they can do the exact same things.
As for the procedural/OO distinction, I'm afraid it's not as well defined or deep. OO means that there is some inheritance mechanism which controls which procedure to dispatch in a particular call. As far as I'm concerned, OO languages are procedural (but not viceversa).
An appropriately conceived relational calculus is more powerful than a similarly conceived functional calculus because functions are special cases of relations.
Bullshit. None is a special case of the other-- they are equivalent notions, since each is powerful enough to define the other. Taking functions as primitives, a relation becomes nothing but a function from tuples to truth values.
Most higher math deals with things in terms of properties, not types.
Bah. There is no important distinction here. It is a perfectly standard thing to regard properties are objects of types X->t; that is, functions mapping individuals of type X to truth values.
If you think you're morally superior because you can write 12-level-deep lambda expressions.. I think you need to go outside some more.
Somebody who writes 12-level-deep lambdas may have a great brain, but is surely putting it to waste. Hell, if you've got just 3 nested lambdas, it is most likely the case that you should seriously rethink whatever you're doing, find suitable abstractions, and use these.
Moderators: the parent is not (+1, Informative), but (-1, Overrated). This lenghty post is all wrong. I even checked the troll forums to make sure this wasn't a troll and found nobody claiming it. And in my experience no troll takes so much time to write a single post.
in point of fact, 'pure' functional programming (no state, no side effects) can only handle the kinds of problems that can be solved by a pushdown automaton. in theoretical terms, they can only handle prolems up to and including context free grammars.
[tons of BS snipped]
The lambda calculus, which is the logical foundation of functional programming, is Turing complete. Period. There's no getting around this. If a language has application and abstraction, it is Turing complete, and can compute all computable functions.
'pure' functional programming can't do that. it involves storing a value, and that's something functional languages don't do.
Bullshit. "Storing values" is a function from an initial state to a modified state. This is trivial to express functionally as a function on states.
to make themselves Turing-complete, functional languages rely on a trick known as 'stream programming', which rests on a sneaky form of variable storage called 'deferred execution'.
BS again. Streams have nothing to do with the Turing-completeness of functional languages. The lambda calculus is Turing complete; evaluation regime (strict or lazy) makes no difference.
we've created something static and unchanging that still manages to act like it has state.
You simply don't grasp the idea that states can be first-class objects you manipulate functionally. Yes, you can simulate states in a purely functional language. This does not mean the language is not functional; it is not, since the semantics of the language itself have no notion of state. Functional programs can explicitly implement the notions of states and state transitions.
Slashdot Mirror
But, even worse, worshipping technology in and of itself is stupid. Technology is a tool. Do you worship axes? If you worship computers enough to write a history of an obsolete OS, why not write the history of the axe?
BS. Violent 3D computer games are an industry plain and simple, not a "revolution", which is just a word which sadly is mostly used for meaningless glorification of accomplishments that, in the great scheme of things, are totally trivial. Just like other bullshit PR terms like "paradigm shift".
The user number in my old account (which I changed because I decided to post to /. with my real name) is under 10k. I've been around here far longer than you. I know what I'm talking about.
So if it's the fact that it's a supercomputer, and not that it's Id that's auctioning it, that is news, how come what was reported is the fact that ID auctioned, and what they used it for, instead of its capabilities? This is completely irrelevant.
I repeat: anybody who gives a damn that Id is auctioning a computer they used to create a couple of games is a spoiled yuppie brat. Collectors item my ass. And Taco should not use his story posting priviledge to sell crap.
Roma = Rome
nia = neo = new
Did you check that in an etymological dictionary? "-ia" is a common roman suffix for placenames, e.g., Hispania, Gallia, Italia, Anglia, Alemania, Dacia, etc.
Basically, Romania is what's left of a heavily colonized Roman province after the troops pulled out.
IIRC, modern Romania is not located where the ancient roman province of Dacia was; it is thought that the ancestors of the Romanias moved there from somewhere else. Witness the fact that there are other languages like Istro-Romanian (in Croatia, IIRC), Aromanian (northern Greece, Macedonia, southern Albania) and Megleno-Romanian (northwest of Salonica). These languages and Romanian are considered to have split from a common ancestor many hundreds of years ago (800? can't remember).
You need to stop idealizing the French Revolution and look at what it actually did: a reign of terror, and terrible persecution of the typical French peasant. I'll just mention the fact that when the Revolution happened, only one third of the population of France actually spoke French; yet the Revolutionaries declared even the private use of any other languages illegal.
As a last note, everyone who has any doubts about Mr. Martinez's bias and racism and classism should follow the URL provided at the top of his user page here on /. It leads to a hate-filled tabloid which does nothing but portray white Americans as evil racists and Hispanics as poor downtrodden people who are oppressed by the evil white upper class.
You must truly enjoy misrepresentation, right? The top headline says "Mexican Migrant Workers Savagely Attacked by Racists in San Diego, California; Seven Skinheads Arrested". It doesn't say "white", it says "racists", "skinheads". How is that racist?
Next headline is about a Mexican Deputy who joins a bi-national mobilization to stop border violence. How is this racist?
The third headline, "US/Mexico Border Crisis" leads to an investigative report about the shooting of a Mexican in Arizona by organized white supremacist vigilante militias, which the local authorities don't investigate. Again, who is this racist?
Nowhere in the site you find anti-white statements. You find anti white supremacist statements. Statements against groups of the likes of American Patrol, which spout true racist propaganda.
This paints a very disturbing pattern about you. You are obviously given to cry out "racism" and "classism" whenever a non-mainstream social group that is being attacked tries to defend itself. You are given to, whenever you are countered with the sheer implausibility and unsupportedness of your accusations, to pointing to silly evidence like my saying "mi gente and everyone else" (if I'd written "my friends and everybody else", would you have called me a "friendist"?), or blatant misrepresentation of facts (like you did with La Voz de Aztlán's page).
And, let's linger on the term "social justice": it is typically used by those who seek to promote division between the races or classes
I'll just let others judge for themselves about the contexts in which the term Social Justice is used. (Also see here.)
Never forget that wealthy classes have, according to the history you so like to point to instead of the future, often assisted the proletariat in taking power, as many forward-thinking aristocrats did during the French Revolution
You are rewriting history. The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. You can find this in any history book.
you put "mi gente" separately, and before, "everyone else," not just in that sentence but philosophically. That is evidence which supports the assertion that you are a racist.
What will you do next, add up the letters in my name and find out that they add up to 666? Please. You are utterly ridiculous.
Doublethink at its best. You shift topics, I follow you, and then you bring back the original topic to show that I'm "wrong".
In my original post I talked about "predominantly white cell phone users" and "predominantly poor communities with antenna towers". Thus the statement about poor communities had nothing to do with cellphone usage.
And you brought in the topic of who has the most cellphones with this:
So I was addressing that particular statement, which in no way involves communities.
I'll leave aside your classist implications that prisons are not communities, and that America is a nation, not a continent.
Most of the cell phone usage i see is is the middle class or poorer part of town, but I'd hesitate to make a hard rule out of my experience. You, on the other hand, have no such compunction. You make assertions like that with no evidence whatsoever, and when you are called on it, you try to change the subject to men in jail.
Let's review my words:
As far as I know, a parenthetical remark does not constitute a change of subject.
And this was in reaction to your "homeless" remark. So it is you that changed the topic, and now wish to accuse me of.
It is not irrelevant, or a straw man, if wealthier people are less likely to value cell phones, since that would mean they are less likely to use them.
If wealthier people value more cellphones this means just that they value them more. Nothing else.
BTW the cajuns were very much irrelevant to demonstrating that 'making it' is an ethnophobic construct, an original, but long-forgotten point.
Once again, you use doublespeak to attack me. Let's look at your own words again:
This, of course, you said sarcastically. However, there is truth to it which you don't wish to recognize. The media are but one small part of the diverse pressures that mainstream US society puts on minority groups to assimilate them, as the Cajun example illustrates.
Of course, now you want to make it look like I just pulled that out of my ass for no reason. But no, I have responded to your raising issues that, sadly, have taken us far afield from what this thread is about.
I don't remember lynching anybody. And I don't drink, or take drugs, so I guess I should remember if it has happened.
You hate white people, so you are a racist.
Bullshit. I just said that Western cultures are powerful, and that this power is causing the assimilation of people from other cultures. This is a fact.
And this is extremely unfair, especially since race is eroding slowly but surely as a cultural divide, thanks in part to intermarriage and thanks to the global culture being created by the Information Age.
Still, ethnicity barriers are not breaking down much. So your point is?
What a load of bullshit. You just spouted a bunch of crap about ethnicity != race (which *I* said in the post you were replying to), and a bunch of unsubstantiated statements about me hating whites.
All this because I dared to say that more powerful ethnic groups assimilate other groups they encounter, which is a historical fact. And you consider this "racism"? Clearly you are the bigoted fool who can't recognize the effects of your society on others, even when others put them right in front of your nose.
And of course, if you redefine "people" as "those who are not homeless" (and, BTW, throw in the HUGE prison population of the US, immigrant farm workers, and such), you can prove many very interesting results.
there really is no diff. in the use of cell phones, beepers, and all that between the middle classes and the wealthy.
You just proved my point above.
If anything, people with more money are less likely to value such a thing.
Don't stray from the point. You are dragging irrelevant thinks, like who values cell phones more or doesn't. We're talking about cell phone ownership vs. socioeconomic status.
you are welcome to your absurd explanations of why the prols don't act the way your failed theories predict they will.
Strawman. I haven't mentioned in this thread any theory of how workers will act. Therefore you can make no meaningful statements about how I expect them to act.
As for the Cajun example, it is very relevant. It is an example of how one moneyed group used political power to assimilate another. This is an example of precisely what we were talking about: how one culture does to assimilate another.
And you think everybody gives their dissertations away for free? You obviously know nothing about academia, right?
No, it means belonging to a particular ethnic group. Etnia != race, basic anthropology.
In America, at least, there is no obvious correspondence between cell phone usage and socioeconomic status.
Bah. People with more money own more cell phones. It is something anybody can see just by walking around.
And if 'making it' is so ethnophobic, why do people of so many ethnicities desire it? Oh I know, they have all absorbed a false 'white consciousness' from a Western media barrage.
Well, this is the rough sketch of the best explanation. Those with power have always used their power against the cultures of those with less power. It's happened in the US itself-- look at the precarious situation of cultures like, for example, the Cajuns in Louisiana, where the anglos, once they secured power, proceeded in a campaign to exterminate the Cajun language and culture, by prohibiting the teaching of the Cajun French (i.e. teachers beating up kids in schools for talking in French). It's still not evident at all that this culture will recover.
If you had just bothered to look at the link I gave, you could have found this page.
Don't be deceived by the fact that many non-whites "make it" nowadays. The very concept of "making it" is ethnophobic, since it crucially involves surrendering native values to "civilized" Western values.
Tell that to the residents of Ouruhia, New Zealand.
The cell companies have conducted extensive research
Bah. You disqualify yourself the moment you drag in research by an interested party.
The problem is that the poster is probably a believer of one of these "Libertarian" or "Objectivist" private totalitarianism minarchist religions that think that the government providing any service is evil, and that everything should be privatized. He'll probably say that PBS is just "a project in social engineering" or some other such unfounded, uninformed crap.
Ah, a Newfie.
Where would you get your cod for your fancy fucking dinner parties without us?
Québec has plenty of fishing waters.
Thank you for your generous offer, but sorry, I'm a vegetarian.
First American land discovered by Europeans?
An island in the Bahamas, forgot which.
Ah, you meant the thing about the Vikings? That is only a myth, it has never been proven. They could have gotten anywhere.
Oldest city in North America?
Depends on how you decide on dates of foundation. Presumably Mexico City, for cities not founded by europeans. Otherwise, Santo Domingo.
Rewriting history, huh? So it happened just because the people on top made it happen, eh?
So then, Quebecers demanding that their unique cultural and linguistic situation be protected had nothing to do with it, eh? Neither the efforts of corageous people like the FLQ, eh?
A government television station...hello, are we in Cuba?
WTF? This is is as absurd as saying that public schooling is fascist.
Canada really does mean well - its a sound premise - the best notions of American liberty with some sound social principles..but it was hijacked in the 70s and turned into a social engineering experiment the likes of which have hardly seen the light of day outside of Scandanavia or France.
First of all, you probably mean USian liberty. America is a continent, not a nation. (However, if you were thinking of El Libertador, Simón Bolívar, well, then I excuse myself. My experience is with small-minded USians who fail to see the world beyond their country.)
And what's wrong with Scandinavia? I have plenty of Scandinavian friends, and they love their governments.
France is a different story, though. It is a country where 20% of the population, the Parisians, are a bunch of arrogant bastards who look down on everyone else. Fascism is gaining ground terribly quick. Expect the worst.
Except bigger computers do not put everybody else's life at risk in the road.
Idiot.
Bah. The author is clearly not clever enough to know that he should know stuff before claiming in a public forum he knows the stuff. This was as "Informative" and/or "Interesting" as a 10 page long proof that 0=1.
The difference here is that between functional vs. imperative languages. You need to look at the languages, and think about what the expressions in these languages mean, i.e., the semantics of the language, and what concepts these meanings invoke.
The semantics of imperative languages invoke the concept of state, which we could paraphrase "the way things are at a certain moment". The quintessential imperative construct that occurs in practical languages is the notion of putting a value in a memory location, i.e., assignment statements. What does a statement like "x:=5" mean? "x" represents some memory location, "5" a value, and the statements means that the value in that memory location changes; the state here is the contents of memory, and executing the statement passing from one configuration of memory to a different one. This is the change of state. Thus the final result from doing "x:=x+1" will depend on a factor which is external to the statement, which is the state of the computer when it gets to that statement.
A (purely) functional language, in the other hand, makes no use of the notion of state in its semantics; only of that of function, in the mathematical sense, which is different from the sense you find in a language like C. A function is something that uniquely maps input values to a unique output value. This means that giving a function some input values guarantees that an unique value will be the output. (In C, "functions" aren't; calling a "function" twice with the same parameters may return different values each time). It was proven in the late 30s that for anything you can do with a state machine (Turing machines), you can write a mathematical function that will do the same thing, and viceversa. This is easy to see, since imperative programming can be captured in functional programming by writing functions that explicitly change states. Thus, if s, t are states, you could write a function "assign", which you could use this way: "t=assign(s,x:=5)", which could mean something like "t is the state that differs from s at most in having x equal to 5".
So this is the theoretical difference between the two types of languages, and the reason they can do the exact same things.
As for the procedural/OO distinction, I'm afraid it's not as well defined or deep. OO means that there is some inheritance mechanism which controls which procedure to dispatch in a particular call. As far as I'm concerned, OO languages are procedural (but not viceversa).
Bullshit. None is a special case of the other-- they are equivalent notions, since each is powerful enough to define the other. Taking functions as primitives, a relation becomes nothing but a function from tuples to truth values.
Bah. There is no important distinction here. It is a perfectly standard thing to regard properties are objects of types X->t; that is, functions mapping individuals of type X to truth values.
If you think you're morally superior because you can write 12-level-deep lambda expressions.. I think you need to go outside some more.
Somebody who writes 12-level-deep lambdas may have a great brain, but is surely putting it to waste. Hell, if you've got just 3 nested lambdas, it is most likely the case that you should seriously rethink whatever you're doing, find suitable abstractions, and use these.
Moderators: the parent is not (+1, Informative), but (-1, Overrated). This lenghty post is all wrong. I even checked the troll forums to make sure this wasn't a troll and found nobody claiming it. And in my experience no troll takes so much time to write a single post.
in point of fact, 'pure' functional programming (no state, no side effects) can only handle the kinds of problems that can be solved by a pushdown automaton. in theoretical terms, they can only handle prolems up to and including context free grammars.
[tons of BS snipped]
The lambda calculus, which is the logical foundation of functional programming, is Turing complete. Period. There's no getting around this. If a language has application and abstraction, it is Turing complete, and can compute all computable functions.
'pure' functional programming can't do that. it involves storing a value, and that's something functional languages don't do.
Bullshit. "Storing values" is a function from an initial state to a modified state. This is trivial to express functionally as a function on states.
to make themselves Turing-complete, functional languages rely on a trick known as 'stream programming', which rests on a sneaky form of variable storage called 'deferred execution'.
BS again. Streams have nothing to do with the Turing-completeness of functional languages. The lambda calculus is Turing complete; evaluation regime (strict or lazy) makes no difference.
we've created something static and unchanging that still manages to act like it has state.
You simply don't grasp the idea that states can be first-class objects you manipulate functionally. Yes, you can simulate states in a purely functional language. This does not mean the language is not functional; it is not, since the semantics of the language itself have no notion of state. Functional programs can explicitly implement the notions of states and state transitions.