Lisp might not be good for RDBMS, but the close correspondance between S-expressions and XML might be extremely helpful if the application is distributed. And anyone who is willing to code rules in Prolog should have no problem with prefix syntax and higher-order functions.
High-end programmers should have no problem switching between prefix and infix: it's only cog-like code monkeys who insist that the most popular languages have C-like syntax. Experts will continue to implement obscure applications in obscure languages for obscene pay.
Depending on what kind of logic you're trying to code up, you might find it easier to create a domain-specific language that allows coding in whatever paradigm is most appropriate rather than having to shoehorn everything into logic-language assertions. Haskell is considered one of the best languages for create DSLs (my favourite example is a DSL for financial contracts which I was reminded of by this post); however, like most non-Microsoft, non-trivial languages, it is very difficult to port to the.Net CLR.
I could go analyse TFA, but I'd prefer if someone could specify what Apache projects this competes with and explain why anyone would rather use this free-until-deployment solution.
You do realise that's because seeds are like eggs, right? They contain enough energy (and nutrients) to grow the organism to the point where it can gather its own resources (leaves in the case of plants, teat-sucking in the case of mammals). That energy was put there by the parent plant when it grew the seed. So a potato is just a carrying case for the genetic material + energy you need to start a potato plant on Mars. It'll need plenty of sunlight to get to the next generation.
I know you Yankees like slipping and slicing when you drive screws, but some smaller markets are more enlightened: I refuse to buy a multitool until I can get one with a built in Robertson #2 driver, because that's what all the screws are up here.
Vagary's statement that "only creatures capable of evil are capable of good" is itself not logically sound.
Thank you to sjames for defending the philosophical interpretation, but I actually had a less abstract, experimental conjecture in mind*: you can't remove a human's ability to do evil acts without making them so useless as to be unable to do good acts. If you had a genetic test for evilness, and aborted all the fetii with those genes, you'd end up aborting everything that wouldn't grow into a vegetable.
Now that I think about it more, if this conjecture is true, it is only true for certain types of entities. It doesn't seem unreasonable that you could make a robot that would only give out (sugarfree) candy.
* Using commonly agreed upon examples of "good" and "evil" acts and naive definitions of "good" and "evil", just for conversation's sake.
If genes do anything at all to behaviour, even just restrict it, then it necessarily follows that will is not absolutely free. Genes certainly could eliminate genocide, but we might want to allow the possibility for genocide because only creatures capable of evil are capable of good; consider jellyfish.
I know they already trawled David's memories, but there would always be something new to learn from watching him interact with the construct.
You seem awfully sure that David is non-deterministic, which, frankly, I would consider an extraordinary claim even for Monica. Personally, I hope our new alien-robot overlords are corrected of the irrationality which would lead them to try and make David happy before they put him out of his misery and turn him off -- what difference does it make? But then I guess I'm not the touchy-feely target audience...
But isn't meat marbled with fat more moist with a good mouth-feel and considered superior by Western palates than low-fat meat or meat with hunks of fat?
That theory makes a lot of sense except I don't really see an explanation of the why. What do cheap-labour conservatives who aren't the elite hope to gain from cheap-labour? Or is it just that the elite have brainwashed all the middle and lower class cheap-labour conservatives?
Ideally, wouldn't the identity authorities establish a web of trust amongst themselves, allowing a user to be authenticated by any one of them and then access any authentication consumer? Hell, I think most people would be more willing to grant Passport a monopoly if they were using open standards that would prevent lock-in.
So the real problem is that no one has figured out a business model for being an id authority other than to extend a monopoly?
Okay so my little brother has been playing CounterStrike on his XBox and wants to try installing it on a PC -- great, I say, I just happen to have a HalfLife CD w/ key from the good old days lying around. So after I install it I try and get this Steam thing going to patch HL so I can install the latest CS mod. Turns out at some point in the distant past I created a Steam account and associated my key with it, but now I don't even remember the email address I used, never mind the username and password. According to Valve, my CD key is now "lost", and if I want a replacement I have to send them US$25 (which is probably about what I originally paid for HL).
Funny, but I don't remember the EULA specifying that they were selling me the right to activate HL for a Steam account; I'd swear it was about a video game.
For whatever reason (could someone wager a guess?) SAML has not been widely adopted (and don't try to argue this point). Maybe this will rectify whatever deficiency SAML has? Or maybe the project is just to create a widely-usable SAML authentication authority?
You can use tabs to add a layer of hierarchy to organise a large number of open pages.
Tabs implemented at the application level are just a temporary solution until someone figures out how to create a window manager that organises windows in a deep hierarchy. This will take some time because it is difficult to create a UI that finds the sweet spot between:
So you can do Huffman Coding (as some other post mentioned), but you can't do a character-for-character translation into binary. Still, it seems if everyone texts with two thumbs, two buttons with no temporal syntax would be optimal.
You're right, the kid doesn't have a lot of desire, but there's no way anyone will buy software that there's a good chance will just sit on the shelf.
I got paid to develop in Flash 4 and I found MX 2004 painful to use. Obsessive kids may be able to figure it out, but I could hardly encourage him to use it when I wasn't capable of answering any of his questions.
All of those tools have room for improvements in usability and increases in Freedom.
For example, the other day I pirated a version of Flash because I figured it might be a good way to start a 12 year old programming. First, why did I have to pirate it or pay for it (and why didn't it run on Linux)? George should fund Free tools. Second, it was totally unusable and we gave up pretty quickly. George should fund better tools. Third, what would the kid have done with stuff he made? George should fund distribution and awards.
What strikes me as insane is how industry best-practice is to take a foot-shooting language like C++, Java, or C# and incrementally add (and pay for) braces to keep you from being able to point the gun at your foot and pull the trigger -- when you could just not give your programmers guns!
Unit tests are an attempt to duct tape stronger typing and contracts on to languages that are unsuited for them, leading to the necessity of kludges like mock objects and test generators. But no matter what tools you add, test-driven development is going to be painful in a language without built-in support for it.
So then why are languages like Eiffel not more popular? One theory is that schools still believe that programming should be taught as play and so programmers must start with unstructured languages and modularly add good practices. Imagine if engineers were taught like that.
I don't get all these Debian spin-offs: why wouldn't I just use Debian? eg: I downloaded Knoppix with the intention of using it as an installer (because I heard all the kids were doing that) then apting to sarge, but without reiserfs or reasonable-sized partition support, it's worse than useless.
So as someone who has plenty of experience using Debian, does Ubuntu offer anything at all? And while I'm expressing my confusion: why do people use anything but The One True Package Manager?
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Lisp might not be good for RDBMS, but the close correspondance between S-expressions and XML might be extremely helpful if the application is distributed. And anyone who is willing to code rules in Prolog should have no problem with prefix syntax and higher-order functions.
High-end programmers should have no problem switching between prefix and infix: it's only cog-like code monkeys who insist that the most popular languages have C-like syntax. Experts will continue to implement obscure applications in obscure languages for obscene pay.
Depending on what kind of logic you're trying to code up, you might find it easier to create a domain-specific language that allows coding in whatever paradigm is most appropriate rather than having to shoehorn everything into logic-language assertions. Haskell is considered one of the best languages for create DSLs (my favourite example is a DSL for financial contracts which I was reminded of by this post); however, like most non-Microsoft, non-trivial languages, it is very difficult to port to the .Net CLR.
I could go analyse TFA, but I'd prefer if someone could specify what Apache projects this competes with and explain why anyone would rather use this free-until-deployment solution.
Wouldn't that set a precedent that code is art rather than device? Maybe the OS community should try and cause such a trial...
You do realise that's because seeds are like eggs, right? They contain enough energy (and nutrients) to grow the organism to the point where it can gather its own resources (leaves in the case of plants, teat-sucking in the case of mammals). That energy was put there by the parent plant when it grew the seed. So a potato is just a carrying case for the genetic material + energy you need to start a potato plant on Mars. It'll need plenty of sunlight to get to the next generation.
I could slip and cut myself if I try and unscrew a Phillips screw, so it's safest if I don't have the driver just in case I get tempted.
I know you Yankees like slipping and slicing when you drive screws, but some smaller markets are more enlightened: I refuse to buy a multitool until I can get one with a built in Robertson #2 driver, because that's what all the screws are up here.
Thank you to sjames for defending the philosophical interpretation, but I actually had a less abstract, experimental conjecture in mind*: you can't remove a human's ability to do evil acts without making them so useless as to be unable to do good acts. If you had a genetic test for evilness, and aborted all the fetii with those genes, you'd end up aborting everything that wouldn't grow into a vegetable.
Now that I think about it more, if this conjecture is true, it is only true for certain types of entities. It doesn't seem unreasonable that you could make a robot that would only give out (sugarfree) candy.
* Using commonly agreed upon examples of "good" and "evil" acts and naive definitions of "good" and "evil", just for conversation's sake.
If genes do anything at all to behaviour, even just restrict it, then it necessarily follows that will is not absolutely free. Genes certainly could eliminate genocide, but we might want to allow the possibility for genocide because only creatures capable of evil are capable of good; consider jellyfish.
But isn't meat marbled with fat more moist with a good mouth-feel and considered superior by Western palates than low-fat meat or meat with hunks of fat?
That theory makes a lot of sense except I don't really see an explanation of the why. What do cheap-labour conservatives who aren't the elite hope to gain from cheap-labour? Or is it just that the elite have brainwashed all the middle and lower class cheap-labour conservatives?
Cool, thanks for the briefing.
Ideally, wouldn't the identity authorities establish a web of trust amongst themselves, allowing a user to be authenticated by any one of them and then access any authentication consumer? Hell, I think most people would be more willing to grant Passport a monopoly if they were using open standards that would prevent lock-in.
So the real problem is that no one has figured out a business model for being an id authority other than to extend a monopoly?
Okay so my little brother has been playing CounterStrike on his XBox and wants to try installing it on a PC -- great, I say, I just happen to have a HalfLife CD w/ key from the good old days lying around. So after I install it I try and get this Steam thing going to patch HL so I can install the latest CS mod. Turns out at some point in the distant past I created a Steam account and associated my key with it, but now I don't even remember the email address I used, never mind the username and password. According to Valve, my CD key is now "lost", and if I want a replacement I have to send them US$25 (which is probably about what I originally paid for HL).
Funny, but I don't remember the EULA specifying that they were selling me the right to activate HL for a Steam account; I'd swear it was about a video game.
For whatever reason (could someone wager a guess?) SAML has not been widely adopted (and don't try to argue this point). Maybe this will rectify whatever deficiency SAML has? Or maybe the project is just to create a widely-usable SAML authentication authority?
If privacy means different things in different contexts, what we need is a taxonomy.
That assumes you still believe Cheney was Bush's real running mate.
Tabs implemented at the application level are just a temporary solution until someone figures out how to create a window manager that organises windows in a deep hierarchy. This will take some time because it is difficult to create a UI that finds the sweet spot between:
Dot, Dash, and Space.
So you can do Huffman Coding (as some other post mentioned), but you can't do a character-for-character translation into binary. Still, it seems if everyone texts with two thumbs, two buttons with no temporal syntax would be optimal.
You're right, the kid doesn't have a lot of desire, but there's no way anyone will buy software that there's a good chance will just sit on the shelf.
I got paid to develop in Flash 4 and I found MX 2004 painful to use. Obsessive kids may be able to figure it out, but I could hardly encourage him to use it when I wasn't capable of answering any of his questions.
It would be nice if the kernel had a bug tracker so I could see who's to blame for this stuff...
Anybody know when we can expect to see full and relatively bug-free acpi support? I'm tired of using hacks like radeontool.
All of those tools have room for improvements in usability and increases in Freedom.
For example, the other day I pirated a version of Flash because I figured it might be a good way to start a 12 year old programming. First, why did I have to pirate it or pay for it (and why didn't it run on Linux)? George should fund Free tools. Second, it was totally unusable and we gave up pretty quickly. George should fund better tools. Third, what would the kid have done with stuff he made? George should fund distribution and awards.
What strikes me as insane is how industry best-practice is to take a foot-shooting language like C++, Java, or C# and incrementally add (and pay for) braces to keep you from being able to point the gun at your foot and pull the trigger -- when you could just not give your programmers guns!
Unit tests are an attempt to duct tape stronger typing and contracts on to languages that are unsuited for them, leading to the necessity of kludges like mock objects and test generators. But no matter what tools you add, test-driven development is going to be painful in a language without built-in support for it.
So then why are languages like Eiffel not more popular? One theory is that schools still believe that programming should be taught as play and so programmers must start with unstructured languages and modularly add good practices. Imagine if engineers were taught like that.
I don't get all these Debian spin-offs: why wouldn't I just use Debian? eg: I downloaded Knoppix with the intention of using it as an installer (because I heard all the kids were doing that) then apting to sarge, but without reiserfs or reasonable-sized partition support, it's worse than useless.
So as someone who has plenty of experience using Debian, does Ubuntu offer anything at all? And while I'm expressing my confusion: why do people use anything but The One True Package Manager?