In the words of Rutherford: All science is either physics or stamp collecting. This is stamp collecting. It's another case of applying formulas to numeric observations without a hint of the underlying social or cognitive processes. That does not advance linguistics.
And this is published in Science? You mean, the journal whose impact factor dwarfs those of the more dedicated linguistic journals? Ugly.
I agree. I've gone from very strict languages to "a pointer is a pointer" in C to correct type checking C and C++, and static typing definitely helps. Take Javascript: a lot of APIs don't give a clue what kind of data they expect and fail silently when you supply the wrong one. That's really going to make users happy...
I used to use scroogle: Google's search engine is ok, but their privacy policy isn't. But the throttling had become clear over the last two months, so I switched to duckduckgo, as many people. It's not quite google, and I can't "predict" its results as well as google's, but it's quite good, and has some nice features, such as the short content at the top of the page and the label "official site".
IANAL, but since when does lawyer mean "someone who reinterprets every word in a new and twisted way, just to make profit"? But hey, If they make this new definition of "famous" stick, then we can redefine "lawyer" to mean whatever we want. I'm proposing to redefine it as "Anser fabalis", given that to me the sound of a lawyer is a loud honking, which has the side-effect that we would be legally entitled to cooking them.
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery
A bit hand-wavey? You're being kind. Large groups of neurons collaborating to trigger a single event have been proposed to model precise timing, e.g. in movement, and locking behavior has been observed for speeds in the order of 100Hz to 5Hz, but synchronization over such a long period of time? And large groups? You would think that would be totally impossible. It sounds like 1. We don't know how a large group of neurons behave over long periods 2. We don't know what triggers a serial killer 3. ? 4. Publication!
You're probably right. Here's some illustration for some readers that might be wondering about the case. The first random article I got from Wikipedia started like this:
The gudastviri (Georgian: ) is a droneless, double-chantered, horn-belled bagpipe played in Georgia. The term comes from the words guda (bag) and stviri (whistling). In some regions, the instrument is called the chiboni, stviri, or tulumi.
My spell checker rejects gudastviri, droneless, chantered, guda, stviri, chiboni, stviri, and tulum. There is no way a 111k word dictionary contains all these words.
The 25% is indeed an enormous red flag. In standard English texts, more than 50% of the text is made up of words like be, is, a, the, and, etc. I haven't seen any error in that on Wikipedia. That means that more than half of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives have been misspelled.
But then what's the point of computational simulation, especially: what could Wolfram contribute? Physicists are quite capable of building their simulations, AFAIK.
If nature is truly discrete, you're right, and there would be a given "step size". If it isn't, there are going to be differences. I was replying on the assumption that nature isn't necessarily discrete.
That's only a (fundamental) problem if it is faster than reality. If it is slower, it cannot influence. At least, not under the currently accepted laws of physics...
Ignore the compression argument. If you can simulate the universe in a machine smaller than itself, the machine simulates itself, so it will have inside it a simulation of the simulation, which contains a simulation of the simulation, etc., all in the same state. So something smaller than a particle would be able to contain the state of the entire universe. Now there's a claim...
No, you're not. Any approximation will deviate from the exact solution after a number of iterations. Does it even make physical sense to have an approximation that can go that low when the objects are not supposed to?
The earth understood as a computer program... That badly?
Joking aside: this is pure bollocks. Classical physics has insolvable problems (3 particles is a no-no), quantum mechanics cannot be simulated at a low level. So how is computation going to help understand the universe? Run a few simulations with a huge pile of assumptions? I put my money on Bruce Willis and his team.
You've just given the argument for the opposite case. People do mistake "their" for "they're" and "too", "two" and "to" as well. That's not because they look alike. Hell, people mistake accept and except, where even the initial two characters differ.
Sure, that could be nice as well, but the IOCCC provides great challenges and puzzles, something that a clean code contest wouldn't. And what would you rather see in your news paper: difficult puzzles or easy ones? Or, for the youngsters here: would you rather play word feud, or type the answer to 1 + 1 over and over again?
Besides that, the IOCCC entries contain mostly well structured and correct code, and afterwards they get documented as well. It's just not readable.
Refactoring into get/set is ok. I'm just of the opinion that set and get aren't needed in all cases. But what really ticked me off was overriding the assignment operator like in C#, making something that looks like assignment call some function, giving rise to all kinds of potential for abuse. I mean: programming language design is supposed to make programming better, at least for me. If I want something worse, I'll use VB...
You're completely right, but the lunatics are running the asylum sometimes. Many people, even some IDEs, insist on generating getters and setters, even when there isn't a JavaBean in sight.
Your points about properties are all true, but a subset of what I would like to see: namely that an assignment operator just performs an assignment, and nothing else. The database open assignment was a case in point. It should just have been something like conn.dbOpen(). We might have conventions for function names that do generic things based on reflection (apart from get and set, there is e.g. also JUnit's testX(), which is sort of cute), but let's not go beyond that.
I don't care about type inference. My IDE does a good job. And I like static typing. But well, the language has closures and typed switches, so why not. But then the set/get feature.
First we got told that writing person.name = "John" is bad. Bad, bad, bad. I never understood why. Sure, getters and setters are very useful, beans and all, and it can take away some trouble, but if you really need a function that does more than change the value of field x, why call it setX()?
Anyway, that's the current practice: getX() and setX(), and sometimes they don't get x, or set x, but just pretend. Now Xtend translates person.name = "John" into a call to a setter. And that's even worse. In a previous job, I inherited C# code that had statements like db.open = true. Whaddya think that meant? Why, it opens the db connection, via the setter, of course! And indeed, assigning false... So now all this power of abuse has come full circle back to Javaland. What a mess.
Slashdot Mirror
In the words of Rutherford: All science is either physics or stamp collecting. This is stamp collecting. It's another case of applying formulas to numeric observations without a hint of the underlying social or cognitive processes. That does not advance linguistics.
And this is published in Science? You mean, the journal whose impact factor dwarfs those of the more dedicated linguistic journals? Ugly.
I agree. I've gone from very strict languages to "a pointer is a pointer" in C to correct type checking C and C++, and static typing definitely helps. Take Javascript: a lot of APIs don't give a clue what kind of data they expect and fail silently when you supply the wrong one. That's really going to make users happy...
PERL??? Are you ... O wait. How was it? Starve a flame war, feed a troll? Or was it the other way around?
Interesting. I'm going to check it out.
... Be greedy!
I used to use scroogle: Google's search engine is ok, but their privacy policy isn't. But the throttling had become clear over the last two months, so I switched to duckduckgo, as many people. It's not quite google, and I can't "predict" its results as well as google's, but it's quite good, and has some nice features, such as the short content at the top of the page and the label "official site".
Try it, everyone!
IANAL, but since when does lawyer mean "someone who reinterprets every word in a new and twisted way, just to make profit"? But hey, If they make this new definition of "famous" stick, then we can redefine "lawyer" to mean whatever we want. I'm proposing to redefine it as "Anser fabalis", given that to me the sound of a lawyer is a loud honking, which has the side-effect that we would be legally entitled to cooking them.
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it -- talking trade balances here -- once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here -- once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel -- once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity -- y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
A bit hand-wavey? You're being kind. Large groups of neurons collaborating to trigger a single event have been proposed to model precise timing, e.g. in movement, and locking behavior has been observed for speeds in the order of 100Hz to 5Hz, but synchronization over such a long period of time? And large groups? You would think that would be totally impossible. It sounds like
1. We don't know how a large group of neurons behave over long periods
2. We don't know what triggers a serial killer
3. ?
4. Publication!
And once again, Oracle succeeds where many others have failed. This time they are going to make Java impopular!
You're probably right. Here's some illustration for some readers that might be wondering about the case. The first random article I got from Wikipedia started like this:
The gudastviri (Georgian: ) is a droneless, double-chantered, horn-belled bagpipe played in Georgia. The term comes from the words guda (bag) and stviri (whistling). In some regions, the instrument is called the chiboni, stviri, or tulumi.
My spell checker rejects gudastviri, droneless, chantered, guda, stviri, chiboni, stviri, and tulum. There is no way a 111k word dictionary contains all these words.
The 25% is indeed an enormous red flag. In standard English texts, more than 50% of the text is made up of words like be, is, a, the, and, etc. I haven't seen any error in that on Wikipedia. That means that more than half of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives have been misspelled.
Mod up parent!!
The same idiot that hopefully has one point left to mod you troll?
But then what's the point of computational simulation, especially: what could Wolfram contribute? Physicists are quite capable of building their simulations, AFAIK.
If nature is truly discrete, you're right, and there would be a given "step size". If it isn't, there are going to be differences. I was replying on the assumption that nature isn't necessarily discrete.
That's only a (fundamental) problem if it is faster than reality. If it is slower, it cannot influence. At least, not under the currently accepted laws of physics...
Ignore the compression argument. If you can simulate the universe in a machine smaller than itself, the machine simulates itself, so it will have inside it a simulation of the simulation, which contains a simulation of the simulation, etc., all in the same state. So something smaller than a particle would be able to contain the state of the entire universe. Now there's a claim...
No, you're not. Any approximation will deviate from the exact solution after a number of iterations. Does it even make physical sense to have an approximation that can go that low when the objects are not supposed to?
The earth understood as a computer program... That badly?
Joking aside: this is pure bollocks. Classical physics has insolvable problems (3 particles is a no-no), quantum mechanics cannot be simulated at a low level. So how is computation going to help understand the universe? Run a few simulations with a huge pile of assumptions? I put my money on Bruce Willis and his team.
You've just given the argument for the opposite case. People do mistake "their" for "they're" and "too", "two" and "to" as well. That's not because they look alike. Hell, people mistake accept and except, where even the initial two characters differ.
Sure, that could be nice as well, but the IOCCC provides great challenges and puzzles, something that a clean code contest wouldn't. And what would you rather see in your news paper: difficult puzzles or easy ones? Or, for the youngsters here: would you rather play word feud, or type the answer to 1 + 1 over and over again?
Besides that, the IOCCC entries contain mostly well structured and correct code, and afterwards they get documented as well. It's just not readable.
Refactoring into get/set is ok. I'm just of the opinion that set and get aren't needed in all cases. But what really ticked me off was overriding the assignment operator like in C#, making something that looks like assignment call some function, giving rise to all kinds of potential for abuse. I mean: programming language design is supposed to make programming better, at least for me. If I want something worse, I'll use VB...
You're completely right, but the lunatics are running the asylum sometimes. Many people, even some IDEs, insist on generating getters and setters, even when there isn't a JavaBean in sight.
Your points about properties are all true, but a subset of what I would like to see: namely that an assignment operator just performs an assignment, and nothing else. The database open assignment was a case in point. It should just have been something like conn.dbOpen(). We might have conventions for function names that do generic things based on reflection (apart from get and set, there is e.g. also JUnit's testX(), which is sort of cute), but let's not go beyond that.
I don't care about type inference. My IDE does a good job. And I like static typing. But well, the language has closures and typed switches, so why not. But then the set/get feature.
First we got told that writing person.name = "John" is bad. Bad, bad, bad. I never understood why. Sure, getters and setters are very useful, beans and all, and it can take away some trouble, but if you really need a function that does more than change the value of field x, why call it setX()?
Anyway, that's the current practice: getX() and setX(), and sometimes they don't get x, or set x, but just pretend. Now Xtend translates person.name = "John" into a call to a setter. And that's even worse. In a previous job, I inherited C# code that had statements like db.open = true. Whaddya think that meant? Why, it opens the db connection, via the setter, of course! And indeed, assigning false... So now all this power of abuse has come full circle back to Javaland. What a mess.
It's sad, isn't it? But this is the internet: morons abound.
Shouldn't that be LatteText? Or MaccchiatoSculpt?