Semantics, but "good" is kind of broad, and can contradict. In a business context, sure, it was the "good" choice.
Well, there are always going to be films made to make money, and others created for 'art'.
If you want to make money... well, plan for that.
If you want to make art... well, don't be surprised if you don't make money.
It's up to the people making the films to decide which route they want to go. The people making Transformers? Well, they're pretty clear on that they're doing it for.
Well, and what you have to remember is the "summer action blockbuster" exists independent of what critics say.
Love it or hate it, there's always going to be that segment which will go see anything with enough giant robots, explosions, car chases, fight scenes...
That market segment isn't looking for insightful social commentary and sophisticated allegory about the human condition. And there's always going to be that market.
Because that market is very profitable.
So, I won't eve talk about Transformers 4... other than to point out that IMDB lists #5 for 2017, and has placeholders for 6, 7, and 8.
If people go, that is what defined "good" and "successful".
That weepy art-house film everybody raves about but didn't sell many tickets? Well, don't pretend like it made any money. Sure, it was 'relevant', or 'topical', or 'moving'. But the handful of people who saw it didn't make it a financial success.
Actually, I watch a LOT of special features and commentaries on Blu Ray films. What a lot of directors have realized is 100% CGI looks unreal, and 100% practical isn't possible for some of the things they want to put in film.
So what they've started doing is filming much of the sequences with actors in green screens, but otherwise actually acting the scene as much as possible.. then they combine the CGI and practical to produce a much more realistic looking thing.
Mad Max took this to some crazy levels, and actually built the vehicles and raced them through the dessert. They did so much of it as real it's mind boggling.. it's not some guys on a sound stage.
There was a while when CG was starting to look completely fake, because they'd gone with Digital Stuntman or whatever it was, and entire segments were purely effects... but it has definitely been a trend for the last bunch of years to go back to more old-school film making, and combining it with the digital. So they'll motion capture the actors actually doing the scene, they'll build as much as they can in practical, and then they'll fill in the environment around them.
It's definitely a trend, and it's definitely for the better... movies like Dare Devil or some of the Spiderman stuff had started to get to the point of looking gimmicky and fake.
Having the actors really do a scene and integrating that with digital produces a MUCH better film, and directors have been realizing it. Which is good, because the audience also realize it.
I can definitely say (as a keen layman who watches the special features on movies), this has really been a trend by a lot of directors over the last bunch of years. And it really is contributing to better movies.
Last week, the company said that the problem was not an intentional backdoor, but the result of a management feature which relied on an undocumented account with a hard-coded password
Dear god, this company makes security products???
This is so crazy stupid it isn't even funny.
It's backdoor, no matter what you call it. An undocumented account with a hard-coded password is the very definition of a backdoor.
This is just PR spin. It's a backdoor, and pretending otherwise if bullshit.
So, we have driverless cars. You still buy insurance to protect yourself and liability.
That's not how I see it.
I'm not paying for risk insurance for a driverless car. Let the maker assume that.
A driverless car is something in which I am a passenger, can get into it after a few drinks in the pub, and for which I will take ZERO liability.
In a truly driverless scenario, the liability doesn't extend to me, because I have no inputs. If it runs over someone, let the company who made it own that liability.
Any scenario in which I need to take responsibility and liability for when the driverless part doesn't work... then I'll stick with driving my own damned car like I do now.
See, with real driverless cars, the owner is just cargo, and insurance becomes property insurance. Anything else is marketing bullshit where they can pass the buck to you.
It's a game changer, because auto insurance would cease to exist as it does now. Otherwise consumers are paying for insurance for the makers of those cars who are just passing the buck to us.
No fault is meaningless when that "fault" is defined by a corporation and whatever lack of QA they've done. Sorry, I'm not paying for that.
While they'll no doubt use it to set your insurance rates, they also plan to "send you advice, alerts, coupons or discounts on insurance or other goods and services." Traveler's Insurance is thinking along somewhat similar lines. They want to create "a device that offers specific suggestions for managing errands and other travel. Customers would be able to see a map of 'risk zone' data for places they want to go, such as stores, restaurants and roads. They could then plan the day 'with an eye toward how risky such endeavors may be,' according to the patent application."
So, what, they want to be our nannies, and they think people will just let themselves be tracked to prop up their failing business model?
I'm sorry, but why the hell would anybody want this? Wow, gee, I'll just go ahead and implant this device so you can monitor everything I do and monetize it.
How about no? I'm glad I live in a country which has real privacy laws, instead of one in which corporations assume they can just insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life for their own gain.
No, I'm saying if you pass a law lowering the bar to allow just any old made up bullshit to be counted as if it is a legitimate discussion of strengths and weaknesses, it's being done entirely to allow religion to bleed into science.
This isn't about discussing real strengths and weaknesses, but allowing unfounded assertions to be taught as if they are on equal footing with science.
The only people who think there is "controversy" over creationism vs evolution are people who want creationism to be taught as if it is also science.
It isn't, and it never will be. It's sophistry to make it look like science.
And why should the US give 2 shits about what foreigners think.
Well, the reciprocal to that is "why should the rest of the world give a fuck about what Americans want"?
You're acting like the guy who invented the wheel gets a vote in how it's used forever... the internet got created decades ago, get over it. That doesn't mean the US retains control of it forever.
Can anyone explain to me how discussing the strengths and weaknesses of a theory is anti-science?
Because what it really is a way for people to make spurious claims about what they claim are weaknesses in the science, when in reality they want to air things which are purely religious and 100% not founded in science.
And through this, they want their anti-science bullshit presented on the same level as real science.
So, imagine someone saying "obviously these fossils cannot be 400 million years old, as we all know the Earth is only 6000 years old". That's not science, it's religious belief being presented as fact.
These people aren't proposing a rational discussion of the limits of science, they are trying to redefine the playing field by pretending any old shit they make up is on the same level as science.
In this case, "Academic Freedom" is apparently the right to claim anything as fact, teach it as if it is science, and have a law which says they're allowed to... because freedom.
This is about redefining what is actually science to lower the threshold and call any old crap science.. most notably, religious belief.
Well, let's point out that you can't have trustworthy and tamper-proof records of transactions if you can't have cryptography free of back doors.
Those two things are incompatible. Either you have robust encryption technologies which allow for such things, or you haven't got a damned thing.
The problem is we increasingly have things which are built on top of encryption, and we increasingly have governments who want to undermine that for reasons of "security"... and none of them grasp that all of the rest of the security goes away when you poke holes in encryption.
A fundamental lack of trust for the US these days.
The fact that everybody knows of the secret US laws which can demand they lie to you about if the government has demanded information causes the perception that, any entity in the hands of the US or its government is not free from interference and meddling.
You know, how tech companies are fighting the government in court about back doors in encryption, or handing over foreign data from foreign servers despite that being in violation of the laws in those countries.
Do American truly not understand the extent to which the trust level of the US has been severely eroded? Or are you laboring under the belief nobody has noticed?
Because the act of making every agency and corporation a part of the US spy apparatus has the effect of everybody assuming they can't trust those entities due to the fact that... well, they can't.
do you think that women who cannot take a joke are the only ones contemplating going into ITor that scenario is a good thing?
You know, of the many women I've worked with in IT, I've successfully refrained from using a "touch my banana/penis joke" for the last 20 years.
Are you seriously suggesting that the women who can't put up with childish assholes just don't apply?
Because I have another solution.. grow the fuck up, and stop acting like a childish prat and pretending this shit is normal or something they should have to put up with.
Are you people so hell bent on being idiots you think it's normal? Or are you aware you're idiots, and simply don't care?
the latest proposal to be floated by the US is the creation of a privacy ombudsman. The independent overseeing body would be charged with not only checking that data transfers between countries were carried out correctly, but also will be handing complaints from Europe.
No, sorry, this is Americans suggesting they put up their own privacy ombudsman to oversee how America does at violating EU privacy laws.
So, I'll tell you what, let the Americans make a request to EU agencies who are already under this jurisdiction, instead of creating some bullshit fantasy where an American agency is trusted to do it.
What, you think Americans would accept a fucking Chinese ombudsman overseeing snooping into American citizens?
America does not have the credibility for this. This is the fucking fox guarding the hen house. Because if it is in any way under the sway of the US government, they'll just invoke secret security laws and make them lie about it.
Bullshit, this is just a dodge to get around oversight and following the laws. Handling complaints from Europe when the ruling will be that you've complied with the law even if it's a lie?
Yeah, right, tell me another one Pinocchio.
Wah wah wah.... stop pretending like the rest of the world needs to be acceding to US snooping like it's your right. Nobody else believes that shit but you.
I have a solution: until companies carry a legal penalty for being do damned incompetent at security, and they have to give a damn... stop buying this shit.
I know, it's a wacky idea, and people can't survive without something connected to their smart phone.
But on behalf of those of us who have been saying this shit is defective by design for years, what the hell do you expect? This stuff is entirely predictable.
I've simply ran out of the ability to feel any sympathy for this.
TFA is pretty thin on details... as in it doesn't have any.
So, what, an American agency is suggesting there's an American to poo-poo privacy concerns and rubber stamp everything as OK?
Sorry, how the data sharing agreement stays null and void, and the US stops acting like they have some right to this information, and that if they want it they do it with the right paperwork and in accordance with the law?
This is just a proposal to have some idiot flunky say "trust us, it's fine". Yeah, sorry, let the rest of the world control this... letting Americans appoint an ombudsman to tell us how nice they're playing about surveillance?
Well, let's start with anthropologists (this is in the second link):
The origins of warfare are controversial: whether the capacity for organised violence occurs deep in the evolutionary history of our species, or is a symptom of the idea of ownership that came with the settling of land and agriculture.
Who apparently, in some cases, believe we created warfare as a social construct.
"Why people think this..."
Which people?
And then we move into FAR too many modern people who seem to think that we've evolved past violence as a species, and that when it happens it's an outlier.
All our higher brain function does is make us better at it. Don't think for one moment that any other species wouldn't do the same if only they knew how.
What the fuck do you think I said?
I'm saying both academically, and philosophically, a lot of humans seem to make the assertion that humans are innately kind and cuddly. I am of the opinion that is bullshit.
I'm saying humans evolved from animals with a capacity for violence, and just because we wear pants and have smartphones doesn't change the millions of years of evolution which still leaves us with a vast capacity to be little more than animals when push comes to shove.
That there are lots of people with schools of though which attempts to claim violence is something we invented, I find to be an absurd idea. Because the animals we evolved from had that capacity, and the modern primates in the jungle have that capacity.
My entire premise is that civilization and evolution are very thin buffers between being what we actually are: smart animals whose capacity for violence is neither new, nor is it gone.
I'm not saying anything new or revolutionary. We're not even fucking disagreeing. But don't act like I'm making up some fucking straw man argument to tear down.
And yet in my experience most of the rest of the UNIX greybeards I have met... most of the time they fire up vi.
Emacs is as much a cultural thing as anything else. You came from an emacs shop and drank the kool-aid, or you simply don't have any interest in it.
I cut my teeth on unix systems which didn't have emacs by default, by the time I saw it I was happy with vi and looked at emacs and went "what the hell?".
Funniest thing I ever saw was a guy who was so utterly dependent on his emacs as to be crippled without it... and then he's on a client site, on a Solaris workstation he can't install software onto... and the only editor he had was vi. He was almost in tears (we were too but from laughing at him).
Anybody who is going to use unix-type systems and doesn't know how to do at least some basics in vi is just asking to be made to look like an idiot.
I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.
Seriously, check the damned weather somewhere else.
You can stick images in an array and manipulate them just as you would a string or a number. And it shows up visually as one would expect. Well, as a naive person would expect - but that's the beauty of it, right?
To me, absolutely... a five year old can understand sorting an array of pictures of "banana frog cat apple dog elephant" in alphabetical order, without understanding the mechanics of sorting.. it's direct, tangible feedback. It's visual, and it's approachable. And it needs to advanced conceptual thinking.
I'm with you, allowing non-programmers to do easy things easily, and at the same time allow for advanced users to do really advanced stuff... that's a pretty damned cool teaching tool. And it's anything but a toy language, because it's capable of the actual heavy lifting too.
Suddenly one wonders just how much cool educational stuff you could pre-package using this into a tablet app or something... imagine your three year old has mastered "greater than/less than".
You need to have a certain level of understanding of programming before you can use ANY programming language productively. Which is why it's not really about the syntax and semantics - it's about algorithms and data structures, and above all about mathematical modelling. Until you master the art of creating suitable models of real-world situations, and judging how amenable to computation your models will be, there's not much point in writing a single line of code.
Actually, I disagree it should be about algorithms and data structures to begin with. In fact, it's a terrible idea. Don't shoot for "productively", don't look for "creating suitable models of real-world situations". That's way too much way too fast.
You don't teach a kid to build stuff by letting them build a real functioning bridge. You give them some legos or building blocks and let them run wild with it. Let them realize things fall over, or collapse, or don't fit.
What we need is a way to accomplish small, discrete, achievable tasks... as quickly as possible, in a way they can fiddle with permutations and see the outcomes, and with as little abstract concepts as possible. At least, not ones which seem like abstract concepts.
You're not trying to make people who are professional programmers... you're trying to establish "if I do X, Y happens... if I want something which is kinda like Y, I need to do something which is mostly like X but different in this way".
One of the exercises I saw done in junior high/high school to teach people the root concept was to get them to "program the robot". You have them walk someone through the steps of doing an easy task for a human... ideally the "robot" understands you can ONLY do EXACTLY what they tell you, EXACTLY as stated, and that you CAN'T interpret for them.
"Go get the book" results in nothing. Step with your left foot, step with your right foot, extend your hand, open your hand, close your hand. I had a class mate who just couldn't wrap her head around this until a teacher and I did this after class... once she'd done it, she suddenly kinda went "oh, so I need to break this down into a bunch of small steps it already knows how to do". She was never going to be a professional coder, but suddenly she understood the underlying fact... computers are idiots and can't do anything on their own.
The idea you need to formulate a set of steps, plan it out and describe it correctly to do something is what you're learning when you first get introduced to the concept of "programming". And it's incredibly eye-opening how much people struggle with even that as a concept.
Start throwing around words like algorithms and data structures, and people will switch off LONG before you've taught them a damned thing.
You need to lay the foundation to help people being to grasp what it means to start filling in those blanks, and extrapolating to a more generalized solution. You can do an awful lot of that adevelopers.slashdot.org
What you describe is not suitable for teaching kids, or establishing the concept. It's for people who are going to be pursuing something much more rigorous and formalized.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there are always going to be films made to make money, and others created for 'art'.
If you want to make money ... well, plan for that.
If you want to make art ... well, don't be surprised if you don't make money.
It's up to the people making the films to decide which route they want to go. The people making Transformers? Well, they're pretty clear on that they're doing it for.
Well, and what you have to remember is the "summer action blockbuster" exists independent of what critics say.
Love it or hate it, there's always going to be that segment which will go see anything with enough giant robots, explosions, car chases, fight scenes ...
That market segment isn't looking for insightful social commentary and sophisticated allegory about the human condition. And there's always going to be that market.
Because that market is very profitable.
So, I won't eve talk about Transformers 4 ... other than to point out that IMDB lists #5 for 2017, and has placeholders for 6, 7, and 8.
If people go, that is what defined "good" and "successful".
That weepy art-house film everybody raves about but didn't sell many tickets? Well, don't pretend like it made any money. Sure, it was 'relevant', or 'topical', or 'moving'. But the handful of people who saw it didn't make it a financial success.
Actually, I watch a LOT of special features and commentaries on Blu Ray films. What a lot of directors have realized is 100% CGI looks unreal, and 100% practical isn't possible for some of the things they want to put in film.
So what they've started doing is filming much of the sequences with actors in green screens, but otherwise actually acting the scene as much as possible .. then they combine the CGI and practical to produce a much more realistic looking thing.
Mad Max took this to some crazy levels, and actually built the vehicles and raced them through the dessert. They did so much of it as real it's mind boggling .. it's not some guys on a sound stage.
There was a while when CG was starting to look completely fake, because they'd gone with Digital Stuntman or whatever it was, and entire segments were purely effects ... but it has definitely been a trend for the last bunch of years to go back to more old-school film making, and combining it with the digital. So they'll motion capture the actors actually doing the scene, they'll build as much as they can in practical, and then they'll fill in the environment around them.
It's definitely a trend, and it's definitely for the better ... movies like Dare Devil or some of the Spiderman stuff had started to get to the point of looking gimmicky and fake.
Having the actors really do a scene and integrating that with digital produces a MUCH better film, and directors have been realizing it. Which is good, because the audience also realize it.
I can definitely say (as a keen layman who watches the special features on movies), this has really been a trend by a lot of directors over the last bunch of years. And it really is contributing to better movies.
Dear god, this company makes security products???
This is so crazy stupid it isn't even funny.
It's backdoor, no matter what you call it. An undocumented account with a hard-coded password is the very definition of a backdoor.
This is just PR spin. It's a backdoor, and pretending otherwise if bullshit.
That's not how I see it.
I'm not paying for risk insurance for a driverless car. Let the maker assume that.
A driverless car is something in which I am a passenger, can get into it after a few drinks in the pub, and for which I will take ZERO liability.
In a truly driverless scenario, the liability doesn't extend to me, because I have no inputs. If it runs over someone, let the company who made it own that liability.
Any scenario in which I need to take responsibility and liability for when the driverless part doesn't work ... then I'll stick with driving my own damned car like I do now.
See, with real driverless cars, the owner is just cargo, and insurance becomes property insurance. Anything else is marketing bullshit where they can pass the buck to you.
It's a game changer, because auto insurance would cease to exist as it does now. Otherwise consumers are paying for insurance for the makers of those cars who are just passing the buck to us.
No fault is meaningless when that "fault" is defined by a corporation and whatever lack of QA they've done. Sorry, I'm not paying for that.
So, what, they want to be our nannies, and they think people will just let themselves be tracked to prop up their failing business model?
I'm sorry, but why the hell would anybody want this? Wow, gee, I'll just go ahead and implant this device so you can monitor everything I do and monetize it.
How about no? I'm glad I live in a country which has real privacy laws, instead of one in which corporations assume they can just insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life for their own gain.
So much bullshit.
No, I'm saying if you pass a law lowering the bar to allow just any old made up bullshit to be counted as if it is a legitimate discussion of strengths and weaknesses, it's being done entirely to allow religion to bleed into science.
This isn't about discussing real strengths and weaknesses, but allowing unfounded assertions to be taught as if they are on equal footing with science.
The only people who think there is "controversy" over creationism vs evolution are people who want creationism to be taught as if it is also science.
It isn't, and it never will be. It's sophistry to make it look like science.
Well, the reciprocal to that is "why should the rest of the world give a fuck about what Americans want"?
You're acting like the guy who invented the wheel gets a vote in how it's used forever ... the internet got created decades ago, get over it. That doesn't mean the US retains control of it forever.
Because what it really is a way for people to make spurious claims about what they claim are weaknesses in the science, when in reality they want to air things which are purely religious and 100% not founded in science.
And through this, they want their anti-science bullshit presented on the same level as real science.
So, imagine someone saying "obviously these fossils cannot be 400 million years old, as we all know the Earth is only 6000 years old". That's not science, it's religious belief being presented as fact.
These people aren't proposing a rational discussion of the limits of science, they are trying to redefine the playing field by pretending any old shit they make up is on the same level as science.
In this case, "Academic Freedom" is apparently the right to claim anything as fact, teach it as if it is science, and have a law which says they're allowed to ... because freedom.
This is about redefining what is actually science to lower the threshold and call any old crap science .. most notably, religious belief.
Well, let's point out that you can't have trustworthy and tamper-proof records of transactions if you can't have cryptography free of back doors.
Those two things are incompatible. Either you have robust encryption technologies which allow for such things, or you haven't got a damned thing.
The problem is we increasingly have things which are built on top of encryption, and we increasingly have governments who want to undermine that for reasons of "security" ... and none of them grasp that all of the rest of the security goes away when you poke holes in encryption.
Yeah, right. This is about allowing stuff which has no resemblance to be presented as science.
Teach your religion in your church. Stop trying to raise kids who can't distinguish facts and science from personal belief and wishful thinking.
This is just thinly veiled attempts at putting religious beliefs into school as if they are facts.
A fundamental lack of trust for the US these days.
The fact that everybody knows of the secret US laws which can demand they lie to you about if the government has demanded information causes the perception that, any entity in the hands of the US or its government is not free from interference and meddling.
You know, how tech companies are fighting the government in court about back doors in encryption, or handing over foreign data from foreign servers despite that being in violation of the laws in those countries.
Do American truly not understand the extent to which the trust level of the US has been severely eroded? Or are you laboring under the belief nobody has noticed?
Because the act of making every agency and corporation a part of the US spy apparatus has the effect of everybody assuming they can't trust those entities due to the fact that ... well, they can't.
You know, of the many women I've worked with in IT, I've successfully refrained from using a "touch my banana/penis joke" for the last 20 years.
Are you seriously suggesting that the women who can't put up with childish assholes just don't apply?
Because I have another solution .. grow the fuck up, and stop acting like a childish prat and pretending this shit is normal or something they should have to put up with.
Are you people so hell bent on being idiots you think it's normal? Or are you aware you're idiots, and simply don't care?
Then read the damned article:
No, sorry, this is Americans suggesting they put up their own privacy ombudsman to oversee how America does at violating EU privacy laws.
So, I'll tell you what, let the Americans make a request to EU agencies who are already under this jurisdiction, instead of creating some bullshit fantasy where an American agency is trusted to do it.
What, you think Americans would accept a fucking Chinese ombudsman overseeing snooping into American citizens?
America does not have the credibility for this. This is the fucking fox guarding the hen house. Because if it is in any way under the sway of the US government, they'll just invoke secret security laws and make them lie about it.
Bullshit, this is just a dodge to get around oversight and following the laws. Handling complaints from Europe when the ruling will be that you've complied with the law even if it's a lie?
Yeah, right, tell me another one Pinocchio.
Wah wah wah .... stop pretending like the rest of the world needs to be acceding to US snooping like it's your right. Nobody else believes that shit but you.
I have a solution: until companies carry a legal penalty for being do damned incompetent at security, and they have to give a damn ... stop buying this shit.
I know, it's a wacky idea, and people can't survive without something connected to their smart phone.
But on behalf of those of us who have been saying this shit is defective by design for years, what the hell do you expect? This stuff is entirely predictable.
I've simply ran out of the ability to feel any sympathy for this.
TFA is pretty thin on details ... as in it doesn't have any.
So, what, an American agency is suggesting there's an American to poo-poo privacy concerns and rubber stamp everything as OK?
Sorry, how the data sharing agreement stays null and void, and the US stops acting like they have some right to this information, and that if they want it they do it with the right paperwork and in accordance with the law?
This is just a proposal to have some idiot flunky say "trust us, it's fine". Yeah, sorry, let the rest of the world control this ... letting Americans appoint an ombudsman to tell us how nice they're playing about surveillance?
Nobody believes that shit.
Well, let's start with anthropologists (this is in the second link):
Who apparently, in some cases, believe we created warfare as a social construct.
And then we move into FAR too many modern people who seem to think that we've evolved past violence as a species, and that when it happens it's an outlier.
People actually think humans are not inately violent.
What the fuck do you think I said?
I'm saying both academically, and philosophically, a lot of humans seem to make the assertion that humans are innately kind and cuddly. I am of the opinion that is bullshit.
I'm saying humans evolved from animals with a capacity for violence, and just because we wear pants and have smartphones doesn't change the millions of years of evolution which still leaves us with a vast capacity to be little more than animals when push comes to shove.
That there are lots of people with schools of though which attempts to claim violence is something we invented, I find to be an absurd idea. Because the animals we evolved from had that capacity, and the modern primates in the jungle have that capacity.
My entire premise is that civilization and evolution are very thin buffers between being what we actually are: smart animals whose capacity for violence is neither new, nor is it gone.
I'm not saying anything new or revolutionary. We're not even fucking disagreeing. But don't act like I'm making up some fucking straw man argument to tear down.
And yet in my experience most of the rest of the UNIX greybeards I have met ... most of the time they fire up vi.
Emacs is as much a cultural thing as anything else. You came from an emacs shop and drank the kool-aid, or you simply don't have any interest in it.
I cut my teeth on unix systems which didn't have emacs by default, by the time I saw it I was happy with vi and looked at emacs and went "what the hell?".
Wow ... so ... what are we up to now? 8,762 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag?
Yeah, I reiterate, I've found that ridiculous for the last 20 years. I see nothing has changed.
LOL ... please tell me you're joking. I can never tell with kitchen sink, I mean, emacs.
Funniest thing I ever saw was a guy who was so utterly dependent on his emacs as to be crippled without it ... and then he's on a client site, on a Solaris workstation he can't install software onto ... and the only editor he had was vi. He was almost in tears (we were too but from laughing at him).
Anybody who is going to use unix-type systems and doesn't know how to do at least some basics in vi is just asking to be made to look like an idiot.
I must confess, I've never grasped this incessant need to do everything from within emacs. I find it tends to create people who spend endless hours honing their editor instead of doing their jobs, and who suddenly can't do anything without all the training wheels they've added.
Seriously, check the damned weather somewhere else.
Has that been updated to include Facebook, Twitter, or Minecraft?
I'm not even sure kids use email these days.
To me, absolutely ... a five year old can understand sorting an array of pictures of "banana frog cat apple dog elephant" in alphabetical order, without understanding the mechanics of sorting .. it's direct, tangible feedback. It's visual, and it's approachable. And it needs to advanced conceptual thinking.
I'm with you, allowing non-programmers to do easy things easily, and at the same time allow for advanced users to do really advanced stuff ... that's a pretty damned cool teaching tool. And it's anything but a toy language, because it's capable of the actual heavy lifting too.
Suddenly one wonders just how much cool educational stuff you could pre-package using this into a tablet app or something ... imagine your three year old has mastered "greater than/less than".
Actually, I disagree it should be about algorithms and data structures to begin with. In fact, it's a terrible idea. Don't shoot for "productively", don't look for "creating suitable models of real-world situations". That's way too much way too fast.
You don't teach a kid to build stuff by letting them build a real functioning bridge. You give them some legos or building blocks and let them run wild with it. Let them realize things fall over, or collapse, or don't fit.
What we need is a way to accomplish small, discrete, achievable tasks ... as quickly as possible, in a way they can fiddle with permutations and see the outcomes, and with as little abstract concepts as possible. At least, not ones which seem like abstract concepts.
You're not trying to make people who are professional programmers ... you're trying to establish "if I do X, Y happens ... if I want something which is kinda like Y, I need to do something which is mostly like X but different in this way".
One of the exercises I saw done in junior high/high school to teach people the root concept was to get them to "program the robot". You have them walk someone through the steps of doing an easy task for a human ... ideally the "robot" understands you can ONLY do EXACTLY what they tell you, EXACTLY as stated, and that you CAN'T interpret for them.
"Go get the book" results in nothing. Step with your left foot, step with your right foot, extend your hand, open your hand, close your hand. I had a class mate who just couldn't wrap her head around this until a teacher and I did this after class ... once she'd done it, she suddenly kinda went "oh, so I need to break this down into a bunch of small steps it already knows how to do". She was never going to be a professional coder, but suddenly she understood the underlying fact ... computers are idiots and can't do anything on their own.
The idea you need to formulate a set of steps, plan it out and describe it correctly to do something is what you're learning when you first get introduced to the concept of "programming". And it's incredibly eye-opening how much people struggle with even that as a concept.
Start throwing around words like algorithms and data structures, and people will switch off LONG before you've taught them a damned thing.
You need to lay the foundation to help people being to grasp what it means to start filling in those blanks, and extrapolating to a more generalized solution. You can do an awful lot of that adevelopers.slashdot.org
What you describe is not suitable for teaching kids, or establishing the concept. It's for people who are going to be pursuing something much more rigorous and formalized.
Except his language allows you to all of the stuff which has come from Mathmatica and the like ... you can do full on advanced maths with it.
It isn't a toy language, it's a fairly complete language. Once you learn the basic you keep going on to the advanced stuff.
The easy stuff is easy. But it can go all the way to doing multi-variable calculus ... that's not a toy language.
Maybe you don't understand the scope of what can actually be done with it.
What he's saying is he has an easy to learn language which doesn't top out at being a toy. There's a difference.