Space complexity should be predicted in functional languages the same as it's done in C++ : by using data structures that you'll know how will use memory under different conditions. If you use collections from the STL to create complex algorithms, you'll also have to learn how to avoid calling the copy constructor if you want predictable space.
Actually, the gurus at Microsoft Research are doing a really good work in 1) and 2) with F#. Its syntax is C-like, and it has monads wrapped up in "computation expressions", edible by imperative programmers! And it runs on the.Net platform, so it interacts nicely with the CLR engine and.Net libraries.
For 3), though, I suppose you'll have to ask Bill himself.;-)
I suspect that one day a language more like haskell and less like C will end up being the most popular.
BTW that language may already be here. F# is Mozart in disguise - and its new computation expressions are a way to make monads palatable to C (and C#) programmers. There's no real need of strong maths to use computation expressions (although it might be required to *build* new types of computation expressions).
Monads are a tough concept, until you realize that they serve the same concept as Inversion of Control in Object-Oriented Programming. If you have managed to do the jump from structured programming to object-oriented, you'll see that Monads are really close to Design Patterns and Aspect-Oriented Programming (the next step in OOP).
The point of monads is not to "make Input/Output wokr" or "provide exception control"; monads work for that and much more.
The real point of monads is that they are a "Structural Pattern": they serve to create the architecture of your functional program, in a way that is powerful and flexible. I like to describe them as an Abstract Data Type to abstract away computations instead of data; they're a good way to encapsulate common functionality to update your data structures, and have it triggered automatically as a side-effect instead of calling them woven with your business logic.
>blockquote>they just don't match the normal person's mental model of computation.
That's because the "normal person" (read: normal programmer)'s mental model of computation is based on imperative languages, which are a degenerated child of Turing's calculus in which every side effect or state change is implicit in the underlying execution machine, not visible in your code.
In functional languages since the invention of the mighty Monad, side effects are again in charge of the programmer, not the platform developer. You can program in a functional language following your precious mental model of computation, it's just that the side effects are made explicit in the abstractions of your program. You can choose how many side effects will there be, and in which parts of the program they can or can't take effect. So the "sequence of states" mental model is nothing unique to imperative programs, functional programming also can do it.
(Have you heard of continuations applied to web programming, where the possible states are not lineal - but a branching tree? Functional can do "sequence of states" even better than imperative!)
And the reality is that procedural languages better match the way the trained programmers mind works.
There, fixed for you.
There's nothing natural in the "change-one-byte-at-a-time" von-Neumann bottleneck languages, other than they're the ones taught in standard programming courses.
Re:It's Worse than That
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Maybe your problem with the game is that you care about "binding to a respawn point", "leveling up", "boost your attributes" or "rate of movement". Wright has stated that they designed the game to appeal to the people who like "Sims fashions and furniture". For them, the Sporepedia is a dream come true, and the simple gameplay enhances the choices to explore all the varying content with ease.
it's market appeal would have to be specialized towards preschoolers
Or rocket scientists, or architects. The utility of that direct manipulation is not determined by the interaction technique but by the contents on which it's applied.
Wouldn't a graphics designer prefer to edit a 3D model with a handle like those of Reactable, instead of with a point-and-click mouse or tablet?
I typically have 20 - 30 tabs open by window, and I prefer horizontal tabs. I tried vertical tabs back in the beginning of Firefox (maybe 4 or 5 years ago), with the first extensions that allowed it, and hated it. The tabs are too far to the left - I usually have just 2 or 3 important tabs at each time, and they are right in the center of the screen, a few pixels away from the cursor. When I change context and want to search for a different group of tabs, the dropdown menu provides a vertical without compromising the screen real state.
So yes, your beloved layout is a matter of preference.
BTW, Microsoft OneNote has hierarchical vertical tabs on the left to classify documents and sections, and it's a mess.
how are you supposed to describe an error in twenty words or less?
A good error message isn't supposed to describe the error, it's supposed to describe the solution. The right answer is to give instructions as of what the user can do to fix the problem (that includes calling the expert if the solution is out of reach to the user knowledge).
You not having a clue about the right course of action is proof that developers shouldn't be involved in anything in relation with user interaction, be it error reporting, widgets layout or timing of interface events. (Yes, I know programmers love doing all that, but it's a mistake. The design should be left to someone with at least some basic training in psychology and/or ergonomics).
I'll never really understand that defeatist kind of mentality either. It seems to be the same pattern in peoples heads that causes issues with tech support. How many times have you had to explain to someone something that was written out exactly in the error message they received as they didn't read it at all because "I'm not good with computers!"?
To be fair, this is mostly a fault of software programmers: 99% of the error messages are gibberish nonsense, so the best strategy for a common user is to simply ignore them and look for expert help. See User Error for the mindset (in developers) that produces that situation.
With respect to maths, my experience is that the defeatist attitude is caused by woeful teachers. Personally, I would love to see a world where teachers would be able to teach about Critical Thinking, Basic Statistics and Probability in an effective way.
Not the case for Dreamfall. I've RTFA, and Ragnar explains that TLJ was unedited (as he was his own boss then), allowing things like swearing and full frontal male nudity, while Dreamfall was edited/censored. He mentions that time limits affected the gameplay, but not the major elements of the story.
Why do I often feel that liberal capitalism is a religion? Maybe it's because their followers tend to use parables instead of sound and documented reasoning?
"Efficiency" is a mystery just like the sacred trinity. On the one hand they argue that nobody can't measure or decide the criteria for the overall well-being of society, and on the other hand they are prone to point out how acting on the "right principles" will always be beneficial to the society, even if the weak must be slaughtered on the sacred altar of efficiency.
I'm all for the protection of individual freedoms, but those scaremongering about pseudo-fallacies based on scary tales (about 'broken windows' or 'invisible hands') are just ridiculous. Specially when, for each of the parables, there will be an economist of a different school showing how the opposite behavior is just as beneficial as the one the parable supports.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about the density of code; but that's a property of the programmer,, not the language.
Space complexity should be predicted in functional languages the same as it's done in C++ : by using data structures that you'll know how will use memory under different conditions. If you use collections from the STL to create complex algorithms, you'll also have to learn how to avoid calling the copy constructor if you want predictable space.
So, you've never used an event queue?
Actually, imperative code is executed by a IO monad at the CPU level. So it's functional lambda-calculus all way down.
Actually, the gurus at Microsoft Research are doing a really good work in 1) and 2) with F#. Its syntax is C-like, and it has monads wrapped up in "computation expressions", edible by imperative programmers! And it runs on the .Net platform, so it interacts nicely with the CLR engine and .Net libraries.
For 3), though, I suppose you'll have to ask Bill himself. ;-)
BTW that language may already be here. F# is Mozart in disguise - and its new computation expressions are a way to make monads palatable to C (and C#) programmers. There's no real need of strong maths to use computation expressions (although it might be required to *build* new types of computation expressions).
Monads are a tough concept, until you realize that they serve the same concept as Inversion of Control in Object-Oriented Programming. If you have managed to do the jump from structured programming to object-oriented, you'll see that Monads are really close to Design Patterns and Aspect-Oriented Programming (the next step in OOP).
The point of monads is not to "make Input/Output wokr" or "provide exception control"; monads work for that and much more.
The real point of monads is that they are a "Structural Pattern": they serve to create the architecture of your functional program, in a way that is powerful and flexible. I like to describe them as an Abstract Data Type to abstract away computations instead of data; they're a good way to encapsulate common functionality to update your data structures, and have it triggered automatically as a side-effect instead of calling them woven with your business logic.
>blockquote>they just don't match the normal person's mental model of computation.
That's because the "normal person" (read: normal programmer)'s mental model of computation is based on imperative languages, which are a degenerated child of Turing's calculus in which every side effect or state change is implicit in the underlying execution machine, not visible in your code.
In functional languages since the invention of the mighty Monad, side effects are again in charge of the programmer, not the platform developer. You can program in a functional language following your precious mental model of computation, it's just that the side effects are made explicit in the abstractions of your program. You can choose how many side effects will there be, and in which parts of the program they can or can't take effect. So the "sequence of states" mental model is nothing unique to imperative programs, functional programming also can do it.
(Have you heard of continuations applied to web programming, where the possible states are not lineal - but a branching tree? Functional can do "sequence of states" even better than imperative!)
There, fixed for you.
There's nothing natural in the "change-one-byte-at-a-time" von-Neumann bottleneck languages, other than they're the ones taught in standard programming courses.
Oh, you mean that the human mind keeps track for changes of state in the environment? Sorry to break the news to you, but that can also be done in functional languages.
Maybe your problem with the game is that you care about "binding to a respawn point", "leveling up", "boost your attributes" or "rate of movement". Wright has stated that they designed the game to appeal to the people who like "Sims fashions and furniture". For them, the Sporepedia is a dream come true, and the simple gameplay enhances the choices to explore all the varying content with ease.
Mostly to show up GPs bad orthography :-)
"release early, release often" is not an idea-logy, it's a method-logy.
Or rocket scientists, or architects. The utility of that direct manipulation is not determined by the interaction technique but by the contents on which it's applied.
Wouldn't a graphics designer prefer to edit a 3D model with a handle like those of Reactable, instead of with a point-and-click mouse or tablet?
(Except when you don't.)
No and no.
It's just that we have stuck with the same GUI for 30 years. But that doesn't mean there aren't other possibilities out there.
Do you drink coffee?
I typically have 20 - 30 tabs open by window, and I prefer horizontal tabs. I tried vertical tabs back in the beginning of Firefox (maybe 4 or 5 years ago), with the first extensions that allowed it, and hated it. The tabs are too far to the left - I usually have just 2 or 3 important tabs at each time, and they are right in the center of the screen, a few pixels away from the cursor. When I change context and want to search for a different group of tabs, the dropdown menu provides a vertical without compromising the screen real state.
So yes, your beloved layout is a matter of preference.
BTW, Microsoft OneNote has hierarchical vertical tabs on the left to classify documents and sections, and it's a mess.
It becomes the Semantic Web, and it gets closer to what Tim had in mind when he invented the WWW than what we have now with HTML + CSS.
A good error message isn't supposed to describe the error, it's supposed to describe the solution. The right answer is to give instructions as of what the user can do to fix the problem (that includes calling the expert if the solution is out of reach to the user knowledge).
You not having a clue about the right course of action is proof that developers shouldn't be involved in anything in relation with user interaction, be it error reporting, widgets layout or timing of interface events. (Yes, I know programmers love doing all that, but it's a mistake. The design should be left to someone with at least some basic training in psychology and/or ergonomics).
But when we normalize it and build it by consensus, it won't be fun anymore. And we'll have to find a different kind of fun, a new baseline.
When the writer is Ray Bradbury, yes, it should.
And isn't 88 a special age for hobbits, or something?
To be fair, this is mostly a fault of software programmers: 99% of the error messages are gibberish nonsense, so the best strategy for a common user is to simply ignore them and look for expert help. See User Error for the mindset (in developers) that produces that situation.
With respect to maths, my experience is that the defeatist attitude is caused by woeful teachers. Personally, I would love to see a world where teachers would be able to teach about Critical Thinking, Basic Statistics and Probability in an effective way.
In which category do you include High School Musical?
Not the case for Dreamfall. I've RTFA, and Ragnar explains that TLJ was unedited (as he was his own boss then), allowing things like swearing and full frontal male nudity, while Dreamfall was edited/censored. He mentions that time limits affected the gameplay, but not the major elements of the story.
Why do I often feel that liberal capitalism is a religion? Maybe it's because their followers tend to use parables instead of sound and documented reasoning?
"Efficiency" is a mystery just like the sacred trinity. On the one hand they argue that nobody can't measure or decide the criteria for the overall well-being of society, and on the other hand they are prone to point out how acting on the "right principles" will always be beneficial to the society, even if the weak must be slaughtered on the sacred altar of efficiency.
I'm all for the protection of individual freedoms, but those scaremongering about pseudo-fallacies based on scary tales (about 'broken windows' or 'invisible hands') are just ridiculous. Specially when, for each of the parables, there will be an economist of a different school showing how the opposite behavior is just as beneficial as the one the parable supports.