"setf" stands for "set field," and "progn" makes sense when considered along with "prog1" and "prog2" - they respectively return the value of their nth, 1st, and 2nd argument.
These are sort of cryptic names, but at least they have some relation to what they actually do, as opposed to "car" and "cdr".
It's extensible in a way that Python isn't. If you want, say, eager comprehensions, or the keyword 'yield', with Lisp you write a macro. In Python (or almost any other language) you wait for the BDFL, with his God-like power, to put it into the language.
As a consequence of this, you can write some really idiosyncratic Lisp code, in contrast to Python which encourages one coding style. Different strengths for different groups.
With an attitude like that, you must either have a nice trust fund or no interest in starting a family and eating something other than cat food when you're older. I had that attitude when I was younger, and unfortunately, it wasn't because of my (non-existent) trust fund. I was wrong, and I'm paying for it now as I try to start a real career 8 or so years after my contemporaries who were on the ball.
Sounds nice, but this is not true. There are plenty of people out there who majored in what they enjoyed, and ended up getting a job as a manager in a restaurant or something like that (or at home in Mom's basement if they're too stubborn to do that). I know plenty of people who fit that description. If you aren't in a position where money is unimportant to you (that is, you weren't born rich and you aren't some loner hermit who will never have to support a family), you can't afford not to consider the job and paycheck you'll get when you graduate.
If you're lucky, the thing you want to do happens to pay well and you get it both ways.
Read Guido's rationale for yourself. Apparently, Guido's vision is first and foremost to have something easy to understand, and he doesn't consider lambda (and other lisp-like features) especially powerful anyway.
Of course, no sane person would compute fibonaccis that way, but this test shows which languages are better at dealing with heavy-duty (non-tail) recursion. If you're a python programmer, you probably don't care about that and shouldn't put any stock in this particular benchmark, but some people care about this.
I hope you read the Bible more closely than you read TFA, which said:
Pietro Serapiglia, who handles distribution for the producer Stephen Low of Montreal, whose company made the film, said officials at other theaters told him they could not book the movie "for religious reasons," because it had "evolutionary overtones" or "would not go well with the Christian community" or because "the evolution stuff is a problem."
It's not just an editor theorizing, it's a real sign of a real return to the Middle Ages.
I installed Linux on a similar machine, my mom's ancient emachines piece of crap. Gnome runs, but it's just not suitable for use on an ancient box like that. Use xfce or icewm if you want something sort of windows-esque that's not so slow, or fluxbox is even faster if you're not afraid to try a non-windows-like window manager. But forget gnome or KDE unless you get a real computer.
When I was researching going wireless I read a lot of horror stories about trying to get them to work under ndiswrapper (I avoided buying one that would need it so I have no personal experience here). Replace "simply" with "painfully" and you have a true statement.
If a leader is a gambler, he can try to bluff concessions out of his enemies with nukes. He also may turn out to be wrong, and unintentionally end up with mutually assured destruction, because somebody he thought would back down pushed back instead.
In 1939, the UK and France had promised that they would declare war on Germany if Hitler invaded Poland. Hitler did so anyway, gambling that they were bluffing and would back down. He lost. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, betting that the US wouldn't do anything about it. He lost too. Neither of them wanted war (at least not at that time, with those enemies), but war was what they got.
Now imagine if either of those men had had nukes. They would be even more inclined to bluff their way into a cheap victory, and while they would probably not start off by nuking another country, it could come to that if their opponents didn't back down.
So far, no gambler has had control of nuclear weapons, but they've only been around for 50-some years, and in relatively stable countries. If nukes proliferate (and they are), sooner or later somebody's going to make a bet with them and lose.
OK, sure, Lisp advocates are arrogant assholes. I get the joke. But your erroneous statements show that you don't know a damned thing about Lisp itself (I'm not going to go into details, but what you said is analogous to complaining that C has slow garbage collection). So you shouldn't be making misleading statements like "LISP has exactly the strengths and weaknesses you would expect from a pure functional language." Maybe Lisp advocate are so over the top because they're right. Maybe it's because they were dropped on their heads as children. You wouldn't know, having never studied the language.
If you want to attack Smug Lisp Weenies, by all means, go ahead, reading slashdot is enough to qualify you for that. But if you want to pontificate on the strengths and weaknesses of Lisp, or any other language, learn it first.
Only because he didn't bother to update an obsolete language for a 20-30 years, which he could have just as easily not bothered to do with a higher level language.
MIX is at least as outdated as Algol. If you know Java/C/just about any language you can make a pretty good guess about what a snippet of Algol is supposed to do, but MIX is just plain weird. And he didn't update it (at least not in any published version yet released) so he's not saving himself any work by using an obsolete, archaic, machine language instead of an obsolete, archaic, high-level language. There's nothing any more timeless about self-modifying assembler that works with decimal numbers than there is about Algol W.
I think the Cormen Rivest Leiserson book uses a better approach - they use a generic made-up high-level language that anyone who knows any real language could probably understand.
OTOH, it's kind of interesting to see how programmers worked in 1965. And it'll make you glad it's not 1965.
I have to wonder whether that's nostalgia or reality. It seems to me that the US peaked about 40-50 years ago, so most people alive today in this country would think that it was better when they were young.. but I have no idea whether middle-aged people back then thought the same thing.
Yeah, it's because Lisp was created in the MIT AI Lab, its users and creators were super-geek hackers, academics and AI people who had little in common with the average working programmer and weren't working on similar problems. If XML, Perl, or C++ had had the same origin and culture surrounding them they'd be about as popular as Lisp.
If they give away their improvements to IE, they protect themselves from encroachment on their turf by Firefox, but then that's one less reason to upgrade to Longhorn when it comes out. If they don't give them away, they sell more copies of Longhorn, but their market share erodes. It looks like they decided to accept the risk in order to make more money. MS still has a commanding share of the browser market, and there's a good chance they'll get a lot of Firefox users back with Longhorn anyway.
Personally, I would err on the side of protecting the monopoly, but I'm not going to argue with multibillionaires over business decisions.
>The users choice includes not purchasing hardware that requires unfree drivers.
Sometimes that's easier said than done. When I was shopping for an 802.11g PCI card a few months ago, I found that there were no guarantees as to what piece of hardware you're getting when you buy a particular brand. There were lots of stories on forums about how the ACME foo G card works with the free bar driver, but then it would turn out that that only applied to the ACME cards made before July 2, and the later ones have the broadcom chipset with the evil proprietary (and buggy) drivers. And stuff like that. Even people who had done their homework got burned with hardware requiring unfree drivers.
As for myself, I wussed out and bought an ethernet bridge that doesn't require any drivers.
Not really. A semi-savvy client will understand that they're getting the deal of the century because MS (or whichever company) wants to lock them in later.
Freedom is a loser as a selling point because 99+% of people don't know what source code is, wouldn't know what to do with it, and just generally have no emotional attachment to source code or the freedom thereof. Freedom may be a good selling point when compared to proprietary software from a company that might disappear and leave you without support, but if you're competing with, say, MS, its only interest for most people is that it guarantees that this company won't someday lock you in and say "all your money are belong to us if you ever want to see your.docs and.mp3s again." But that goes back to price.
That's right. As as example, I've seen lots of newbies asking questions about compiling and installing software, apparently unaware that 99% of the time a user wants to use a package manager instead of./configure make make install.
You've got useless summaries of switches for "ls" on the one hand and user unfriendly man pages on the other.
Yeah, I read the article, I just don't happen to think that the "light" version will be all that impressive for someone who has never seen linux before. One of the selling points of linux is that most of what you need is included with the distribution, you don't have to spend 2 days installing irfanview, mozilla, and 2 petabytes of MS service packs.
What a condescending asshole. I'll bet you sound just like the comic book guy from the Simpsons.
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These are sort of cryptic names, but at least they have some relation to what they actually do, as opposed to "car" and "cdr".
As a consequence of this, you can write some really idiosyncratic Lisp code, in contrast to Python which encourages one coding style. Different strengths for different groups.
With an attitude like that, you must either have a nice trust fund or no interest in starting a family and eating something other than cat food when you're older. I had that attitude when I was younger, and unfortunately, it wasn't because of my (non-existent) trust fund. I was wrong, and I'm paying for it now as I try to start a real career 8 or so years after my contemporaries who were on the ball.
If you're lucky, the thing you want to do happens to pay well and you get it both ways.
here
Read Guido's rationale for yourself. Apparently, Guido's vision is first and foremost to have something easy to understand, and he doesn't consider lambda (and other lisp-like features) especially powerful anyway.
Actually, they're taking lambda out of python.
Of course, no sane person would compute fibonaccis that way, but this test shows which languages are better at dealing with heavy-duty (non-tail) recursion. If you're a python programmer, you probably don't care about that and shouldn't put any stock in this particular benchmark, but some people care about this.
I have a professor who does the same thing, yet she posts assignments for us in .doc format.
I installed Linux on a similar machine, my mom's ancient emachines piece of crap. Gnome runs, but it's just not suitable for use on an ancient box like that. Use xfce or icewm if you want something sort of windows-esque that's not so slow, or fluxbox is even faster if you're not afraid to try a non-windows-like window manager. But forget gnome or KDE unless you get a real computer.
When I was researching going wireless I read a lot of horror stories about trying to get them to work under ndiswrapper (I avoided buying one that would need it so I have no personal experience here). Replace "simply" with "painfully" and you have a true statement.
Stupid mods.
In 1939, the UK and France had promised that they would declare war on Germany if Hitler invaded Poland. Hitler did so anyway, gambling that they were bluffing and would back down. He lost. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, betting that the US wouldn't do anything about it. He lost too. Neither of them wanted war (at least not at that time, with those enemies), but war was what they got.
Now imagine if either of those men had had nukes. They would be even more inclined to bluff their way into a cheap victory, and while they would probably not start off by nuking another country, it could come to that if their opponents didn't back down.
So far, no gambler has had control of nuclear weapons, but they've only been around for 50-some years, and in relatively stable countries. If nukes proliferate (and they are), sooner or later somebody's going to make a bet with them and lose.
If you want to attack Smug Lisp Weenies, by all means, go ahead, reading slashdot is enough to qualify you for that. But if you want to pontificate on the strengths and weaknesses of Lisp, or any other language, learn it first.
Damnit.
I think the Cormen Rivest Leiserson book uses a better approach - they use a generic made-up high-level language that anyone who knows any real language could probably understand.
OTOH, it's kind of interesting to see how programmers worked in 1965. And it'll make you glad it's not 1965.
I have to wonder whether that's nostalgia or reality. It seems to me that the US peaked about 40-50 years ago, so most people alive today in this country would think that it was better when they were young.. but I have no idea whether middle-aged people back then thought the same thing.
XML isn't so much dumbed down as bloated up.
Personally, I would err on the side of protecting the monopoly, but I'm not going to argue with multibillionaires over business decisions.
Sometimes that's easier said than done. When I was shopping for an 802.11g PCI card a few months ago, I found that there were no guarantees as to what piece of hardware you're getting when you buy a particular brand. There were lots of stories on forums about how the ACME foo G card works with the free bar driver, but then it would turn out that that only applied to the ACME cards made before July 2, and the later ones have the broadcom chipset with the evil proprietary (and buggy) drivers. And stuff like that. Even people who had done their homework got burned with hardware requiring unfree drivers.
As for myself, I wussed out and bought an ethernet bridge that doesn't require any drivers.
Not really. A semi-savvy client will understand that they're getting the deal of the century because MS (or whichever company) wants to lock them in later. Freedom is a loser as a selling point because 99+% of people don't know what source code is, wouldn't know what to do with it, and just generally have no emotional attachment to source code or the freedom thereof. Freedom may be a good selling point when compared to proprietary software from a company that might disappear and leave you without support, but if you're competing with, say, MS, its only interest for most people is that it guarantees that this company won't someday lock you in and say "all your money are belong to us if you ever want to see your .docs and .mp3s again." But that goes back to price.
That's right. As as example, I've seen lots of newbies asking questions about compiling and installing software, apparently unaware that 99% of the time a user wants to use a package manager instead of ./configure make make install.
You've got useless summaries of switches for "ls" on the one hand and user unfriendly man pages on the other.
Yeah, I read the article, I just don't happen to think that the "light" version will be all that impressive for someone who has never seen linux before. One of the selling points of linux is that most of what you need is included with the distribution, you don't have to spend 2 days installing irfanview, mozilla, and 2 petabytes of MS service packs. What a condescending asshole. I'll bet you sound just like the comic book guy from the Simpsons.
Now how am I going to show off linux to someone who doesn't have a bootable DVD?