So I switched 5 years ago to Dvorak because I could feel RSI coming on. A couple years later I bought a Kinesis keyboard. I'll be honest, the Kinesis keyboard improved things 10x as much as switching to Dvorak. In addition, Dvorak really only makes sense if you do a lot of typing in English. Because of the odd placement of the parens and brackets, typing C in dvorak can be a real pain. I don't program all that much anymore (certainly not in C, mostly in MATLAB and Scheme nowadays).
> Your gender bias has already presented itself. An equally valid question would have been "has MIT selected this person because they are a MAN" (assuming they were a man).
But in a society where universities have black, hispanic, female etc quotas to fill regardless of relative qualifications, I think it is quite ok to ask whether the mechanism by which they arrived in their position is by taking advantage of this bias, or not.
Had the society not enforced these rules, your post would stand.
MIT does not have quotas. Instead it encourages diversity -- that is, minority students are viewed as an asset to the school. Accepting minority students is not MIT's way of "saying sorry" or "undoing years of wrong." MIT's point of view is that its population (especially its majority constituents) will be better off in an environment that is diverse. I would agree.
My point however has been missed (as it was by the other response to my original post). The point I'm making is that the only reason sex is an issue is because she is female. The fact that we immediately question her credentials suggests that we i) do not value diversity and ii) are wary of, in this case, female competence.
Whether or not the new MIT president were male or female, they will prove or disprove their competence with action during their tenure.
Key point you should understand:
If the second you hear an elected official is female you consider the possibility of lowered standards, then you are sexist. Its not something to be upset about -- our society IS VERY sexist. So sexist that much of it goes on without us noticing it. Anyone who reads this should understand the above. Women are as capable as men. What you should do if you realize you have this inclination is start thinking deeply about the underlying assumptions you bring to bear in situations with women.
>Your gender bias has already presented itself. An equally valid question would have been "has MIT selected this person because they are a MAN" (assuming they were a man).
That's total nonsense. What you saying is that asking any questions about possible sexism/racism makes YOU sexist/racist. That's simply retarded.
It's a shame that people like you are so willing to throw labels like "sexist" around so lightly. The grandparent's post wasn't sexist, it just wasn't what you wanted to hear.
Your ad hominum attackes undermine your argument.
The point that you missed was the following: if the new president were a man, would people be asking the equilavent question "did this man get the job because he was a man?"? I don't think I've ever heard a question like that posed around here on Slashdot which is a very male dominated site.
What I have illustrated to the grandparent poster is that his view belied an underlying sex bias. In addition, his questions in his post are ones easily answered by reading the original post's linked web site news page. I challenge beh to consider whether he would have been so incredulous if he had read the MIT announcement and a man were elected. Would the listed credentials have not satisfied him?
beh writes: While I do support equal opportunities/emancipation issues, has MIT selected this woman because she is female and very good in her area of expertise, or has MIT selected her because she was the best irrespective of gender?
Your gender bias has already presented itself. An equally valid question would have been "has MIT selected this person because they are a MAN" (assuming they were a man). Gender bias in the past has caused situations in which men get positions over women despite the women being more competent.
You have ignored the fact that this women is the first non-engineering background president (she is involved in Life Sciences). I think this is the most important difference. MIT has made a commitment to a biological revolution.
I would look over your own post there, beh, and notice how biased you are against women. Do you assume anytime you have been chosen over others that your maleness wasn't a factor?
>ummmm lets see.. oh yeah HEAD PHONES. and don't even think about coming back with the "cdrom has a head phone jack" cuz we all know that your mp3s wont play through that shit
you missed the point entirely. i don't see any reason for people to be listening to music at work. they should be working. or bring a walkman. what a waste of money paying $50 so your secretary can be distracted by music. and that goes for buying new PC's nowadays. i bet that you could use a computer from 1992 to do everything you do with the single exception of game playing... gimme a laptop that runs at 200 MHz and lasts for 20 hours and i'll give you $1000
man... who posted this on slashdot??!? who let the cat out of the bag?? stream ripping has been on the downlow and now you are blasting it into the deaf RIAA's ears.
man, this guy has no clue. he installed 9 distros and couldn't get sound to work. what can i deduce from this? he doesn't know how to configure his sound card properly. we have no idea whether this guys is a complete newbie or a paid Microsoft employee...
and here's another thing i'm sure some other people agree about: why does your corporate PC need sound? (your secretary sure as hell doesn't!)
>The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this. However it did help me gain insight into software from a PHB and suit perspective."
Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Whoever wrote this article doesn't understand the first thing about the FSF. Why wouldn't they protect the GPL? You won't have free software if everyone can just use it without contributing back to the source. I don't feel the least bit sorry for these executives. It's clear to everyone that if you use GPL and release a product then you must release derivative works. Come 'on.
160,000? that's it. no problem. you can delete that much mail in time. what's the problem. you could even write a script in 2 minutes to deal with those mails over a longer period of time.
i think you some good points here. it is true that car and cdr can not be overloaded... however the way you are using them i think you mean the same as the lisp "get" command which can behave polymorphically.
and, in addition, if you CLOS (common lisp object system) to implement an object oriented system you can define an object 'car' of sorts that you can share between subtypes.
the fact of the matter is python, lisp and perl are all much better than java. python and lisp people should really be fighting to convert people from java... and C++
Try passing an objet instead of a list to a standard Lisp function - yes in Python you can implement the List protocol, or inherit from the standard List class.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Every heard of CLOS (common lisp object system)? Full object oriented support.
Also, Lisp is dynamic typed so you can pass whatever you like into a function. Including other functions, lists, symbols, strings, continuations and, eventually with dialects like Arc, macros.
That's odd because I find ML's sytax to be very sensible and simple
ML is strongly typed which means its immediately useless. OOP can viewed as a relaxation from strong types (in C) to slightly dynamic types. You watch, eventually most languages will be dynamically typed).
One of the problems I had when I tried to learn Lisp was that it needs special editor support. This meant, as far as I could tell, I had to learn emacs.
First off, emacs is butter. Emacs is gorgoes. Emacs is so extensible and so efficient that its stupid. If you sat down and learned it for a week you would be twice as efficient than any windows editor. Emacs is built on lisp and for this reason all of emacs is extensible... everything!!! It's really amazing.
Concerning Lisp syntax, the thing about Lisp syntax is that its syntax is a parse tree where as most languages (none s-expression languages) require a token/parser stage to compile. Because you work on the sytax tree, macros are trivial to write because you are just performing modifications on the parse tree...
the problem with using a language like Java is that when you problem solve in your head you "think in Java".... thinking in java is a mess. java is so obtuse, so ladden with crap and extra syntax that doesn't get you anything. just the fact that lisp is dynamically typed makes it slimmer... i can guarantee that you can't write a program in C that i can beat in length in lisp... and i bet that i could write a short lisp program that you wouldn't be able to write in C without significant effort.
(when i say you, i mean the "royal" you, not you specifically)
Python is totally object orientated, and very intelligently designed in this department. Whereas in Perl (5) you have to jump through hoops to create objects, especially OO modules, in Python it's as easy as assigning a variable a new value.
Alright, lets set something straight here. The world is on a huge object oriented high. As has been said about strict types, object oriented programming is a hammer and everything all of a sudden looks like a nail.
Any language that is *only* objected oriented is forcing you to look at everything as nails.
[Lisp] has a really steep learning curve, and there are no good free (as in software) development environments, as far as I know. (IANALisp Expert, though). Just you, Emacs and the Lisp interpreter.
Lisp is as powerful as mathematics, but there is more to a language than its semantics. It has to be accessible, too.
First off, Lisp isn't hard. It's like othelllo. Takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master. (gag)
My brief look at Oz seems to illustrate some similarities, but I'd have to check it out more to understand. Both have a core language set that everything else is reduced to. In lisp these are cons, car, cdr, cond, quote, apply, eval.
I'll take a look at Oz but what makes Lisp very powerful is that it has no syntax. The text is literally the parse tree which means that macros are very easy to define and use. The entire idea of programming using Lisp is to develop a language on top of Lisp. If you are writing an image editor you define an embedded language in Lisp for image manipulation. An because things can be compiled at runtime and macros can hide computation at compile time you can get good performance as well.
There is also a misconception that a language needs to explicit in what is efficient and inefficient. What is misunderstood is that it is very often not obvious where the bottlenecks are. The way to make a Lisp program fast is the same way you make a C program fast. 1) Profile 2) Find hot spots 3) Optimize 4) Rinse and repeat.
Also, concerning free development environment check out Dr. Scheme which is a nice UI and comes with a bunch of packages. I was working on some encryption problems and had a graphical histogram implemented in about 2 minutes. Try doing that in Java.
Lisp isn't designed for the average programmer. The best programmers use Lisp (if they are allowed to by their bosses) because it is the most powerful.
Lisp programmers scare me. Someone mentions a feature that lisp has had for a few years, and invariable some lisp guy comments on how it's the future! switch now! Look at all the babes I attract with my Lisp skillz!
explain what the major advantages of using Python are. I have only ever looked at it very briefly and even more briefly at Jython. From this very limited experience I cant really think of a compelling reason to use Python over some of the more mainstream languages, other than perhaps as a scripting type glue.
If you are using Java then python is a step up because it offers first class functions and some other incredibly power constructs.
Unfortunately, although Python's effort is applaudable, it really is only a first class imperative language that has added some features of Lisp.
If you are going to chose a new language to learn, then you should be learning Lisp. Most people avoid it because it looks complicated but, believe me, after using in for many years, Lisp is gorgeous.
I highly suggest you check out Paul Graham's website and read his articles about Lisp before you waste anytime learning any other language.
All languages nowadays are slowly adding individual pieces of Lisp functionality. Why not just use Lisp (no reason to wait a decade for all the "popular" languages to finally come fill circle and become Lisp dialects).
I think all these companies have the wrong idea. Here's my idea. You build a ultra small form factor PC that has no display, no cdrom. Just wireless, VGA maybe some USB and a great battery. Then you buy one of these niftygoggles and figure out some kind of input device and you are money.
now, if only some one kind find me one of these ultra small form factor PC's... I found something called the Mini-PC-EX1 which is 450g (pretty light!) but it has a CDROM and is still a bit clunky...
So, the question i ask is this? Anyone know of a truly ultra small form factor displayless pc? (that runs linux)? And, anyone know how I could input into this device with enough speed/accuracy to code?
Just imagine entire corporate headquarters transforming into parks where people wander around with eyeglass mounted displays, and pocket size pc that are wireless connected... No need for small stuffy offices or cubicles...
If you know anything please contact me with information...
Slashdot Mirror
unfortunately i also have a kinesis and it rocks and i'll never look back.
I swear by my two kinesis keyboards
No hype just comfort...
So I switched 5 years ago to Dvorak because I could feel RSI coming on. A couple years later I bought a Kinesis keyboard. I'll be honest, the Kinesis keyboard improved things 10x as much as switching to Dvorak. In addition, Dvorak really only makes sense if you do a lot of typing in English. Because of the odd placement of the parens and brackets, typing C in dvorak can be a real pain. I don't program all that much anymore (certainly not in C, mostly in MATLAB and Scheme nowadays).
Summary: Check out Kinesis-ergo.com.
MIT does not have quotas. Instead it encourages diversity -- that is, minority students are viewed as an asset to the school. Accepting minority students is not MIT's way of "saying sorry" or "undoing years of wrong." MIT's point of view is that its population (especially its majority constituents) will be better off in an environment that is diverse. I would agree.
My point however has been missed (as it was by the other response to my original post). The point I'm making is that the only reason sex is an issue is because she is female. The fact that we immediately question her credentials suggests that we i) do not value diversity and ii) are wary of, in this case, female competence.
Whether or not the new MIT president were male or female, they will prove or disprove their competence with action during their tenure.
Key point you should understand:
If the second you hear an elected official is female you consider the possibility of lowered standards, then you are sexist. Its not something to be upset about -- our society IS VERY sexist. So sexist that much of it goes on without us noticing it. Anyone who reads this should understand the above. Women are as capable as men. What you should do if you realize you have this inclination is start thinking deeply about the underlying assumptions you bring to bear in situations with women.
.
.
>Your gender bias has already presented itself. An equally valid question would have been "has MIT selected this person because they are a MAN" (assuming they were a man).
That's total nonsense. What you saying is that asking any questions about possible sexism/racism makes YOU sexist/racist. That's simply retarded.
It's a shame that people like you are so willing to throw labels like "sexist" around so lightly. The grandparent's post wasn't sexist, it just wasn't what you wanted to hear.
Your ad hominum attackes undermine your argument.
The point that you missed was the following: if the new president were a man, would people be asking the equilavent question "did this man get the job because he was a man?"? I don't think I've ever heard a question like that posed around here on Slashdot which is a very male dominated site.
What I have illustrated to the grandparent poster is that his view belied an underlying sex bias. In addition, his questions in his post are ones easily answered by reading the original post's linked web site news page. I challenge beh to consider whether he would have been so incredulous if he had read the MIT announcement and a man were elected. Would the listed credentials have not satisfied him?
beh writes: While I do support equal opportunities/emancipation issues, has MIT selected this woman because she is female and very good in her area of expertise, or has MIT selected her because she was the best irrespective of gender?
Your gender bias has already presented itself. An equally valid question would have been "has MIT selected this person because they are a MAN" (assuming they were a man). Gender bias in the past has caused situations in which men get positions over women despite the women being more competent.
You have ignored the fact that this women is the first non-engineering background president (she is involved in Life Sciences). I think this is the most important difference. MIT has made a commitment to a biological revolution.
I would look over your own post there, beh, and notice how biased you are against women. Do you assume anytime you have been chosen over others that your maleness wasn't a factor?
they are missing IPL which predated LISP? am i right?
man oh man! talk about a sappy lil' story...
:)
> You are special...
> You are a unique, butterfly...
> You have so much to give...
gag! where are our balls?
my advice: stop listening to your mother
>ummmm lets see.. oh yeah HEAD PHONES. and don't even think about coming back with the "cdrom has a head phone jack" cuz we all know that your mp3s wont play through that shit
you missed the point entirely. i don't see any reason for people to be listening to music at work. they should be working. or bring a walkman. what a waste of money paying $50 so your secretary can be distracted by music. and that goes for buying new PC's nowadays. i bet that you could use a computer from 1992 to do everything you do with the single exception of game playing... gimme a laptop that runs at 200 MHz and lasts for 20 hours and i'll give you $1000
dan
man... who posted this on slashdot??!? who let the cat out of the bag?? stream ripping has been on the downlow and now you are blasting it into the deaf RIAA's ears.
great...
man, this guy has no clue. he installed 9 distros and couldn't get sound to work. what can i deduce from this? he doesn't know how to configure his sound card properly. we have no idea whether this guys is a complete newbie or a paid Microsoft employee...
and here's another thing i'm sure some other people agree about: why does your corporate PC need sound? (your secretary sure as hell doesn't!)
dan
>The open source community is not portrayed in positive light so you might want to skip reading this. However it did help me gain insight into software from a PHB and suit perspective."
Rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Whoever wrote this article doesn't understand the first thing about the FSF. Why wouldn't they protect the GPL? You won't have free software if everyone can just use it without contributing back to the source. I don't feel the least bit sorry for these executives. It's clear to everyone that if you use GPL and release a product then you must release derivative works. Come 'on.
160,000? that's it. no problem. you can delete that much mail in time. what's the problem. you could even write a script in 2 minutes to deal with those mails over a longer period of time.
i think you some good points here. it is true that car and cdr can not be overloaded... however the way you are using them i think you mean the same as the lisp "get" command which can behave polymorphically.
and, in addition, if you CLOS (common lisp object system) to implement an object oriented system you can define an object 'car' of sorts that you can share between subtypes.
the fact of the matter is python, lisp and perl are all much better than java. python and lisp people should really be fighting to convert people from java... and C++
dan
Try passing an objet instead of a list to a standard Lisp function - yes in Python you can implement the List protocol, or inherit from the standard List class.
You clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Every heard of CLOS (common lisp object system)? Full object oriented support.
Also, Lisp is dynamic typed so you can pass whatever you like into a function. Including other functions, lists, symbols, strings, continuations and, eventually with dialects like Arc, macros.
That's odd because I find ML's sytax to be very sensible and simple
ML is strongly typed which means its immediately useless. OOP can viewed as a relaxation from strong types (in C) to slightly dynamic types. You watch, eventually most languages will be dynamically typed).
One of the problems I had when I tried to learn Lisp was that it needs special editor support. This meant, as far as I could tell, I had to learn emacs.
First off, emacs is butter. Emacs is gorgoes. Emacs is so extensible and so efficient that its stupid. If you sat down and learned it for a week you would be twice as efficient than any windows editor. Emacs is built on lisp and for this reason all of emacs is extensible... everything!!! It's really amazing.
Concerning Lisp syntax, the thing about Lisp syntax is that its syntax is a parse tree where as most languages (none s-expression languages) require a token/parser stage to compile. Because you work on the sytax tree, macros are trivial to write because you are just performing modifications on the parse tree...
the problem with using a language like Java is that when you problem solve in your head you "think in Java".... thinking in java is a mess. java is so obtuse, so ladden with crap and extra syntax that doesn't get you anything. just the fact that lisp is dynamically typed makes it slimmer... i can guarantee that you can't write a program in C that i can beat in length in lisp... and i bet that i could write a short lisp program that you wouldn't be able to write in C without significant effort.
(when i say you, i mean the "royal" you, not you specifically)
Concerning advantages of Phython
Python is totally object orientated, and very intelligently designed in this department. Whereas in Perl (5) you have to jump through hoops to create objects, especially OO modules, in Python it's as easy as assigning a variable a new value.
Alright, lets set something straight here. The world is on a huge object oriented high. As has been said about strict types, object oriented programming is a hammer and everything all of a sudden looks like a nail.
Any language that is *only* objected oriented is forcing you to look at everything as nails.
Try Lisp, you'll feel much better.
(Insert language here) is just a watered down Lisp.
[Lisp] has a really steep learning curve, and there are no good free (as in software) development environments, as far as I know. (IANALisp Expert, though). Just you, Emacs and the Lisp interpreter.
Lisp is as powerful as mathematics, but there is more to a language than its semantics. It has to be accessible, too.
First off, Lisp isn't hard. It's like othelllo. Takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master. (gag)
My brief look at Oz seems to illustrate some similarities, but I'd have to check it out more to understand. Both have a core language set that everything else is reduced to. In lisp these are cons, car, cdr, cond, quote, apply, eval.
I'll take a look at Oz but what makes Lisp very powerful is that it has no syntax. The text is literally the parse tree which means that macros are very easy to define and use. The entire idea of programming using Lisp is to develop a language on top of Lisp. If you are writing an image editor you define an embedded language in Lisp for image manipulation. An because things can be compiled at runtime and macros can hide computation at compile time you can get good performance as well.
There is also a misconception that a language needs to explicit in what is efficient and inefficient. What is misunderstood is that it is very often not obvious where the bottlenecks are. The way to make a Lisp program fast is the same way you make a C program fast. 1) Profile 2) Find hot spots 3) Optimize 4) Rinse and repeat.
Also, concerning free development environment check out Dr. Scheme which is a nice UI and comes with a bunch of packages. I was working on some encryption problems and had a graphical histogram implemented in about 2 minutes. Try doing that in Java.
Lisp isn't designed for the average programmer. The best programmers use Lisp (if they are allowed to by their bosses) because it is the most powerful.
Lisp programmers scare me. Someone mentions a feature that lisp has had for a few years, and invariable some lisp guy comments on how it's the future! switch now! Look at all the babes I attract with my Lisp skillz!
its true. we do attract lots of women.
explain what the major advantages of using Python are. I have only ever looked at it very briefly and even more briefly at Jython. From this very limited experience I cant really think of a compelling reason to use Python over some of the more mainstream languages, other than perhaps as a scripting type glue.
If you are using Java then python is a step up because it offers first class functions and some other incredibly power constructs.
Unfortunately, although Python's effort is applaudable, it really is only a first class imperative language that has added some features of Lisp.
If you are going to chose a new language to learn, then you should be learning Lisp. Most people avoid it because it looks complicated but, believe me, after using in for many years, Lisp is gorgeous.
I highly suggest you check out Paul Graham's website and read his articles about Lisp before you waste anytime learning any other language.
All languages nowadays are slowly adding individual pieces of Lisp functionality. Why not just use Lisp (no reason to wait a decade for all the "popular" languages to finally come fill circle and become Lisp dialects).
come on.... we see way to many films with this guy and frankly he has gotten on my nerves...
and talk about bad casting?
does anyone here look at afleck and think he's worthy of being a hacker?
i just put DirecTV on my do-not-call list...
parents: oh dear. i hope we don't have one of those.
(cr|h)acker: let's DoS them to hell, that'll teach 'em.
slashdot: if you were using linux this wouldn't happen...
9000 lawsuits... jeez. imagine if everyone just stalled them. do they have enough lawyers to handle 9000 lawsuits that get drawn out?
that's really good, now if we can only get your and mine message mod'd up maybe we can do some good!!!
ooopss...
-1, Redundant
I think all these companies have the wrong idea. Here's my idea. You build a ultra small form factor PC that has no display, no cdrom. Just wireless, VGA maybe some USB and a great battery. Then you buy one of these nifty goggles and figure out some kind of input device and you are money.
... I found something called the Mini-PC-EX1 which is 450g (pretty light!) but it has a CDROM and is still a bit clunky...
now, if only some one kind find me one of these ultra small form factor PC's
So, the question i ask is this? Anyone know of a truly ultra small form factor displayless pc? (that runs linux)? And, anyone know how I could input into this device with enough speed/accuracy to code?
Just imagine entire corporate headquarters transforming into parks where people wander around with eyeglass mounted displays, and pocket size pc that are wireless connected... No need for small stuffy offices or cubicles...
If you know anything please contact me with information...