To run Tetris in Emacs, use M-x tetris . (That is Emacs notation for alt-x, then type 'tetris', then enter.)
Re:LISP a bad choice as a starter language.
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Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
Interestingly, Clojure constructs often have LESS parentheses than the Java ones that do the same thing, even when making calls to the exact same libraries and functions. It was pretty neat to see those examples.
Re:LISP a bad choice as a starter language.
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
While I was first exposed to programming in Pascal, I never "got" many things. Scheme was my first course in college, and everything fell together. I had an awesome teacher, and the Schemer's Guide was great. I'm tremendously thankful that I learned to love a Lisp before I hit Java and Perl and the rest. Learning a Lisp helps prevent learning an irrational fear of recursion, for example.
Re:Modern Computers do come with BASIC
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Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
You may be able to open it up in Notepad, but Notepad SUCKS as a programming editor. If Microsoft shipped Windows with an editor that was remotely modern (or hell, just bought Notepad++, if that were possible), scripting for WSH or in VB would be infinitely easier.
Re:Yes, yes, for loops!
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Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
Wow, that was really well-written. I wish I still had mod points for you.
As you (and the other AC) alluded to, macros and other syntactic sugar (which Lisp lets you define your own of) help you make the code clearer, less verbose, and less redundant in many cases (such as your map and reduce examples). It also can bite you in the butt if you forget what a macro expands to, or if you write a macro wrong, but most sorts of those errors in other languages bite as well.
If you use Emacs' automagical indentation (TAB == "indent this line Properly"), and set your editor to display the corresponding parenthesis for any one you have selected, it becomes much easier to track parentheses. I am absolutely addicted to Emacs' magic indentation, even when it Does It The Way I Don't Want. (It has a brace style for Perl and C which I don't quite like, and can't seem to get changed.)
Go watch some screencasts of Clojure or Slime. Some of them use TextMate (I think), some use Emacs, but generally there is some brace-handling awesomeness going on there. Use Emacs, and your lisp indentation concerns will nearly disappear.
if you cannot resist the urge to jump in and point out that it's "whom" not "who" then you aren't being helpful, you aren't correcting any kind of important error, you're being nothing but a rude jerk.
You're also being educational.
If someone honestly didn't know about some obscure rule (like "don't hyphenate ''-ly' words") or custom, or were not a native speaker, or didn't know that 'effect' and 'affect' are different (or which to use where), or the difference between 'who' and 'whom' and when to use them, they might care to know how to use them correctly. Many might not, and are in the "I cba to writ rite" crowd, but some others DO care, and appreciate the correction. I do. I also realize this is likely somewhat of a minority. However, I have little respect for people that have no appreciation for doing things well.
I do also try to refrain from such corrections, except perhaps in really egregious situations... but I also expect some other nerds to be receptive to "you're doing it wrong" said in a tactful way.;)
In my scout troop, it was also a common shortening for "tailgate camping" (as opposed to backpacking), where one brings all one's needs via car, and presumably could use the tailgate for a makeshift table. It had a connotation of "real campers don't do that", but as I get older I see it more as "hey look, convenient showers".;)
Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.
Conversely, they may be people who care passionately about using language The Right Way -- much as Star Wars nerds will correct you if you assert that Han was Leia's sister, or that Luke build R2-D2. Pursuit of perfection is something which all nerds do to a certain extent, especially programmers. If I tell you, "your code example is missing braces on your 'if' clause, so it won't evaluate the way you want it to", I'm not trying to be an asshole. Think of it as a verbal compiler error. Ironically, many programmers take the perspective that writing in English is something in which correctness and conformity to convention doesn't matter -- and yet we must be extremely correct when coding.
Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not.
What can I say - no one likes being exposed as wrong.
There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.
Natural language is too ambiguous to parse. You cannot always guarantee that someone will understand what you mean, and errors in word choice, punctuation, or spelling only compound that. People who care about communication take the time to be courteous to their listener/reader, and write/speak in a way which they know the audience will not mistake. If you can't be bothered to follow the conventions which guide English language (even if they aren't codified the way French is), you're either a visionary literary mind (e.g., e e cummings) or you need an editor.
The OED is considered by many to be a definitive reference for spellings and word meanings. I'm not sure where one would find a grammar reference - googling for one was not immediately useful. Still, not poor spelling is, in the age of the internet, a sign that one doesn't care about spelling it right, rather than not knowing the spelling. Unless you've mangled the word (and even then), Googling for it will give great answers. Sometimes Google corrects it, and other times the first page of results gives the answers many times over. ("orderves" -> "how do you spell orderves" -> "hors d'oeuvre") In short, spelling errors are a sign of either unnoticed typogaphical mistakes or of laziness, and when they're systematic people will tend to assume the latter.
To be fair, there are many people who do speed in residential areas. (My in-laws would love to put some cameras and radar detectors (and maybe some road spikes) on the road when some of their neighbors speed by at 50 in a 25 zone.) Some even end up boasting about it, such as the fellow that bragged about speeding on one of his car tuner forums (and then was flamed, tracked down, and prosecuted).
So, sometimes it's hard to tell on the internet when people are being cleverly sarcastic (as you were) or are bragging about being jerks. Your humor was pretty subtle, and I can understand how someone might miss it. (I am pretty sure I would have, had I not read your explanation before noticing the sig.) Kudos on the humor (it IS funny!), but just know that some of us are more cynical of our fellow netizens, and are more willing to take someone at face value when they say they're a jerk (rather than believe that surely it's a jest).
I can agree with some of what you write. As a parent (my son is ~3), I frequently am trying to get him to alter his behavior to be more polite, or more conducive to safety, or even to obey me long enough that we can get his shoes on to get to preschool on time. That is, to a degree, indoctrination, but I don't really see that as a bad thing. A parent's role is to prepare their child to be a successful human -- that means you help them stay safe, learn, exercise creativity, and learn to play well with others.
My son doesn't have a choice about running with scissors or pencils or forks: the price of "learning" the hard way is too steep. Similarly, he can GTFO of the kitchen when boiling pots of water are on the stove. On the other hand, if he pokes another kid and they poke back, my reply tends to be along the lines of "well, perhaps you shouldn't have poked him".;)
"if one can agree that there does exist certain material that is inappropriate for children..."
There isn't, and there's no reason to think as such.
I think it's pretty far-fetched to claim that there isn't material which is inappropriate for children. (If that wasn't your claim, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.) There is certainly material that I don't want my 3 year old watching, and material I don't want him to watch or play when he's six, eight, or twelve.
At 3, I don't want him playing games that are all about shooting things. He'd be adept at it, I expect, but I'd prefer that he played games that didn't involve shooting things until he has been exposed to the concept of death, and what it means, so that we can talk meaningfully about how the game is different from reality. Similarly, not keen on fighting games until he's demonstrated that he knows it's not appropriate behavior in real life. Yes, I will need to balance this vs the fact that many of the "best" games involve some pixelized death, even the old-school ones.
I don't want him playing hentai games (despite being RPGs and all that) pretty much at any age. I realize that by the time he's 15 or 16 he probably WILL play them (perhaps earlier) but they will be verboten. Mainly because I'm not interested in playtesting them all to differentiate which ones might be about more wholesome sexual behavior versus which are rape simulators. Ew. Sorry, kid, no.
There are even several sci-fi books which I've enjoyed tremendously, but which have some passages which are very sexualized; I don't want him reading those before he's a teen, either.
If you can do it without endangering other people, and without damaging property that you don't have permission to damage, then I'm pretty sure exploding bombs are quite OK. People have to demolish buildings, after all.
The problem is that too many people still cling to these ideals that the worst thing in the world is for their child to see a naked breast. And they spout this while breast feeding without seeing the irony.
You'd be surprised how many people are offended when people exercise their (legal) right to breastfeed in public.
It'll be interesting when you go to write some Perl code with your pen+tablet. The text recognition assumes you're writing in a natural language, so braces and punctuation are often tedious to get right. Write some basic Perl (with hashes, arrays, and some scalars) on your local handwriting-recognizing device, and let us know how amusing it is.
Exactly. At the time he made the decision, he was effectively the captain of a starving lifeboat, deciding that either everyone could die slowly, or half the people could die quickly. How he chose them is of very little importance.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize you're joking, but:
Eliza in Emacs Lisp: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/classics/eliza/emacs/0.html
To run Tetris in Emacs, use M-x tetris . (That is Emacs notation for alt-x, then type 'tetris', then enter.)
Interestingly, Clojure constructs often have LESS parentheses than the Java ones that do the same thing, even when making calls to the exact same libraries and functions. It was pretty neat to see those examples.
While I was first exposed to programming in Pascal, I never "got" many things. Scheme was my first course in college, and everything fell together. I had an awesome teacher, and the Schemer's Guide was great. I'm tremendously thankful that I learned to love a Lisp before I hit Java and Perl and the rest. Learning a Lisp helps prevent learning an irrational fear of recursion, for example.
You may be able to open it up in Notepad, but Notepad SUCKS as a programming editor. If Microsoft shipped Windows with an editor that was remotely modern (or hell, just bought Notepad++, if that were possible), scripting for WSH or in VB would be infinitely easier.
Wow, that was really well-written. I wish I still had mod points for you.
As you (and the other AC) alluded to, macros and other syntactic sugar (which Lisp lets you define your own of) help you make the code clearer, less verbose, and less redundant in many cases (such as your map and reduce examples). It also can bite you in the butt if you forget what a macro expands to, or if you write a macro wrong, but most sorts of those errors in other languages bite as well.
If you use Emacs' automagical indentation (TAB == "indent this line Properly"), and set your editor to display the corresponding parenthesis for any one you have selected, it becomes much easier to track parentheses. I am absolutely addicted to Emacs' magic indentation, even when it Does It The Way I Don't Want. (It has a brace style for Perl and C which I don't quite like, and can't seem to get changed.)
Go watch some screencasts of Clojure or Slime. Some of them use TextMate (I think), some use Emacs, but generally there is some brace-handling awesomeness going on there. Use Emacs, and your lisp indentation concerns will nearly disappear.
if you cannot resist the urge to jump in and point out that it's "whom" not "who" then you aren't being helpful, you aren't correcting any kind of important error, you're being nothing but a rude jerk.
You're also being educational.
If someone honestly didn't know about some obscure rule (like "don't hyphenate ''-ly' words") or custom, or were not a native speaker, or didn't know that 'effect' and 'affect' are different (or which to use where), or the difference between 'who' and 'whom' and when to use them, they might care to know how to use them correctly. Many might not, and are in the "I cba to writ rite" crowd, but some others DO care, and appreciate the correction. I do. I also realize this is likely somewhat of a minority. However, I have little respect for people that have no appreciation for doing things well.
I do also try to refrain from such corrections, except perhaps in really egregious situations... but I also expect some other nerds to be receptive to "you're doing it wrong" said in a tactful way. ;)
Especially if you're going to see a screening of Battlefield Earth.
In my scout troop, it was also a common shortening for "tailgate camping" (as opposed to backpacking), where one brings all one's needs via car, and presumably could use the tailgate for a makeshift table. It had a connotation of "real campers don't do that", but as I get older I see it more as "hey look, convenient showers". ;)
It's all about the realism, though. Why would you want to settle for virtual jerks, when you can be there for the real thing?
As in, "ha ha, some idiot somewhere probably finds this funny .... oh no!" ? :)
Ride more Swiss trains. ;-)
Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.
Conversely, they may be people who care passionately about using language The Right Way -- much as Star Wars nerds will correct you if you assert that Han was Leia's sister, or that Luke build R2-D2. Pursuit of perfection is something which all nerds do to a certain extent, especially programmers. If I tell you, "your code example is missing braces on your 'if' clause, so it won't evaluate the way you want it to", I'm not trying to be an asshole. Think of it as a verbal compiler error. Ironically, many programmers take the perspective that writing in English is something in which correctness and conformity to convention doesn't matter -- and yet we must be extremely correct when coding.
Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not.
What can I say - no one likes being exposed as wrong.
There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.
Natural language is too ambiguous to parse. You cannot always guarantee that someone will understand what you mean, and errors in word choice, punctuation, or spelling only compound that. People who care about communication take the time to be courteous to their listener/reader, and write/speak in a way which they know the audience will not mistake. If you can't be bothered to follow the conventions which guide English language (even if they aren't codified the way French is), you're either a visionary literary mind (e.g., e e cummings) or you need an editor.
The OED is considered by many to be a definitive reference for spellings and word meanings. I'm not sure where one would find a grammar reference - googling for one was not immediately useful. Still, not poor spelling is, in the age of the internet, a sign that one doesn't care about spelling it right, rather than not knowing the spelling. Unless you've mangled the word (and even then), Googling for it will give great answers. Sometimes Google corrects it, and other times the first page of results gives the answers many times over. ("orderves" -> "how do you spell orderves" -> "hors d'oeuvre") In short, spelling errors are a sign of either unnoticed typogaphical mistakes or of laziness, and when they're systematic people will tend to assume the latter.
I wonder how the colors would compare for someone who is color-blind.
And, because you can buy them in bulk for cheap, you can afford to buy more rubies.
To be fair, there are many people who do speed in residential areas. (My in-laws would love to put some cameras and radar detectors (and maybe some road spikes) on the road when some of their neighbors speed by at 50 in a 25 zone.) Some even end up boasting about it, such as the fellow that bragged about speeding on one of his car tuner forums (and then was flamed, tracked down, and prosecuted).
So, sometimes it's hard to tell on the internet when people are being cleverly sarcastic (as you were) or are bragging about being jerks. Your humor was pretty subtle, and I can understand how someone might miss it. (I am pretty sure I would have, had I not read your explanation before noticing the sig.) Kudos on the humor (it IS funny!), but just know that some of us are more cynical of our fellow netizens, and are more willing to take someone at face value when they say they're a jerk (rather than believe that surely it's a jest).
I can agree with some of what you write. As a parent (my son is ~3), I frequently am trying to get him to alter his behavior to be more polite, or more conducive to safety, or even to obey me long enough that we can get his shoes on to get to preschool on time. That is, to a degree, indoctrination, but I don't really see that as a bad thing. A parent's role is to prepare their child to be a successful human -- that means you help them stay safe, learn, exercise creativity, and learn to play well with others.
My son doesn't have a choice about running with scissors or pencils or forks: the price of "learning" the hard way is too steep. Similarly, he can GTFO of the kitchen when boiling pots of water are on the stove. On the other hand, if he pokes another kid and they poke back, my reply tends to be along the lines of "well, perhaps you shouldn't have poked him". ;)
"if one can agree that there does exist certain material that is inappropriate for children..."
There isn't, and there's no reason to think as such.
I think it's pretty far-fetched to claim that there isn't material which is inappropriate for children. (If that wasn't your claim, I'm sorry for misunderstanding.) There is certainly material that I don't want my 3 year old watching, and material I don't want him to watch or play when he's six, eight, or twelve.
At 3, I don't want him playing games that are all about shooting things. He'd be adept at it, I expect, but I'd prefer that he played games that didn't involve shooting things until he has been exposed to the concept of death, and what it means, so that we can talk meaningfully about how the game is different from reality. Similarly, not keen on fighting games until he's demonstrated that he knows it's not appropriate behavior in real life. Yes, I will need to balance this vs the fact that many of the "best" games involve some pixelized death, even the old-school ones.
I don't want him playing hentai games (despite being RPGs and all that) pretty much at any age. I realize that by the time he's 15 or 16 he probably WILL play them (perhaps earlier) but they will be verboten. Mainly because I'm not interested in playtesting them all to differentiate which ones might be about more wholesome sexual behavior versus which are rape simulators. Ew. Sorry, kid, no.
There are even several sci-fi books which I've enjoyed tremendously, but which have some passages which are very sexualized; I don't want him reading those before he's a teen, either.
If you can do it without endangering other people, and without damaging property that you don't have permission to damage, then I'm pretty sure exploding bombs are quite OK. People have to demolish buildings, after all.
Why not just ship them off the an island, or something, preferably with lots of space?
The problem is that too many people still cling to these ideals that the worst thing in the world is for their child to see a naked breast. And they spout this while breast feeding without seeing the irony.
You'd be surprised how many people are offended when people exercise their (legal) right to breastfeed in public.
Lunch Trek III: The Search for Sporks?
It'll be interesting when you go to write some Perl code with your pen+tablet. The text recognition assumes you're writing in a natural language, so braces and punctuation are often tedious to get right. Write some basic Perl (with hashes, arrays, and some scalars) on your local handwriting-recognizing device, and let us know how amusing it is.
Exactly. At the time he made the decision, he was effectively the captain of a starving lifeboat, deciding that either everyone could die slowly, or half the people could die quickly. How he chose them is of very little importance.
Cultivate a reputation for forgetfulness.