And the reality is that procedural languages better match the way the human mind works.
I don't think there is any evidence that procedural languages are easier to understand; SQL, which (like functional languages) is declarative rather than procedural seems to be at least as simple as most programming languages for even neophytes to understand.
Procedural programming is probably easier to understand if you started out for years learning procedural languages, or if you come from a hardware-centric background; OTOH, if your first experience with computer programming is spending years exclusively with functional languages, or you come to programming with a background heavy in math and formal logic, functional programming is probably fairly easy.
This is something I've heard touted as a major selling point of functional languages, but it's never made sense to me. In both cases, you have to define the calculation to generate elements of the list.
In Haskell-like functional languages, where side effects can be avoided without surprise, its possible to be declarative rather than procedural in how you "define the calculation"; this doesn't stop you from having to describe something, but often produces more definitions that are both more compact and more clear (in a "what are you getting" sense, not a "what is the computer going to do to get it" sense). This advantage of declarative programming is a big reason why SQL is useful; expressing simple concepts that have simple expressions in SQL in a procedural language is often less than straightforward. Lazy functional languages, though structurally different than SQL and having this advantage in, usually, different use cases than SQL, have the same kind of advantage in terms of declarative programming.
Hascal, and other functional languages may be good for multi-core development. However not to many programmers program in them... Plus I find they do not scale well for larger application.
What particular problems have you identified in scaling functional (lazy or otherwise) programs to larger applications? Usually, I've seen that touted as a strength of functional languages, not a weakness.
The authors mention that it "works extremely well as a preparation for a course on object-oriented programming [1];" which betrays a certain reverence for the status quo (i.e. university as Java mill).
While, of course, concrete evaluations necessarily rely on the environments in which things can be concretely evaluated -- and that means, in this case, real world universities -- I don't see that at all. Object-oriented programming and design is not limited to Java, and is certainly something that has demonstrated utility even if it isn't the be-all and end-all of programming. As one of the criticism of using Scheme as a first language is that it doesn't prepare students well for dealing with OO, the fact that HtDP demonstrably doesn't fall down in that respect is a good thing.
The great thing about SICP is its irreverence for the "real world" (metacircular evaluator?!),
See, that's exactly why I said that, for many people, HtDP would be a better programming work. Many people are concerned with "the real world". (Note, I personally think that, despite the differences in focus, both HtDP and SICP are great books.)
Medical costs have been growing at a far far faster rate than inflation.
Because oligopolistic insurance companies have raised premiums at a far faster rate than their payouts have increased.
Clearly, demand for doctors is outstripping supply by a lot.
Labor costs of physicians are not the only input to "medical costs", nor are they the prime driver of the increase in "medical costs". Medical insurance profits, compliance and administrative costs (often, again, driven by insurance companies), and pharmaceutical costs are more significant components of the increase in medical costs than any increase in physician salaries.
Lowering the educational requirements for physicians -- even if you made the basic degree required for medical practice back into a bachelor's degree, rather than simply dropping one required pre-med class -- won't have a substantial effect on overall medical costs.
The official site is always a good bet. But I also make it a habit to memorize the url to the rdoc of whatever I'm doing:
For anything that's a gem, if you've got it installed with the rdoc (which you can generated with "gem rdoc" for any installed gem that doesn't install the rdoc by default), you can just run "gem server" on the machine its installed on, and then access the rdoc from that machine. You don't need to rely on external documentation sites...
REBOL is the best language ever (feel free to flame me)
REBOL is an interesting language, but I can't see much to recommend it over dynamic languages with open-source implementations, like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.; its non-free (both in the "speech" and, for any but the most basic versions, "beer") nature has really limited adoption and resources compared to the competition.
I don't think SICP is a good reference, and for many people I suspect HtDP (also using Scheme, and also from MIT Press) is probably a better programming book.
The least expensive Oracle version matches MySQL on price.
OTOH, MySQL is superior to Oracle on licensing permissions -- how important that is depends on the particular circumstance.
Just don't think Oracle is the one and only solution for every type of problem out there.
Of course not. Its just the solution for the (shrinking) range of things for which neither SQLite nor PostgreSQL is the right answer. (I'm joking, but only a little.)
Cross-platform widget sets are always dreadful. An application developed using cross-platform widgets will, at best, work well on one platform, and more usually on no platforms. OS X and Windows have different UI philosophies, and an OS X application needs a different UI from a Windows application.
Chrome on Windows doesn't follow Windows UI conventions, nor does it follow those of any other major platform; then again, part of the whole Chrome philosophy seems to be browser-as-nearly-transparent-platform, not browser-as-normal-application-on-host-platform.
Nobody has to agree to the GPL to use a GPL'ed piece of software
That's what the GPL says.
Then again, plenty of people package installers for GPL software where the GPL is presented as if it were an EULA and the user must indicate acceptance of the GPL in order to install the software.
(And, except for a legalistic problem with the term "accept", I don't see this as undesirable: you should be aware of what you can do with the license, and what you don't need the license to do, when you get GPL software, or software distributed under any other license, even if you don't need to accept the license to use the software.)
Berners-Lee is smart enough to know that all systemic rating scales are subject to being gamed.
Sir Tim is not proposing a "systemic rating scale", in fact, he specifically any single such scale in favor of something more like a freeform tagging system by which different ratings providers could provide ratings using their own rating systems. (He's not real specific, at least in the BBC article cited by TFA) about what exactly the system would entail, just that different organizations could provide rating in different ways.
The important thing berners-lee is missing is that cults rely on restriction of information to thrive, not the ready availability of it.
Actually, cults rely on their own freedom to spread information to recruit, and on social structures that discourage members from accessing (or at least giving credence to) outside information sources to retain membership. Yes, some cults will actively seek to restrict derogatory claims (true or otherwise) about themselves from being distributed in the public media, where there are readily available means to do so, many others are far less concerned about that because they principally target people who are generally detached from or distrustful of mainstream media sources, or because they rely on far more powerful person-to-person communication ot overcome negative media images (often, using outright false-flag recruitment where recruits don't know what group they've become associated with until they've been drawn deeply in).
Its not at all as simple as "cults rely on restriction of information to thrive".
At what point did Berners-Lee appoint themselves Rulers of the Truth?
Read TFA, or better yet the BBC source article linked in TFA. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who (neither plural nor indefinite gender use being appropriate) would usually be referred to as "himself" not "themselves", said: "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
Hardly what you'd expect from a self-appointed "Ruler of Truth".
If one reads TFA, or better the original article linked in tFA (here, but not linked in the summary), its quite clear that most of the way this is being interpreted is wrong. He's not asking for a unitary rating by a single authority, he's asking for a mechanism by which diverse entities can provide their own ratings in their own way:
Sir Tim and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium had looked at simple ways of branding websites - but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms was needed.
"I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways," he said. "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
What he's asking for seems more like a form of accountable third-party tagging than like a single MPAA/ESRB/etc.-style rating based on "truth" rather than "maturity" of content.
If you are built merely for survival and not by design, you cannot trust your own thoughts.
Welcome to reality.
You can assume they help you survive, and that's about it.
Even that assumption is invalid, of course: it would be less of a stretch to assume that they are consequences of some trait which, on average, helped those it applied to survive in some environment in which it was present, whether or not the thoughts (or even the trait which contributes to them) actually help you survive in your environment or not.
Science is a mechanism for filtering superstition out from reality.
No, science is a mechanism for separating useful superstitions from useless ones. No, really: science doesn't test whether a hypothesized model of reality describes the real underlying processes, it tests whether it predicts experiences better than competing models.
Except Churches were the first building to use lightening rods..
How does a rod reduce the weight of a building? Does it reduce the mass, or shield the mass from the effects of gravity? Sounds like superstition to me...
There are plenty of examples of flawed superstitious beliefs leading to an equally large disadvantage or equally great damage. For examples see what happens to people who join cults.
People who join cults often experience increases in most available measures of well-being and quality of life.
The bad results that make major headlines do so because they are exceptional, not because they are the norm.
In name, sure, but its more of a corporatist totalitarian state than a Communist one in substance.
The "highest levels" of any corporate HQ is the Communist Party.
Well, there are certain state-owned (often, IIRC, through the People's Liberation Army) industries in China for which that is true, but as a general rule its really not.
Everyone in sight, probably, given the amount of money involved.
Now, as to who might be actually liable for the financial harm to UAL by spreading information that they knew was false or that was spread with reckless disregard for falsehood, so far the best candidate would seem to be Income Security Advisors, Inc., which seems to where an active, human decision was made to spread the information as a current alert after seeing it on Google News, which seems to be where the wildfire spread started.
I have been using Chrome on my work PC and find many of its features compelling, and wonder how soon we will see its best innovations in Firefox. Why is Gecko worth keeping if it is outdated and bloated?
Chrome's innovations are mostly in the JavaScript engine and the process-per-tab architecture, neither of which have much to do with the rendering engine: Gecko v. WebKit is mostly a peripheral issue.
I wonder though. Is this really a solid investment? Google has struck gold mines with the whole adword and adsense, but giving broadband to countries with little to no GDP?
Little to no GDP now. Providing communications infrastructure increases the likely rate of economic growth in those countries, and the returns for investment there. As a move for profit, it only works if it actually does help spur economic growth in those countries, but it certainly isn't unreasonable to think that it will. Whether or not Google really does no evil, this is certainly the kind of investment which has the possibility of Google ultimately doing well for themselves while doing good for others.
Of course, even if it does pan out in the end wouldn't they have seen a larger return investing in a BRIC country?
Broadband access is already rapidly growing in those countries. Inasmuch as Google benefits from increased broadband access anywhere (provided that Google isn't actively blocked) they don't need to invest anything to gain that benefit. And, as for other kinds of investment in BRIC countries, Google has been making those, so its not an either/or scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there is any evidence that procedural languages are easier to understand; SQL, which (like functional languages) is declarative rather than procedural seems to be at least as simple as most programming languages for even neophytes to understand.
Procedural programming is probably easier to understand if you started out for years learning procedural languages, or if you come from a hardware-centric background; OTOH, if your first experience with computer programming is spending years exclusively with functional languages, or you come to programming with a background heavy in math and formal logic, functional programming is probably fairly easy.
In Haskell-like functional languages, where side effects can be avoided without surprise, its possible to be declarative rather than procedural in how you "define the calculation"; this doesn't stop you from having to describe something, but often produces more definitions that are both more compact and more clear (in a "what are you getting" sense, not a "what is the computer going to do to get it" sense). This advantage of declarative programming is a big reason why SQL is useful; expressing simple concepts that have simple expressions in SQL in a procedural language is often less than straightforward. Lazy functional languages, though structurally different than SQL and having this advantage in, usually, different use cases than SQL, have the same kind of advantage in terms of declarative programming.
What particular problems have you identified in scaling functional (lazy or otherwise) programs to larger applications? Usually, I've seen that touted as a strength of functional languages, not a weakness.
I'll let you answer that question, below...
While, of course, concrete evaluations necessarily rely on the environments in which things can be concretely evaluated -- and that means, in this case, real world universities -- I don't see that at all. Object-oriented programming and design is not limited to Java, and is certainly something that has demonstrated utility even if it isn't the be-all and end-all of programming. As one of the criticism of using Scheme as a first language is that it doesn't prepare students well for dealing with OO, the fact that HtDP demonstrably doesn't fall down in that respect is a good thing.
See, that's exactly why I said that, for many people, HtDP would be a better programming work. Many people are concerned with "the real world". (Note, I personally think that, despite the differences in focus, both HtDP and SICP are great books.)
Because oligopolistic insurance companies have raised premiums at a far faster rate than their payouts have increased.
Labor costs of physicians are not the only input to "medical costs", nor are they the prime driver of the increase in "medical costs". Medical insurance profits, compliance and administrative costs (often, again, driven by insurance companies), and pharmaceutical costs are more significant components of the increase in medical costs than any increase in physician salaries.
Lowering the educational requirements for physicians -- even if you made the basic degree required for medical practice back into a bachelor's degree, rather than simply dropping one required pre-med class -- won't have a substantial effect on overall medical costs.
For anything that's a gem, if you've got it installed with the rdoc (which you can generated with "gem rdoc" for any installed gem that doesn't install the rdoc by default), you can just run "gem server" on the machine its installed on, and then access the rdoc from that machine. You don't need to rely on external documentation sites...
REBOL is an interesting language, but I can't see much to recommend it over dynamic languages with open-source implementations, like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.; its non-free (both in the "speech" and, for any but the most basic versions, "beer") nature has really limited adoption and resources compared to the competition.
Or R6RS, depending on which side of that schism you fall on.
I don't think SICP is a good reference, and for many people I suspect HtDP (also using Scheme, and also from MIT Press) is probably a better programming book.
I think its generally more robust in ACID terms, but less advanced in terms of simultaneous access and performance with larger databases.
So I'd say its not unquestionably "more advanced", but its often a better choice.
And where its not, I'm inclined to say PostgreSQL is.
The least expensive Oracle version matches MySQL on price.
OTOH, MySQL is superior to Oracle on licensing permissions -- how important that is depends on the particular circumstance.
Of course not. Its just the solution for the (shrinking) range of things for which neither SQLite nor PostgreSQL is the right answer. (I'm joking, but only a little.)
Chrome on Windows doesn't follow Windows UI conventions, nor does it follow those of any other major platform; then again, part of the whole Chrome philosophy seems to be browser-as-nearly-transparent-platform, not browser-as-normal-application-on-host-platform.
That's what the GPL says.
Then again, plenty of people package installers for GPL software where the GPL is presented as if it were an EULA and the user must indicate acceptance of the GPL in order to install the software.
(And, except for a legalistic problem with the term "accept", I don't see this as undesirable: you should be aware of what you can do with the license, and what you don't need the license to do, when you get GPL software, or software distributed under any other license, even if you don't need to accept the license to use the software.)
Sir Tim is not proposing a "systemic rating scale", in fact, he specifically any single such scale in favor of something more like a freeform tagging system by which different ratings providers could provide ratings using their own rating systems. (He's not real specific, at least in the BBC article cited by TFA) about what exactly the system would entail, just that different organizations could provide rating in different ways.
Actually, cults rely on their own freedom to spread information to recruit, and on social structures that discourage members from accessing (or at least giving credence to) outside information sources to retain membership. Yes, some cults will actively seek to restrict derogatory claims (true or otherwise) about themselves from being distributed in the public media, where there are readily available means to do so, many others are far less concerned about that because they principally target people who are generally detached from or distrustful of mainstream media sources, or because they rely on far more powerful person-to-person communication ot overcome negative media images (often, using outright false-flag recruitment where recruits don't know what group they've become associated with until they've been drawn deeply in).
Its not at all as simple as "cults rely on restriction of information to thrive".
Read TFA, or better yet the BBC source article linked in TFA. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who (neither plural nor indefinite gender use being appropriate) would usually be referred to as "himself" not "themselves", said: "So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways".
Hardly what you'd expect from a self-appointed "Ruler of Truth".
If one reads TFA, or better the original article linked in tFA (here, but not linked in the summary), its quite clear that most of the way this is being interpreted is wrong. He's not asking for a unitary rating by a single authority, he's asking for a mechanism by which diverse entities can provide their own ratings in their own way:
What he's asking for seems more like a form of accountable third-party tagging than like a single MPAA/ESRB/etc.-style rating based on "truth" rather than "maturity" of content.
Welcome to reality.
Even that assumption is invalid, of course: it would be less of a stretch to assume that they are consequences of some trait which, on average, helped those it applied to survive in some environment in which it was present, whether or not the thoughts (or even the trait which contributes to them) actually help you survive in your environment or not.
No, science is a mechanism for separating useful superstitions from useless ones. No, really: science doesn't test whether a hypothesized model of reality describes the real underlying processes, it tests whether it predicts experiences better than competing models.
How does a rod reduce the weight of a building? Does it reduce the mass, or shield the mass from the effects of gravity? Sounds like superstition to me...
People who join cults often experience increases in most available measures of well-being and quality of life.
The bad results that make major headlines do so because they are exceptional, not because they are the norm.
In name, sure, but its more of a corporatist totalitarian state than a Communist one in substance.
Well, there are certain state-owned (often, IIRC, through the People's Liberation Army) industries in China for which that is true, but as a general rule its really not.
Everyone in sight, probably, given the amount of money involved.
Now, as to who might be actually liable for the financial harm to UAL by spreading information that they knew was false or that was spread with reckless disregard for falsehood, so far the best candidate would seem to be Income Security Advisors, Inc., which seems to where an active, human decision was made to spread the information as a current alert after seeing it on Google News, which seems to be where the wildfire spread started.
Chrome's innovations are mostly in the JavaScript engine and the process-per-tab architecture, neither of which have much to do with the rendering engine: Gecko v. WebKit is mostly a peripheral issue.
Little to no GDP now. Providing communications infrastructure increases the likely rate of economic growth in those countries, and the returns for investment there. As a move for profit, it only works if it actually does help spur economic growth in those countries, but it certainly isn't unreasonable to think that it will. Whether or not Google really does no evil, this is certainly the kind of investment which has the possibility of Google ultimately doing well for themselves while doing good for others.
Broadband access is already rapidly growing in those countries. Inasmuch as Google benefits from increased broadband access anywhere (provided that Google isn't actively blocked) they don't need to invest anything to gain that benefit. And, as for other kinds of investment in BRIC countries, Google has been making those, so its not an either/or scenario.