The good think about having brackets as syntax and whitespace as formatting is that it is redundant, and mismatches between them may provide a way of catching thinkos. And it helps (in properly formatted code) readability: there is a reason natural languages tend to have quite a bit of redundancy, it aids comprehension.
The bad think about having brackets as syntax and whitespace as just formatting is that it is redundant, and you can produce things that look wrong but are wrong but look right if you don't have something automatically formatting.
Many programming languages lean toward the first factor outweighing the second. Python leans the other way. It isn't objectively one way or the other; which factor is a bigger factor in usability varies from person to person, and group to group.
That's why Ruby is nice, it's as readable as Python but it has regex included...
Just curious, are you talking about having to "import re" in Python instead of just having regex support by default, or is there something significant lacking in Python's regex support?
The need to import a library isn't a big deal, but Ruby's core support isn't just support functions "included by default", its also a simple literal syntax available and perl-style magic variables related to regexs. Now, I'm not too fond of the magic variables, but the magic variables are probably convenient to people coming from Perl, and the literal syntax is a convenience if you are using regexs a lot.
So you can test a string against a regexp with something like:
/pattern/ =~ string
And get nil if there is no match, and the index of the start of the match if there is one. In Python, you get the same with something like: re.search(pattern, string).start
I now have an IRC bot written in Python which allows me to modify the code live, without restarting the bot. . . . It was a rather ingenious hack, imho, was startlingly simple to implement, and was made possible by the amazing dynamicness of Python.
Its a clever hack, but there is nothing really specific to Python about it. Lots of languages would let you do that: indeed, that's one of the things that I've seen raved about regarding the use of Lisp in, e.g., the space program. Certainly, Lisp/Scheme, Ruby, and Perl all support that kind of hack fairly naturally.
If Python's the place where it clicked for you, that's great, but don't be misled to think that its unique or even part of some new breed in that respect.
I am sorry, but that's simply incorrect. A check is a draft. As described by the UCC article 3, it is an order to pay.
A check is an order to the bank. To the recipient, it is a promise that there are sufficient funds in the account to cover the draft (and, on top of that, that the order will not be cancelled before the draft is presented through a separate communication with the bank), a promise which is, all too frequently, false; which is why, even with all the modern infrastructure to increase trust by allowing some degree of verification of such promises, checks have fallen out of favor for transactions where there are practical alternatives.
It is distinctly different from as a promise (such as IOU) in that you cannot be sued for writing a check.
You can't be sued for issuing an IOU either. You can be sued for not paying on an IOU, just as you can be sued for not having the funds for a check.
Just because a bank promises to honor it on demand doesn't mean that (1) it is convenient to present it, or (2) any particular other participant in the market is confident that they bank will be able to honor it when presented, regardless of the promise.
That's why fiat currency only works when it is based on trust.
Except that it has nothing to do with "fiat currency", since the currency described is a representational (commodity-backed) currency. IF you are going to argue about fiat vs. other kinds of currency, it would help to learn what "fiat currency" refers to.
I am sure you can bring up a lot of arguments for the volatility of the system. But the volatility of the current system is much greater
No, actually, a single-commodity system faces greater volatility than modern first-world fiat money systems. That intense volatility may be fluctuation around under a long-run average that doesn't have the kind of gradual downward trend that fiat money tends to have, which is better for institutions which hold large stocks of cash (and act as creditors) for generations, and similarly bad for institutions whose assets are physical capital rather than money and tend to have, over an extended period, more debt than cash, but its still intense volatility.
Changing to commodity or representational money will not change that (if anything, it will be a symptom that that problem has gotten worse.)
That's elitist and more importantly inaccurate.
There's nothing "elitist" about it. It's not inaccurate, either.
It's because people don't have a choice.
AS you yourself note, the degree to which people do this has changed over the last 20 years (since the 80s), and the monetary system hasn't changed since then. People have changed the choices they make, which demonstrates that they do, in fact, have choices.
If they don't invest, they lose their savings.
If they don't invest at all, they face a very slow decline in the value of their cash. If they "invest" in simple interest bearing accounts like savings accounts, they face slower or no decline in the value of their savings. People make higher risk investments not because they are compelled to do so by the gradual decline in the value of fiat currency, but because they are forced to do so by the increasing uncertainty in retirement due to the erosion of defined-benefit pensions, the shorter duration of employment with a single employer, rising healthcare costs, reduced social support programs, and a number of other economic and government policy factors unrelated to the currency system.
On a personal note, please, stay away from ad hominems such as "your misinformation".
Characterizing your statement as "misinformation" is not ad hominem, any more than your characterizing my statement as "elitist" is ad hominem.
"Argumentum ad hominem" is raising arguments about personal characteristics of the other participant in an argument and suggesting their arguments should be discarded because the person making the argument is a bad person. If you are going to complain about ad hominem, please learn what it is first.
Had people kept their savings in gold, the trend of having to invest when everyone else is wouldn't be there -- people would be perfectly happy with moderate rate of savings their gold provided them.
There's no evidence to support this. People have been seeking interest-bearing accounts and other investments for retirement security for centuries: purchased annuities have been a popular vehicle since the Middle Ages. People may or may not invest, as you suggest, because pressure from the perception that "everyone else is", but that's not because we aren't on the gold standard. Personally-directed retirement investment may be more popular now than it was even a few decades ago both because their are increased tax incentives and more available vehicles to do it now, and because reliable, employer-provided defined benefit pensions are less commonly found than they were even 20 years ago.
I don't know why you keep insisting that we were still on a gold standard until 1930s.
You yourself have noted we were still on the gold standard under the Breton Woods system, which Nixon withdrew from, which mandated currencies be convertible (among participants, not the public) for gold. But free (i.e., public) convertibility of gold stopped with the recall of bullion, gold certificates, etc. under Roosevelt in 1933 (which also was when the US left the gold standard until reestablishing it by joining Bretton Woods in 1946.)
Can you outline the exact procedure one would have to go through to get the gold equivalent of their money in 1925 from the federal reserve? Or at least provide a link to it?
Strangely, the "exact procedure" for redeeming certificates that were made unredeemable more than half a century before the creation of the web browser aren't easy to find on the web. However, the whole reason that the decisi
Yes, it would. Under the current system people invest even though they have no idea what they invest in.
That's because people are stupid.
Changing to commodity or representational money will not change that (if anything, it will be a symptom that that problem has gotten worse.)
The only reason they do so is because they know that not investing in anything will reduce the value of their savings.
But it won't do so nearly as quickly as investing poorly, which is what you are asserting that they are doing (and, in fact, many people are doing.) I suspect the reason is more that they've heard you can make lots of money investing (which you can, if you are smart and/or lucky enough), which they will continue to hear (because it will continue to be true) no matter what monetary system is in place, as long as there is even a modestly functional economy. Commodity or representational money won't substantially reduce the extreme gap in value between sitting your money on the shelf and investing it well, and the perceived gains to be made investing. (It will probably reduce the average financial gain from investing a bit, but while that will generally slow the economy down, it won't stop investing from being attractive, especially to the people who invest without knowing much based on unreasonable expectations that they will with little effort have good results.)
Nothing compels people to retain their earnings in cash.
Nothing does so now.
I wasn't aware you were advocating compelling people to retain their earnings as cash. But, feel free to make the case for that if you wish.
If cash didn't lose its value, people would most certainly keep their money in cash.
They'd be somewhat more likely too, though most would probably prefer investments with a positive return to no return even then. Of course, if keeping cash around for no return was better than what the market had to offer, people would keep cash and no one would invest: but I don't think that's a desirable outcome.
People were keeping their money in savings accounts as late as 80's.
"Savings accounts" are not "cash". They are low-risk investment. People keep their money in savings accounts now, if they don't have a lot of savings outside of tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Usually, you can get better returns (with less liquidity) with other investments, particularly if you want to invest more, and there are more options for small investors than in the 1980s, with more liquidity, and interest rates are lower, which makes savings accounts less attractive. A savings account is basically letting the bank invest your money for you, and giving the bank virtually all of the returns in exchange for saving you the work of finding decent investments.
Now people have just given up on idea of retirement altogether or decided that they'll take their chances with the volatile markets.
Largely because corporations have abandoned defined-benefit pensions. Tax policy plays an important (but not the only) role here, but the currency system is almost completely irrelevant.
Why shouldn't people be able to just keep the money they earned and use it for their retirement?
How is buying valuable assets (whether financial instruments or otherwise) with money and using those assets to finance retirement less desirable? I really don't think it makes sense to destroy our money system chasing after your misguided idea that people need to be able to just keep surplus cash in their closet and use it to retire.
People are legally able to exchange property (other than money) for property (other than money) now. I can legally enter into a contract to trade my car for a 6 cows, 8 chickens, and t
But look at the alternative -- robbing people of their savings.
No on is being "robbed" of anything. Money is a medium of exchange. Failing to exchange it for something of value may result in its value changing before you do so. The extreme short-term volatility of commodity money is not preferable the gradual long-term decline in value of most fiat money, since the latter much more than the former can be managed by purchasing productive assets with the money in some reasonable time.
It is still much more stable than the fiat system.
No, its much more volatile, though the more extreme fluctuations may have a greater tendency to average out over the extremely long-term. But short-term volatility is more damaging than long-term decline in value, because the long-term decline can be managed by purchasing productive assets, while the more extreme short-term volatility of commodity prices is harder to manage. There are plenty of long-term stores of value available to participants in the economy: the essential and indispensable role of government-issued money is in a medium of exchange, not a long-term store of value.
C'mon, these issues have been explored and resolved hundreds of years ago.
Right. They were resolved, successively, by the abandonment of commodity currencies for representational currencies followed by the abandonment of representational currencies for fiat currencies. And, really, now by the dominance of privately issued "fiat representational" currencies (ledger balances which are transferred largely without government-issued currency ever changing hand, and created privately out of thin air through the magic of fractional reserve banking, and backed fractionally not by commodities, but by reserves of government-issued fiat currency) being the dominant medium of exchange.
But since you are advocating undoing all those layers of solutions and going back to commodity currency...
Banks can be storage houses for large quantities of gold. What do you think you do when you write a check?
Sure, a check (or a privately-issued banknote) is a privately-issued form of promise-backed currency allegedly backed, in the usual case, by some form of government-issued currency in the banks hands (either in a specific account or the banks general reserve.) To argue against promise-backed currencies and then argue for using checks is to argue incoherently -- a check or banknote is promise-backed.
You could just as well write such orders to transfer ownership of gold.
Or I could use a government-issued gold-backed representational currency, rather than resorting to a privately-issued one; which is why government-issued representational currencies largely displaced government-validate coins (commodity currency) in practical exchange. And for any instant exchange, such a currency is no worse than a government-issued fiat currency. OTOH, if I want to be able to do business and only worry about the general economy as a whole, and the specific industry I work in, but not be concerned additionally about momentary disruptions of the gold supply, I'd be a lot happier using a fiat currency issued by a stable government: which is one reason why fiat currencies have displaced representational currencies globally.
Definitions vary. Maybe gold-based is what I should have said. Ie, currency that is readily redeemed for gold.
"Readily redeemed" is not a binary category, but a continuum. And how readily it is, in fact, redeemed in gold is a factor, but not the only one, in how readily it is perceived to be redeemed, which is what can cause its value in practice to vary compared to actual, physical gold. You can't get around this by shifting definitions: representational currencies (which is what you are talking about) do not have a fixed practical value, even in terms of the commodity for which they are redeemable. They are subject to variation even with respect to that commodity, as well as being exposed to fluctuations in the market for that commodity.
The only way you get a currency that is reliably fixed value relative to a physical commodity is to trade the physical commodity itself.
Basically, the unit of exchange is a weight of gold and the only "currency" is a paper that says that a certain bank promises to pay gold the moment this currency is presented.
Yes, that's a demand note representational currency. They've been used, and even they have varying value in practice with respect to the underlying currency based, again, on faith in the issuing institutions capacity and reliability to pay. They are a promised-backed money, and their value is discounted by the degree to which the promise is unreliable. Just because a bank promises to honor it on demand doesn't mean that (1) it is convenient to present it, or (2) any particular other participant in the market is confident that they bank will be able to honor it when presented, regardless of the promise.
That's not how gold-standard worked between 1913 and the time Nixon abolished it -- only countries could redeem dollars for gold -- individuals could not.
Presumably, you mean that's not how the gold standard worked between the United States joining the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1946 and the U.S. abandoning it in 1972; the United States wasn't on the gold standard for the entire 1913-1972, and prior to abandoning the gold standard in 1933, the US did, in fact, a system of free convertibility of gold certificates circulating as currency (the US retained free convertibility of silver certificates circulating as currency into, IIRC, the 1960s.)
I tried PHP out for a while a couple years ago. Quite a lot of useful libraries, but the language itself didn't seem to offer much. For just gluing together the existing libraries with minimal new code, it seemed to quite usable (and a lot of web development might get by with that), but it seemed a lot less nice when there was more processing involved. Maybe I just didn't get it, or maybe its improved since then...
For building most web applications it's the place to be.
Why? Sure, it featured neat embedding in HTML before there were Python or Ruby templating engines that used Python or Ruby in HTML, but why would it be preferred now, for a new, ground-up web application, besides familiarity to the developer? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just looking for perspectives on "why PHP?")
Adam Smith didn't solve shit, he came up with a fly-by-night idea and piled on it loads of seemingly sound philosophy (that was probably also a bunch of bullshit too).
What fly-by-night idea are you referring to that Adam Smith came up with?
China has the government structure and the sheer number of people available to hit us hard with debt they own.
China may have leverage because our government currently wants to keep selling them debt, but they debt they already own gives us leverage over them, more than the other way around: they are counting on us to pay it, so who has the leverage?
Fiat currency has worked remarkably well because the US held all of the cards until now and noone but the US could game the system.
Fiat currency has, on balance, everywhere in the world, worked better than commodity or representational currency ever has, because it isn't as subject to short-term extreme fluctuations based on the market for a single commodity of any commodity or representational system, doesn't have the exchange value problems of multicommodity systems, and doesn't have the limited range of values for which exchanges are practical and logistical issues faced by commodity systems, particularly single commodity systems.
This is independent, largely, of who is "holding cards". Clearly, anyone holding dominant power in the world economy or over critical resources can disrupt any fiat, representational, or commodity system—though this is easier with representational or commodity systems, where they are vulnerable to most of the same attacks that are possible against a fiat system (particularly a representational system) as well as efforts directed at disrupting or distorting the market for the underlying commodity.
The fact is, fiat currency is pretend currency, and it only works as long as someone with a lot more guns than someone else has and keeps control of it.
No, the fact is fiat currency is real (and pure currency). Commodity and representational currency is far more unstable in the short-term because it is something other than currency, and is therefore more exposed to particular external uncertainties.
Well, first of all the population is not growing because we have more money.
Why the population is growing isn't the issue, how you deal with the growing population is the issue. The slow increase in the value of money associated with most first-world fiat currencies naturally accommodates a growing population, whereas the relative intergenerational stability of commodity-based money would further retain wealth in the aging cohort.
(The greater short-term instability of commodity or representational money is a separate problem that most proposals for such money fail to address.)
Gold-backed currency is such in name only unless the currency is a promissory note which can be redeemed for a quantity of gold on demand.
That's the definition of a gold-backed currency. The thing is, they've existed in the real world, and they do fluctuate in value based on people's trust in the issuing institution.
It would put more burden on those investing to make sure they invest wisely.
No, it wouldn't.
But the argument for gold is not an argument for progress (or against it).
If its not better, there is no reason to adopt it. I've asked why it would be better.
It sidesteps that issue. It is mostly an argument about fairness.
It mostly gains extremely-long-term stability at the expense of far less stability over reasonable time periods (on the order of mere decades).
It's not honest to reduce the value of what people have earned and saved over time.
Nothing compels people to retain their earnings in cash. There is nothing dishonest about using a medium of exchange that people know declines in value over the long-term compared to many other assets. Nothing compels people to keep their stored wealth in cash, and few sane, law-abiding people do so.
Certainly, I agree that the speculative nature of the bubbles would disappear if people were allowed to legally exchange property for property (as in gold/silver coins for company shares, houses, cows, etc).
No one else said that, so I don't know why you characterize that as "agreeing". People are legally able to exchange property (other than money) for property (other than money) now. I can legally enter into a contract to trade my car for a 6 cows, 8 chickens, and the right to use the buyers bathtub at will for the next years.
The only thing that the law says is that if the buyer breaks the contract and I sue him, I'll most likely be awarded damages for the breach in cash, not livestock and bathtub access.
You are only legally required to accept dollar if you chose to quote your price.
Actually, the important impact of "legal tender" laws isn't that you are legally required to accept anything as payment. The important impact is when you try to sue somebody for failing to pay: first, if they made a tender of payment in dollars, that will be taken into account and, secondly, if you secure a judgement, except in extraordinary circumstances where the law permits "specific performance" as a remedy, then no matter what form of payment your agreement called for, the damages awarded will be denominated in dollars.
I am talking about the actual practice as it has existed. Paper currency has been tried many times and so has value-based currency.
All currency is "value-based". If you are trying to contrast fiat currency, on the one hand, with representational and commodity currency on the other (or, alternative, fiat and representational currency on the one hand with commodity currency on the other), you should say what you mean. Most likely, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Yes, both commodity and representational currency have been tried. One of their many weaknesses is that intense currency fluctuations are very common based on short-term fluctuations in the value of the underlying commodity; radical short-term fluctuations in fiat money values do happen occasionally, but usually only when there is a general economic or government failure. (Commodity currencies also have additional problems in that they can be extraordinarily inconvenient for large exchanges, though this is not a problem with representational currencies.)
Btw, in the modern world it would actually be more practical to have gold/silver coins.
No, it wouldn't. You might be able to avoid debasement (if cheap verification equipment was in the hands of every participant in the market), but even then you have the problem that gold and silver are extremely valuable compared to the many common transactions, but a large quantity of either would still be required for large transactions without resorting to representational currencies (and creating a demand for them as currency would increase that value.)
An ounce of silver is worth on the order of $15 now. With a silver commodity currency, it would pretty hard to have any money smaller than $1: a current US $ would be worth a little more than a pennyweight, and be a silver coin about the size of a dime.
At the same time, a $1,000 would be over 4 pounds of silver.
You can manage the narrow range of practical values in a commodity system two ways. First, you can go to a multicommodity system, but then you can't trade both for "real" market value of the metal in the coins and maintain a fixed exchange rate between coins of different metals. Second, you can abandon a pure commodity system for a representational system, where banknotes backed that are freely exchangable for the backing commodity are issued. But then you don't have commodity money, you have promised-based money again.
The fact is, and always will be, the ONLY thing that creates money is a value added process performed on a raw material or commodity.
No, a value-added process creates value not money.
Money is created in a number of ways: issuing currency obviously, but also the action of banks. If you deposit $100 at a bank, the bank loans out most of it and retains a fraction (say, for simplicity, 10% or $10 of the $100), along with a similar fraction of all the deposits it receives from other people, to cover withdrawals. But, here's the thing, you can still spend the whole $100, and so can the person to whom the bank loaned the money. (As long as not everyone wants the money in the physical bills, the fact that there isn't enough cash in existence doesn't matter.) So, in effect, there is now $190 in existence. (And, of course, when the borrower spends the money and whoever received it deposits it, the bank lends most of that out again, creating even more money. And so on: when the debts are repaid, this "destroys" the "created" money, but then the money is lent out again "recreating" it.)
Money is a symbol and token exchanged for value, it is not value, is not created by the same processes that create value, and the disconnection between the creation of money and the creation of value is a source of fluctuations in the value of money.
Regardless how the intrinsic value of the gold can be philosophically shown, the fact remains that under gold-based currency money does not lose value.
This is only true for the trivial case where the "value of currency" is measured in how much gold you can realize from it, and even then only when gold itself traded for nothing but its metal value is the currency.
Gold-backed currencies can lose value on the market, even when the value is measured in gold, based on the perception of the stability and reliability of the issuing institutions and access to that institution.
Under government-promise based currency (fiat) money ALWAYS loses value.
Gold-backed currencies issued by governments are also "government-promised based currency", even though they are not "fiat" currency as the term is usually defined. Gold-backed currencies are still backed by promises; of the major forms (commodity, representative [commodity-backed], and fiat) of currency, only commodity money is not promised-based.
Anyhow, why would money that didn't tend, more often than not, to gradually lose value over time compared to other commodities be desirable to money that does? Seems to me that would reduce the incentive for productive investment and economic activity generally.
There is no way anyone can go back to the gold standard with the WTO in existence, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find a way to make the currency system actually work.
The currency system actually works.
(Other aspects of the economic system don't, and deliberately so, because the narrow interests that have the most influence in setting the rules benefit from the brokenness, but that's a different story.)
You can't sustain a system of constant debt growth forever.
Well, no, the heat death of the universe will prevent that: you can't sustain anything forever.
OTOH, there is no economic reason a government can't sustain constant debt growth forever (ignoring cosmological constraints), particularly if over the long-term the ratio of debt to the total economic output of the governed nation isn't growing without bound.
What good is 2L if you can't virtually explore the things there that aren't possible, safe, legal, or some combination of all of these virtually?
If $L weren't exchangeable for real world dollars and purchased with them, there wouldn't be a problem here. There is a difference between a virtual world which allows you to simulate things that are illegal in the real world and a virtual world which provides a vehicle for doing, in the real world, things that are illegal in the real world.
TIOBE's methodology is distinctly suspect, too. Looking at search engine result counts - which are estimates, and in the case of Google are well documented to be inaccurate - is hardly scientific. And they're using YouTube as one of their search engines?! How is that going to produce meaningful figures?
Their measuring the popularity of language foo by "Programming foo" hits, with some special case modifications to deal with particular languages where that kind of query would be problematic. Its not at all a reliable metric, but among the quick-and-dirty language-comparison metrics, it doesn't seem to be notably bad (not, again, that its any good, just that whole pack is really bad and this seems no worse than average.)
Using YouTube makes some sense given the kind of measure they are doing, since "Programming foo" screencasts that might be distributed via YouTube are as meaningful as the average "Programming foo" webpage.
(I hate screencasts, personally, but that's a different issue.)
Mesh network is a software feature, could be provided by OS.
The XO can act as a mesh point when the main CPU is powered off; this feature clearly cannot be provided by the OS.
E-book mode isn't a significant perk.
Perhaps not for a general purpose laptop; when you are selling to to national ministries of education as, among other things, a way to deliver educational content more efficiently, e-book mode is a pretty major feature.
Battery life is, but it should be able to enter some strong power-saving mode, shouldn't it?
That's an area that the XO has focussed on considerably, so I doubt that the Classmate can mitigate its general disadvantage there. If anything, the XO probably has the advantage on that point as well, which increases the overall XO advantage.
1. Mathematics requirements in CS programs are shrinking.
The reason is because Computer Science has developed into a discipline that is no longer pure mathematics.
The problem with this explanation is that there is no evidence whatsoever that Computer Science, as a discipline, involves any less mathematics than it ever did, even if undergraduate "Computer Science" curricula at many institutions involve less math and more vocational programming based on industry fashion with less theory.
2. The development of programming skills in several languages is giving way to cookbook approaches using large libraries and special-purpose packages.
Guess what, that's what building real software is like today.
Understanding both the scope of models and the theoretical underpinnings remains important to actual computer science. If universities want to offer programming curricula that aren't about computer science, that's perfectly legitimate, they just shouldn't call them "computer science".
We don't need people that can write quicksort in obscure unused languages [...]
Todays "obscure, unused language" are the model for tomorrow's industrially dominant language. Most of the newer popular languages (Java included) were designed (and continue to be improved) by people intimately familiar with what you would probably describe as "obscure unused" languages, and incorporate features directly from them.
Innovation comes from these kinds of specialized, experimental, or tightly-focussed languages, and is only later incorporated into industrial languages. While grunt coders might not need to have experience with them, a Computer Science curriculum ought to expose people to something other than what is currently industrially popular.
but people that can grasp systems of millions of lines of code.
People that don't learn more than a couple of currently-industrially-popular languages and don't learn the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of computation well aren't going to grasp systems of millions of lines of code well, and aren't going to apply even the current industrially-popular languages well to new challenges.
Ada doesn't prepare you for that because it is a toy language that never really was adopted outside of the academic world.
In the real world, Ada is an industrial language that was developed by the Department of Defense specifically to tame the diversity of languages they were dealing with in systems containing millions of lines of code, and specifically to deal with issues of safety, reliability, and maintainability, and was mandated for about a decade (1987-1997) for all DoD projects where new code was the focus. It's about as far from an academically-focussed or "toy" language as you can get; its true that, with the fading of the DoD mandate in favor of off-the-shelf software at DoD, Ada has faced a sharp decline in industrial popularity and is now, perhaps, used mainly academically, but its focus isn't academic, it isn't a toy language, and there is certainly no basis for claiming that Ada doesn't prepare you for large systems, or that it was never adopted outside of academia.
Having done a Ph. D. in software engineering & architecture and having practiced my skills in several companies, my view is that one of the largest problems in computer science education is teachers who have never worked on real, industrial sized software systems and continue to send students into industry with a lot of misguided & naive ideas about how to build software. Most SE teachers out there simply have no clue what they are talking about.
Computer Science and Software Engineering are two related, but distinct, disciplines. You treat them as if they were the same thing. (Of course, part of the problem may be that "software engineering" isn't as widely available as a separate degree program.)
I think under 203(a)(3), you might have to wait 35 years to do that:-)
The Section 203 termination option is a different, copyright-specific provision that applies whether or not the license was gratuitous. My original post was about a rule which applies to gratuitous licenses in general (including gratuitous copyright licenses), not the Section 203 option.
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The good think about having brackets as syntax and whitespace as formatting is that it is redundant, and mismatches between them may provide a way of catching thinkos. And it helps (in properly formatted code) readability: there is a reason natural languages tend to have quite a bit of redundancy, it aids comprehension.
The bad think about having brackets as syntax and whitespace as just formatting is that it is redundant, and you can produce things that look wrong but are wrong but look right if you don't have something automatically formatting.
Many programming languages lean toward the first factor outweighing the second. Python leans the other way. It isn't objectively one way or the other; which factor is a bigger factor in usability varies from person to person, and group to group.
The need to import a library isn't a big deal, but Ruby's core support isn't just support functions "included by default", its also a simple literal syntax available and perl-style magic variables related to regexs. Now, I'm not too fond of the magic variables, but the magic variables are probably convenient to people coming from Perl, and the literal syntax is a convenience if you are using regexs a lot.
So you can test a string against a regexp with something like:
And get nil if there is no match, and the index of the start of the match if there is one. In Python, you get the same with something like:
re.search(pattern, string).start
Its a clever hack, but there is nothing really specific to Python about it. Lots of languages would let you do that: indeed, that's one of the things that I've seen raved about regarding the use of Lisp in, e.g., the space program. Certainly, Lisp/Scheme, Ruby, and Perl all support that kind of hack fairly naturally.
If Python's the place where it clicked for you, that's great, but don't be misled to think that its unique or even part of some new breed in that respect.
A check is an order to the bank. To the recipient, it is a promise that there are sufficient funds in the account to cover the draft (and, on top of that, that the order will not be cancelled before the draft is presented through a separate communication with the bank), a promise which is, all too frequently, false; which is why, even with all the modern infrastructure to increase trust by allowing some degree of verification of such promises, checks have fallen out of favor for transactions where there are practical alternatives.
You can't be sued for issuing an IOU either. You can be sued for not paying on an IOU, just as you can be sued for not having the funds for a check.
Except that it has nothing to do with "fiat currency", since the currency described is a representational (commodity-backed) currency. IF you are going to argue about fiat vs. other kinds of currency, it would help to learn what "fiat currency" refers to.
No, actually, a single-commodity system faces greater volatility than modern first-world fiat money systems. That intense volatility may be fluctuation around under a long-run average that doesn't have the kind of gradual downward trend that fiat money tends to have, which is better for institutions which hold large stocks of cash (and act as creditors) for generations, and similarly bad for institutions whose assets are physical capital rather than money and tend to have, over an extended period, more debt than cash, but its still intense volatility.
There's nothing "elitist" about it. It's not inaccurate, either.
AS you yourself note, the degree to which people do this has changed over the last 20 years (since the 80s), and the monetary system hasn't changed since then. People have changed the choices they make, which demonstrates that they do, in fact, have choices.
If they don't invest at all, they face a very slow decline in the value of their cash. If they "invest" in simple interest bearing accounts like savings accounts, they face slower or no decline in the value of their savings. People make higher risk investments not because they are compelled to do so by the gradual decline in the value of fiat currency, but because they are forced to do so by the increasing uncertainty in retirement due to the erosion of defined-benefit pensions, the shorter duration of employment with a single employer, rising healthcare costs, reduced social support programs, and a number of other economic and government policy factors unrelated to the currency system.
Characterizing your statement as "misinformation" is not ad hominem, any more than your characterizing my statement as "elitist" is ad hominem.
"Argumentum ad hominem" is raising arguments about personal characteristics of the other participant in an argument and suggesting their arguments should be discarded because the person making the argument is a bad person. If you are going to complain about ad hominem, please learn what it is first.
There's no evidence to support this. People have been seeking interest-bearing accounts and other investments for retirement security for centuries: purchased annuities have been a popular vehicle since the Middle Ages. People may or may not invest, as you suggest, because pressure from the perception that "everyone else is", but that's not because we aren't on the gold standard. Personally-directed retirement investment may be more popular now than it was even a few decades ago both because their are increased tax incentives and more available vehicles to do it now, and because reliable, employer-provided defined benefit pensions are less commonly found than they were even 20 years ago.
You yourself have noted we were still on the gold standard under the Breton Woods system, which Nixon withdrew from, which mandated currencies be convertible (among participants, not the public) for gold. But free (i.e., public) convertibility of gold stopped with the recall of bullion, gold certificates, etc. under Roosevelt in 1933 (which also was when the US left the gold standard until reestablishing it by joining Bretton Woods in 1946.)
Strangely, the "exact procedure" for redeeming certificates that were made unredeemable more than half a century before the creation of the web browser aren't easy to find on the web. However, the whole reason that the decisi
That's because people are stupid.
Changing to commodity or representational money will not change that (if anything, it will be a symptom that that problem has gotten worse.)
But it won't do so nearly as quickly as investing poorly, which is what you are asserting that they are doing (and, in fact, many people are doing.) I suspect the reason is more that they've heard you can make lots of money investing (which you can, if you are smart and/or lucky enough), which they will continue to hear (because it will continue to be true) no matter what monetary system is in place, as long as there is even a modestly functional economy. Commodity or representational money won't substantially reduce the extreme gap in value between sitting your money on the shelf and investing it well, and the perceived gains to be made investing. (It will probably reduce the average financial gain from investing a bit, but while that will generally slow the economy down, it won't stop investing from being attractive, especially to the people who invest without knowing much based on unreasonable expectations that they will with little effort have good results.)
I wasn't aware you were advocating compelling people to retain their earnings as cash. But, feel free to make the case for that if you wish.
They'd be somewhat more likely too, though most would probably prefer investments with a positive return to no return even then. Of course, if keeping cash around for no return was better than what the market had to offer, people would keep cash and no one would invest: but I don't think that's a desirable outcome.
"Savings accounts" are not "cash". They are low-risk investment. People keep their money in savings accounts now, if they don't have a lot of savings outside of tax-sheltered retirement accounts. Usually, you can get better returns (with less liquidity) with other investments, particularly if you want to invest more, and there are more options for small investors than in the 1980s, with more liquidity, and interest rates are lower, which makes savings accounts less attractive. A savings account is basically letting the bank invest your money for you, and giving the bank virtually all of the returns in exchange for saving you the work of finding decent investments.
Largely because corporations have abandoned defined-benefit pensions. Tax policy plays an important (but not the only) role here, but the currency system is almost completely irrelevant.
How is buying valuable assets (whether financial instruments or otherwise) with money and using those assets to finance retirement less desirable? I really don't think it makes sense to destroy our money system chasing after your misguided idea that people need to be able to just keep surplus cash in their closet and use it to retire.
No on is being "robbed" of anything. Money is a medium of exchange. Failing to exchange it for something of value may result in its value changing before you do so. The extreme short-term volatility of commodity money is not preferable the gradual long-term decline in value of most fiat money, since the latter much more than the former can be managed by purchasing productive assets with the money in some reasonable time.
No, its much more volatile, though the more extreme fluctuations may have a greater tendency to average out over the extremely long-term. But short-term volatility is more damaging than long-term decline in value, because the long-term decline can be managed by purchasing productive assets, while the more extreme short-term volatility of commodity prices is harder to manage. There are plenty of long-term stores of value available to participants in the economy: the essential and indispensable role of government-issued money is in a medium of exchange, not a long-term store of value.
Right. They were resolved, successively, by the abandonment of commodity currencies for representational currencies followed by the abandonment of representational currencies for fiat currencies. And, really, now by the dominance of privately issued "fiat representational" currencies (ledger balances which are transferred largely without government-issued currency ever changing hand, and created privately out of thin air through the magic of fractional reserve banking, and backed fractionally not by commodities, but by reserves of government-issued fiat currency) being the dominant medium of exchange.
But since you are advocating undoing all those layers of solutions and going back to commodity currency...
Sure, a check (or a privately-issued banknote) is a privately-issued form of promise-backed currency allegedly backed, in the usual case, by some form of government-issued currency in the banks hands (either in a specific account or the banks general reserve.) To argue against promise-backed currencies and then argue for using checks is to argue incoherently -- a check or banknote is promise-backed.
Or I could use a government-issued gold-backed representational currency, rather than resorting to a privately-issued one; which is why government-issued representational currencies largely displaced government-validate coins (commodity currency) in practical exchange. And for any instant exchange, such a currency is no worse than a government-issued fiat currency. OTOH, if I want to be able to do business and only worry about the general economy as a whole, and the specific industry I work in, but not be concerned additionally about momentary disruptions of the gold supply, I'd be a lot happier using a fiat currency issued by a stable government: which is one reason why fiat currencies have displaced representational currencies globally.
"Readily redeemed" is not a binary category, but a continuum. And how readily it is, in fact, redeemed in gold is a factor, but not the only one, in how readily it is perceived to be redeemed, which is what can cause its value in practice to vary compared to actual, physical gold. You can't get around this by shifting definitions: representational currencies (which is what you are talking about) do not have a fixed practical value, even in terms of the commodity for which they are redeemable. They are subject to variation even with respect to that commodity, as well as being exposed to fluctuations in the market for that commodity.
The only way you get a currency that is reliably fixed value relative to a physical commodity is to trade the physical commodity itself.
Yes, that's a demand note representational currency. They've been used, and even they have varying value in practice with respect to the underlying currency based, again, on faith in the issuing institutions capacity and reliability to pay. They are a promised-backed money, and their value is discounted by the degree to which the promise is unreliable. Just because a bank promises to honor it on demand doesn't mean that (1) it is convenient to present it, or (2) any particular other participant in the market is confident that they bank will be able to honor it when presented, regardless of the promise.
Presumably, you mean that's not how the gold standard worked between the United States joining the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1946 and the U.S. abandoning it in 1972; the United States wasn't on the gold standard for the entire 1913-1972, and prior to abandoning the gold standard in 1933, the US did, in fact, a system of free convertibility of gold certificates circulating as currency (the US retained free convertibility of silver certificates circulating as currency into, IIRC, the 1960s.)
I tried PHP out for a while a couple years ago. Quite a lot of useful libraries, but the language itself didn't seem to offer much. For just gluing together the existing libraries with minimal new code, it seemed to quite usable (and a lot of web development might get by with that), but it seemed a lot less nice when there was more processing involved. Maybe I just didn't get it, or maybe its improved since then...
Why? Sure, it featured neat embedding in HTML before there were Python or Ruby templating engines that used Python or Ruby in HTML, but why would it be preferred now, for a new, ground-up web application, besides familiarity to the developer? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just looking for perspectives on "why PHP?")
No, its not. Even if it was, so what?
What fly-by-night idea are you referring to that Adam Smith came up with?
China may have leverage because our government currently wants to keep selling them debt, but they debt they already own gives us leverage over them, more than the other way around: they are counting on us to pay it, so who has the leverage?
Fiat currency has, on balance, everywhere in the world, worked better than commodity or representational currency ever has, because it isn't as subject to short-term extreme fluctuations based on the market for a single commodity of any commodity or representational system, doesn't have the exchange value problems of multicommodity systems, and doesn't have the limited range of values for which exchanges are practical and logistical issues faced by commodity systems, particularly single commodity systems.
This is independent, largely, of who is "holding cards". Clearly, anyone holding dominant power in the world economy or over critical resources can disrupt any fiat, representational, or commodity system—though this is easier with representational or commodity systems, where they are vulnerable to most of the same attacks that are possible against a fiat system (particularly a representational system) as well as efforts directed at disrupting or distorting the market for the underlying commodity.
No, the fact is fiat currency is real (and pure currency). Commodity and representational currency is far more unstable in the short-term because it is something other than currency, and is therefore more exposed to particular external uncertainties.
Why the population is growing isn't the issue, how you deal with the growing population is the issue. The slow increase in the value of money associated with most first-world fiat currencies naturally accommodates a growing population, whereas the relative intergenerational stability of commodity-based money would further retain wealth in the aging cohort.
(The greater short-term instability of commodity or representational money is a separate problem that most proposals for such money fail to address.)
That's the definition of a gold-backed currency. The thing is, they've existed in the real world, and they do fluctuate in value based on people's trust in the issuing institution.
No, it wouldn't.
If its not better, there is no reason to adopt it. I've asked why it would be better.
It mostly gains extremely-long-term stability at the expense of far less stability over reasonable time periods (on the order of mere decades).
Nothing compels people to retain their earnings in cash. There is nothing dishonest about using a medium of exchange that people know declines in value over the long-term compared to many other assets. Nothing compels people to keep their stored wealth in cash, and few sane, law-abiding people do so.
No one else said that, so I don't know why you characterize that as "agreeing". People are legally able to exchange property (other than money) for property (other than money) now. I can legally enter into a contract to trade my car for a 6 cows, 8 chickens, and the right to use the buyers bathtub at will for the next years.
The only thing that the law says is that if the buyer breaks the contract and I sue him, I'll most likely be awarded damages for the breach in cash, not livestock and bathtub access.
Actually, the important impact of "legal tender" laws isn't that you are legally required to accept anything as payment. The important impact is when you try to sue somebody for failing to pay: first, if they made a tender of payment in dollars, that will be taken into account and, secondly, if you secure a judgement, except in extraordinary circumstances where the law permits "specific performance" as a remedy, then no matter what form of payment your agreement called for, the damages awarded will be denominated in dollars.
All currency is "value-based". If you are trying to contrast fiat currency, on the one hand, with representational and commodity currency on the other (or, alternative, fiat and representational currency on the one hand with commodity currency on the other), you should say what you mean. Most likely, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Yes, both commodity and representational currency have been tried. One of their many weaknesses is that intense currency fluctuations are very common based on short-term fluctuations in the value of the underlying commodity; radical short-term fluctuations in fiat money values do happen occasionally, but usually only when there is a general economic or government failure. (Commodity currencies also have additional problems in that they can be extraordinarily inconvenient for large exchanges, though this is not a problem with representational currencies.)
No, it wouldn't. You might be able to avoid debasement (if cheap verification equipment was in the hands of every participant in the market), but even then you have the problem that gold and silver are extremely valuable compared to the many common transactions, but a large quantity of either would still be required for large transactions without resorting to representational currencies (and creating a demand for them as currency would increase that value.)
An ounce of silver is worth on the order of $15 now. With a silver commodity currency, it would pretty hard to have any money smaller than $1: a current US $ would be worth a little more than a pennyweight, and be a silver coin about the size of a dime.
At the same time, a $1,000 would be over 4 pounds of silver.
You can manage the narrow range of practical values in a commodity system two ways. First, you can go to a multicommodity system, but then you can't trade both for "real" market value of the metal in the coins and maintain a fixed exchange rate between
coins of different metals. Second, you can abandon a pure commodity system for a representational system, where banknotes backed that are freely exchangable for the backing commodity are issued. But then you don't have commodity money, you have promised-based money again.
No, a value-added process creates value not money.
Money is created in a number of ways: issuing currency obviously, but also the action of banks. If you deposit $100 at a bank, the bank loans out most of it and retains a fraction (say, for simplicity, 10% or $10 of the $100), along with a similar fraction of all the deposits it receives from other people, to cover withdrawals. But, here's the thing, you can still spend the whole $100, and so can the person to whom the bank loaned the money. (As long as not everyone wants the money in the physical bills, the fact that there isn't enough cash in existence doesn't matter.) So, in effect, there is now $190 in existence. (And, of course, when the borrower spends the money and whoever received it deposits it, the bank lends most of that out again, creating even more money. And so on: when the debts are repaid, this "destroys" the "created" money, but then the money is lent out again "recreating" it.)
Money is a symbol and token exchanged for value, it is not value, is not created by the same processes that create value, and the disconnection between the creation of money and the creation of value is a source of fluctuations in the value of money.
This is only true for the trivial case where the "value of currency" is measured in how much gold you can realize from it, and even then only when gold itself traded for nothing but its metal value is the currency.
Gold-backed currencies can lose value on the market, even when the value is measured in gold, based on the perception of the stability and reliability of the issuing institutions and access to that institution.
Gold-backed currencies issued by governments are also "government-promised based currency", even though they are not "fiat" currency as the term is usually defined. Gold-backed currencies are still backed by promises; of the major forms (commodity, representative [commodity-backed], and fiat) of currency, only commodity money is not promised-based.
Anyhow, why would money that didn't tend, more often than not, to gradually lose value over time compared to other commodities be desirable to money that does? Seems to me that would reduce the incentive for productive investment and economic activity generally.
The currency system actually works.
(Other aspects of the economic system don't, and deliberately so, because the narrow interests that have the most influence in setting the rules benefit from the brokenness, but that's a different story.)
Well, no, the heat death of the universe will prevent that: you can't sustain anything forever.
OTOH, there is no economic reason a government can't sustain constant debt growth forever (ignoring cosmological constraints), particularly if over the long-term the ratio of debt to the total economic output of the governed nation isn't growing without bound.
If $L weren't exchangeable for real world dollars and purchased with them, there wouldn't be a problem here. There is a difference between a virtual world which allows you to simulate things that are illegal in the real world and a virtual world which provides a vehicle for doing, in the real world, things that are illegal in the real world.
Their measuring the popularity of language foo by "Programming foo" hits, with some special case modifications to deal with particular languages where that kind of query would be problematic. Its not at all a reliable metric, but among the quick-and-dirty language-comparison metrics, it doesn't seem to be notably bad (not, again, that its any good, just that whole pack is really bad and this seems no worse than average.)
Using YouTube makes some sense given the kind of measure they are doing, since "Programming foo" screencasts that might be distributed via YouTube are as meaningful as the average "Programming foo" webpage.
(I hate screencasts, personally, but that's a different issue.)
The XO can act as a mesh point when the main CPU is powered off; this feature clearly cannot be provided by the OS.
Perhaps not for a general purpose laptop; when you are selling to to national ministries of education as, among other things, a way to deliver educational content more efficiently, e-book mode is a pretty major feature.
That's an area that the XO has focussed on considerably, so I doubt that the Classmate can mitigate its general disadvantage there. If anything, the XO probably has the advantage on that point as well, which increases the overall XO advantage.
From checking the first few universities I thought to look at on the web:
Caltech and MIT both use Scheme for their first course (and both use SICP as the main text).
The initial three main programming classes for the CS major at UC Davis use primarily C, C++, and Assembly.
Stanford's first course uses C++ and the second course uses C++, Java, and Lisp.
Perhaps there may be "cradle to grave Java" curricula out there somewhere, but what universities are we talking about here?
The problem with this explanation is that there is no evidence whatsoever that Computer Science, as a discipline, involves any less mathematics than it ever did, even if undergraduate "Computer Science" curricula at many institutions involve less math and more vocational programming based on industry fashion with less theory.
Understanding both the scope of models and the theoretical underpinnings remains important to actual computer science. If universities want to offer programming curricula that aren't about computer science, that's perfectly legitimate, they just shouldn't call them "computer science".
Todays "obscure, unused language" are the model for tomorrow's industrially dominant language. Most of the newer popular languages (Java included) were designed (and continue to be improved) by people intimately familiar with what you would probably describe as "obscure unused" languages, and incorporate features directly from them.
Innovation comes from these kinds of specialized, experimental, or tightly-focussed languages, and is only later incorporated into industrial languages. While grunt coders might not need to have experience with them, a Computer Science curriculum ought to expose people to something other than what is currently industrially popular.
People that don't learn more than a couple of currently-industrially-popular languages and don't learn the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of computation well aren't going to grasp systems of millions of lines of code well, and aren't going to apply even the current industrially-popular languages well to new challenges.
In the real world, Ada is an industrial language that was developed by the Department of Defense specifically to tame the diversity of languages they were dealing with in systems containing millions of lines of code, and specifically to deal with issues of safety, reliability, and maintainability, and was mandated for about a decade (1987-1997) for all DoD projects where new code was the focus. It's about as far from an academically-focussed or "toy" language as you can get; its true that, with the fading of the DoD mandate in favor of off-the-shelf software at DoD, Ada has faced a sharp decline in industrial popularity and is now, perhaps, used mainly academically, but its focus isn't academic, it isn't a toy language, and there is certainly no basis for claiming that Ada doesn't prepare you for large systems, or that it was never adopted outside of academia.
Computer Science and Software Engineering are two related, but distinct, disciplines. You treat them as if they were the same thing. (Of course, part of the problem may be that "software engineering" isn't as widely available as a separate degree program.)
The Section 203 termination option is a different, copyright-specific provision that applies whether or not the license was gratuitous. My original post was about a rule which applies to gratuitous licenses in general (including gratuitous copyright licenses), not the Section 203 option.