From my time there, I saw that the Luxembourgish speak English, French, German, and Luxembourgish... and then they speak the languages they learn in school.
Yeah, 5 languages is pretty common. 6 and 7 aren't even rare.
It's really simple. Past experience has shown that pilots do stupid things for money. We take risks we shouldn't when our paycheck is on the line. It used to be that I didn't need a commercial license to fly for money, but after seeing too many people get injured and die because of risky behavior (weather, fuel, maintenance, etc...) the FAA saw that regulations about commercial flight were necessary.
Imagine there's a blizzard outside. Think about your motivations to drive yourself to a friend's house, vs. your motivations to drive an uber passenger to his friend's house when the client is paying a 10.0x surcharge. And you really need the money because you're short on rent. Think you're more likely to take the risk when there's money on the line? Of course you are. We all are. But in aviation, you're always one hiccup away from an accident so the consequences of chasing money are much worse.
The journalist is not doing exactly the same thing. The journalist is flying for money, the hobbyist not.
The FAA's rules for aviation are written in blood. The reason I'm not allowed to fly for money is because experience shows that people take risks when money is involved, risks they wouldn't otherwise take. In general, the pressure to fly my plane in order to get home in time for is much less than the pressure to fly in order to get a paying client home on time for his dinner, especially if I need the money and won't get it if I don't fly.
Note, this is not a discussion about the relative risk of a 2kg UAV being flown for money. I'm focussing only on the mistaken notion that motivations are not important for predicting an activity's danger. Motivations are *crucially* important here.
Not python. It has an obnoxious syntax that is incompatible with modern IDEs. Python's flexibility is really cool, but the poor syntax (len vs length, [-1] instead of [end], etc..) and use of whitespace as a syntax unnecessarily complicates programming and makes it hard for a modern IDE to enforce style.
What we need is a language with python's back end but with a front end that wasn't created by someone with an axe to grind when it came to syntax and program layout.
First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book? One of the wonderful things about a web page is for it to be long and easy to scroll through, instead of requiring me to scroll in order to get to the next text section. That makes it really awkward to go back and forth.
Second, where can I search for other people's results? I want to switch to RCN in Boston, how does this webpage help me know how they're doing?
I personally turned down the purchase of a Velocity XL at my local airport when the owner was required to do a security inspection, including taking off his shoes, in order to get to his own hanger. There was no way I was going to be hassled by a security search to access my own private property.
This is purely anecdotal, and it doesn't change the fact that you're right that most of this decrease in numbers has been in the cards for years, but it's false to claim that pilots aren't harmed by the insanity around the TSA and its ilk.
It is not a search engine's responsibility to police our neologisms. Santorum is a word now used by the common public, and it requires no editorializing by third parties. As the original article points out:
The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum's full name, rather than just the word "santorum." In that case, his official site ranks tops.
So in other words, if I'm looking for a person, I write the person's name in and find the person. If I'm looking for a thing, I type said thing in and find it.
For example, would anybody be annoyed if a google search of the word "houston" showed Houston, TX as the first hit, instead of Whitney Houston?
Now as to why Santorum and santorum came to be connected is another matter. But that's something for a different conversation, which the columnist fails to grasp.
The bat researchers (I'm a controls researcher, so I have to ask their advice about things like this) say that the bat should carry a load weighing no more than 5% of its weight. On a 10g bat, and these bats are among the bigger species, you can see that this leads to a very small package, indeed.
As for your second question, there were IR cameras recording from many different angles, all of them ground-based. The purpose of the experiment was not to record bat flight with a GoPro; that was just a nice feature that we added since we were already there. The experiment was about perturbing the bats by entering into their clutter and seeing how they respond. Do they flee? Do they ignore? Do they act the same way they do when a hawk attacks? What rules are they following when they fly in a swarm?
The carbon fiber parts where from hobby-lobby. Although we'll be getting them from HobbyKing in the future because it's something like $5/rod.
The only specialty part was the OpenPilot CopterControl module. That was indeed all of $100. Appropriately sized BLDCs can be bought for $7/ea., a radio is $50, the props are $1.50/ea., the battery was $20, the charger was not high output, and there are a few other components that you didn't list which I won't either in the interests of conciseness. Suffice to say that you can build a complete, functioning quadcopter with a CopterControl for all of $250, incl. the transmitter/receiver combo.
I realize that most of the comments here will probably be poking fun at the batcopter, and I can't wait to read what the/. audience is going to come up with. I guess I underestimated the coolness factor of flying towel racks. However, if you want to discuss the science behind it, I'll be more than happy.
It was a neat project, and we're only just starting, although that's probably the first and the last time that I'll go into the field. Apparently, we have some 30TB of data to wade through, so there's enough there for any dozen PhDs. The next task is to figure out what we actually recorded and to see what we can do with it.
Oh, balderdash. Better controls laws means better autonomous vehicles. It's your choice if you elect people who use those vehicles to drop bombs instead of move people.
I'm a longtime and continuing user of Windows, Linux, and Mac, in that chronological order. 6 months ago, a friend gave me his old iPhone 3G. Now I've got a Nook Color running CM7 and an Atrix on order. After the experience with the Nook Color, I'm petrified of getting the Atrix. It's simply amazing how you can go forward in hardware, but backwards in usability. What does that have to do with point #1?
Simple. Apple has a focused, single-minded user experience. Everything they sell can use almost everything that is made. No Motoblur/HTC Sense/Android/Gingerbread/Honeycomb/FroYo/etc... How do you expect a salesperson to be able to tell you what a tablet is good for, when s/he doesn't even know what the tablet can do, because Android is... what?
To be honest, I don't regret my Nook Color, not for the price, but I could not articulate why someone else should buy one, not even at $250. Yet I could easily do that for an iPad at $600+. I don't own an iPad, and probably never will, but after having seen the software ecosystem, and the relative quality of the user experience (Android is too many, too many options. For simple stuff. Like deleting a program.), I can easily talk to someone and figure out what an iPad could do for them.
Being one of these "younger" workers I think the article is referring to, I can definitely relate. I don't enjoy working in a solitary office, find that having a colleague in close proximity helps me out when I'm stuck, etc... I recently had a 10m^2 office, shared with one other researcher, and I definitely miss it. My wife has the ability to have a decent sized office with a window view, but she prefers to share a 50% bigger office with a second colleague. They get more done that way.
Of course, others would prefer anything but, and I respect that, too, but this isn't necessarily as Orwellian a quote as that.
So, wait, let me get this straight. Reverse-engineering the drivers for use on non-Xboxes is "hacking" and "unintended" use of a Microsoft product, but Microsoft is only too happy to sell this product to advertisers? Because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the advertisers will not be using an Xbox.
We've fielded quite a few safety critical systems that perform well. In fact, large commercial aircraft are landing autonomously these days, a feat well beyond high speed parallel parking with a puny little car.:-)
Err, no it's not. Landing large aircraft is easy, that's why we did it first.
Don't confuse easy with complex. An aircraft model might be complex, but it is understood, and thus the math makes it easy. Sliding an arbitrary car across arbitrary ground is NOT easy, as we don't understand the math behind it. Without a model, it's very hard to implement closed-loop controls. What's interesting here is that they mix an open-loop control that works in a particular situation with a closed-loop control that doesn't and get a system that is capable of correcting itself but works with arbitrary situations.
This would be the equivalent of landing the aircraft in some unmodeled phase of flight, such as in a spin. Now *that* would be impressive.
1) Yeah, that's just wrong, and missing the point. We can guide missiles into tiny spots because we have incredibly good models of their flight path. We can drive a car into a tiny spot in exactly the same way. What's interesting here is that they mix together a LQR controller with open-loop, in a way that does not require hand-tuning and gives excellent, repeatable results.
If we had a dynamic model of the car as it were sliding sideways, I'm sure we could use Lie brackets to discover all sorts of interesting accessible trajectories. But we don't. So this is pretty good control, and might quite possibly be a step toward the type of controller we have in our brain (able to use a combination of open-loop (I did this last time and it worked) and closed-loop (what I'm doing isn't working, I need to adjust) controls)
2) True, but even more likely: if your automatic-parking Mercedes scratches my car while parallel parking, who's responsible for the damage? You (as the driver) or Mercedes (who promised that this feature would work)?
3) As another poster stated, since you don't mean it, it must come naturally. I think many people find parallel parking a chore and would rather have a machine do it for them.
4) Yup, tough toodles, kid. Your freedom to kill others is only a freedom to the point at which we cannot find a better solution. If you were complaining about not being able to go somewhere you want, I would be behind you 100%. However, you seem to be complaining that you consider it a freedom to drive how *you* want to. Considering the atrocious results (both accident rates and people making moronic decision to buy tank sized SUVs because "they're safer"), this "freedom" is pretty poorly exercised.
How this post got modded up is beyond me. It demonstrates the most amazing lack of knowledge on the subject. What is impressive here is that we have a computer doing something a human does. That's always impressive when it's done the first time, and you get mad street cred when it's reproduceable. There are many, many things humans do that we do not understand how to model and thus cannot yet control. Heck, we don't even know how to tell a robot to walk through a crowded room of people (do I ask my boss to pull back from the table, or brush up against my mother-in-law?), so parroting that someone can do it better is hardly impressive. "Someone" cannot be manufactured, micronized, improved on, or reproduced countless millions of times.
Oh, and in case you didn't notice, the last author of this paper is Sebastian Thrun, head of the Stanford project that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and took second place in the DARPA Urban Challenge. I suggest you read the paper in order to understand what's being proposed here, and then we can talk shop.
Oh, I completely understand why you like it. The function itself doesn't even bother me. What bothers me is the name. If I say "you've got a range of options to choose from when programming, from C++ to Python," 100% of people would understand both C++ and Python to feature in the list. When we talk about functional programming, I understand programming that can be read outloud. This might be incorrect, but it's the way I imagine it should be.
So, really, it's not a programming problem at all, it's just a terrible syntax problem. There's a myriad of bad and confusing function names that can be imagined, and more than a few seem to have wound up in Python.
P.S. I'll have to look into the advantages range gives you. What you describe makes it seem like a nice function, in spite of the name.
You say you don't like 'len' as a name for a length function, that you would prefer using the name 'length'. Well, python is so superior, that you can fix that problem really fast in your code:
length = len
That *is* a neat feature.
My only beef is that it can't help to solve the mess that is everyone else's Python code. Once I'm programming in Python, all these things will seem very natural. (It can't be worse than C!) But for people who are new to Python, and just want to modify a tiny section of code in someone's script because it almost, but not quite, does what they want it to, all the myriad Python bizarreness jumps up and bites them.
Oh, please. What hogwash. You're making an assumption that not liking enforced whitespace means not having consistent style and respecting whitespace norms for all published programs. Anyone who does serious programming is capable of instantly figuring out whitespacing, even when it's inconsistent. If it's code that's been incorrectly formatted, it's dreadfully easy to fix it. Matlab, for instance, will automatically apply correct indents to an entire file, so I imagine that that's a feature available on many other editors.
What's hard to figure out on your own is uncommented code. Should Python mandate comments, then? (Maybe just!)
You do realize there's no dynamic typing in F#, right? It's very rigidly typed, in fact, more so than C/C#/Java - it won't let you use an int where a float is expected! (it's the price you have to pay for type inference - it doesn't play well with ambiguity)
I do. They're not quite the same beast, but since I've programed a lot in C the question of dynamic typing or not is not so important.
On the whole, it looks like what you're looking for is actually called Ruby.
Really? I had always thought of Ruby as a web language. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it.
I'm going to say something anathema to the/. crowd, but I'm looking into it with interest for replacing Python. I first teethed on FORTRAN, moved to Matlab 10 years lates, and have been using C extensively for the past 2 years. I'm starting into Python as a quick and dirty replacement for Matlab, and am quickly falling into a love-hate relationship with it.
The love comes from all the cool things that Python can do, for free. Dynamic typing,.append() functionality, etc. It's just awesome.
The hate comes from the sheer lunacy that is Python syntax. Forced whitespacing doesn't suit my debugging style (why not just have the compiler recognize either whitespace or accolades?); functions names like len() are just, frankly, idiotic (length() is much more readable to beginners, and takes only a few extra milliseconds to type for experienced users); and the way of working with indices is just weird (2:5 means the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th elements, but not the fifth; range(2 5) gives you 2 3 4, but not 5.).
Python reminds me of many of these incredibly powerful scientific projects that never got used by a non-scientist until it was far too late to make changes. range() is a good example of this, as while it perfectly emulates "for i=2; i < 5; i++", it is NOT what you expect to get when you say, outloud, "I want a range of numbers from 2 to 5". Having contributed to Scilab, I should know as I'm equally guilty of this kind of thing.
If F# can fill this void, by giving functional programming with functional syntax, I'll probably stop my Python experiments and move directly to F#.
Although to be honest, I'd love to find a python front end that uses non-insane syntax and then simply precompiles it into python syntax at run-time. Then you don't have the MS, Windows, and.Net ickiness.
P.S. I'm not looking to start a flame war about force whitespacing. There are really good reasons to like it. All my programs have consistent whitespacing, except when I debug (I like to put debug programming all the way against the margin, that way there's no possibility of ever forgetting it in the code)). However, you can't have it both ways on readability vis-à-vis function names and indices.
Slashdot Mirror
From my time there, I saw that the Luxembourgish speak English, French, German, and Luxembourgish... and then they speak the languages they learn in school.
Yeah, 5 languages is pretty common. 6 and 7 aren't even rare.
It's really simple. Past experience has shown that pilots do stupid things for money. We take risks we shouldn't when our paycheck is on the line. It used to be that I didn't need a commercial license to fly for money, but after seeing too many people get injured and die because of risky behavior (weather, fuel, maintenance, etc...) the FAA saw that regulations about commercial flight were necessary.
Imagine there's a blizzard outside. Think about your motivations to drive yourself to a friend's house, vs. your motivations to drive an uber passenger to his friend's house when the client is paying a 10.0x surcharge. And you really need the money because you're short on rent. Think you're more likely to take the risk when there's money on the line? Of course you are. We all are. But in aviation, you're always one hiccup away from an accident so the consequences of chasing money are much worse.
And that's why $50 makes all the difference.
The journalist is not doing exactly the same thing. The journalist is flying for money, the hobbyist not.
The FAA's rules for aviation are written in blood. The reason I'm not allowed to fly for money is because experience shows that people take risks when money is involved, risks they wouldn't otherwise take. In general, the pressure to fly my plane in order to get home in time for is much less than the pressure to fly in order to get a paying client home on time for his dinner, especially if I need the money and won't get it if I don't fly.
Note, this is not a discussion about the relative risk of a 2kg UAV being flown for money. I'm focussing only on the mistaken notion that motivations are not important for predicting an activity's danger. Motivations are *crucially* important here.
Not python. It has an obnoxious syntax that is incompatible with modern IDEs. Python's flexibility is really cool, but the poor syntax (len vs length, [-1] instead of [end], etc..) and use of whitespace as a syntax unnecessarily complicates programming and makes it hard for a modern IDE to enforce style.
What we need is a language with python's back end but with a front end that wasn't created by someone with an axe to grind when it came to syntax and program layout.
First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book? One of the wonderful things about a web page is for it to be long and easy to scroll through, instead of requiring me to scroll in order to get to the next text section. That makes it really awkward to go back and forth.
Second, where can I search for other people's results? I want to switch to RCN in Boston, how does this webpage help me know how they're doing?
I personally turned down the purchase of a Velocity XL at my local airport when the owner was required to do a security inspection, including taking off his shoes, in order to get to his own hanger. There was no way I was going to be hassled by a security search to access my own private property.
This is purely anecdotal, and it doesn't change the fact that you're right that most of this decrease in numbers has been in the cards for years, but it's false to claim that pilots aren't harmed by the insanity around the TSA and its ilk.
Please note their $5,000 prize is a two-months' stay in Japan: Land of soy sauce... and Mothra.
It is not a search engine's responsibility to police our neologisms. Santorum is a word now used by the common public, and it requires no editorializing by third parties. As the original article points out:
The news is better for searches for Rick Santorum's full name, rather than just the word "santorum." In that case, his official site ranks tops.
So in other words, if I'm looking for a person, I write the person's name in and find the person. If I'm looking for a thing, I type said thing in and find it.
For example, would anybody be annoyed if a google search of the word "houston" showed Houston, TX as the first hit, instead of Whitney Houston?
Now as to why Santorum and santorum came to be connected is another matter. But that's something for a different conversation, which the columnist fails to grasp.
The bat researchers (I'm a controls researcher, so I have to ask their advice about things like this) say that the bat should carry a load weighing no more than 5% of its weight. On a 10g bat, and these bats are among the bigger species, you can see that this leads to a very small package, indeed.
As for your second question, there were IR cameras recording from many different angles, all of them ground-based. The purpose of the experiment was not to record bat flight with a GoPro; that was just a nice feature that we added since we were already there. The experiment was about perturbing the bats by entering into their clutter and seeing how they respond. Do they flee? Do they ignore? Do they act the same way they do when a hawk attacks? What rules are they following when they fly in a swarm?
The carbon fiber parts where from hobby-lobby. Although we'll be getting them from HobbyKing in the future because it's something like $5/rod.
The only specialty part was the OpenPilot CopterControl module. That was indeed all of $100. Appropriately sized BLDCs can be bought for $7/ea., a radio is $50, the props are $1.50/ea., the battery was $20, the charger was not high output, and there are a few other components that you didn't list which I won't either in the interests of conciseness. Suffice to say that you can build a complete, functioning quadcopter with a CopterControl for all of $250, incl. the transmitter/receiver combo.
I realize that most of the comments here will probably be poking fun at the batcopter, and I can't wait to read what the /. audience is going to come up with. I guess I underestimated the coolness factor of flying towel racks. However, if you want to discuss the science behind it, I'll be more than happy.
It was a neat project, and we're only just starting, although that's probably the first and the last time that I'll go into the field. Apparently, we have some 30TB of data to wade through, so there's enough there for any dozen PhDs. The next task is to figure out what we actually recorded and to see what we can do with it.
Dr. Kenneth Sebesta
Oh, balderdash. Better controls laws means better autonomous vehicles. It's your choice if you elect people who use those vehicles to drop bombs instead of move people.
Re point #1:
I'm a longtime and continuing user of Windows, Linux, and Mac, in that chronological order. 6 months ago, a friend gave me his old iPhone 3G. Now I've got a Nook Color running CM7 and an Atrix on order. After the experience with the Nook Color, I'm petrified of getting the Atrix. It's simply amazing how you can go forward in hardware, but backwards in usability. What does that have to do with point #1?
Simple. Apple has a focused, single-minded user experience. Everything they sell can use almost everything that is made. No Motoblur/HTC Sense/Android/Gingerbread/Honeycomb/FroYo/etc... How do you expect a salesperson to be able to tell you what a tablet is good for, when s/he doesn't even know what the tablet can do, because Android is... what?
To be honest, I don't regret my Nook Color, not for the price, but I could not articulate why someone else should buy one, not even at $250. Yet I could easily do that for an iPad at $600+. I don't own an iPad, and probably never will, but after having seen the software ecosystem, and the relative quality of the user experience (Android is too many, too many options. For simple stuff. Like deleting a program.), I can easily talk to someone and figure out what an iPad could do for them.
Being one of these "younger" workers I think the article is referring to, I can definitely relate. I don't enjoy working in a solitary office, find that having a colleague in close proximity helps me out when I'm stuck, etc... I recently had a 10m^2 office, shared with one other researcher, and I definitely miss it. My wife has the ability to have a decent sized office with a window view, but she prefers to share a 50% bigger office with a second colleague. They get more done that way.
Of course, others would prefer anything but, and I respect that, too, but this isn't necessarily as Orwellian a quote as that.
This is only related because it was said in my hackerspace, this morning:
Q: How many hackers does it take to... do anything?
A: Three. Two to watch and one to demonstrate.
P.S.: If you happen to be in Luxembourg, we're selling chocolate keyboards this weekend.
So, wait, let me get this straight. Reverse-engineering the drivers for use on non-Xboxes is "hacking" and "unintended" use of a Microsoft product, but Microsoft is only too happy to sell this product to advertisers? Because you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that the advertisers will not be using an Xbox.
We've fielded quite a few safety critical systems that perform well. In fact, large commercial aircraft are landing autonomously these days, a feat well beyond high speed parallel parking with a puny little car. :-)
Err, no it's not. Landing large aircraft is easy, that's why we did it first.
Don't confuse easy with complex. An aircraft model might be complex, but it is understood, and thus the math makes it easy. Sliding an arbitrary car across arbitrary ground is NOT easy, as we don't understand the math behind it. Without a model, it's very hard to implement closed-loop controls. What's interesting here is that they mix an open-loop control that works in a particular situation with a closed-loop control that doesn't and get a system that is capable of correcting itself but works with arbitrary situations.
This would be the equivalent of landing the aircraft in some unmodeled phase of flight, such as in a spin. Now *that* would be impressive.
1) Yeah, that's just wrong, and missing the point. We can guide missiles into tiny spots because we have incredibly good models of their flight path. We can drive a car into a tiny spot in exactly the same way. What's interesting here is that they mix together a LQR controller with open-loop, in a way that does not require hand-tuning and gives excellent, repeatable results.
If we had a dynamic model of the car as it were sliding sideways, I'm sure we could use Lie brackets to discover all sorts of interesting accessible trajectories. But we don't. So this is pretty good control, and might quite possibly be a step toward the type of controller we have in our brain (able to use a combination of open-loop (I did this last time and it worked) and closed-loop (what I'm doing isn't working, I need to adjust) controls)
2) True, but even more likely: if your automatic-parking Mercedes scratches my car while parallel parking, who's responsible for the damage? You (as the driver) or Mercedes (who promised that this feature would work)?
3) As another poster stated, since you don't mean it, it must come naturally. I think many people find parallel parking a chore and would rather have a machine do it for them.
4) Yup, tough toodles, kid. Your freedom to kill others is only a freedom to the point at which we cannot find a better solution. If you were complaining about not being able to go somewhere you want, I would be behind you 100%. However, you seem to be complaining that you consider it a freedom to drive how *you* want to. Considering the atrocious results (both accident rates and people making moronic decision to buy tank sized SUVs because "they're safer"), this "freedom" is pretty poorly exercised.
How this post got modded up is beyond me. It demonstrates the most amazing lack of knowledge on the subject. What is impressive here is that we have a computer doing something a human does. That's always impressive when it's done the first time, and you get mad street cred when it's reproduceable. There are many, many things humans do that we do not understand how to model and thus cannot yet control. Heck, we don't even know how to tell a robot to walk through a crowded room of people (do I ask my boss to pull back from the table, or brush up against my mother-in-law?), so parroting that someone can do it better is hardly impressive. "Someone" cannot be manufactured, micronized, improved on, or reproduced countless millions of times.
Oh, and in case you didn't notice, the last author of this paper is Sebastian Thrun, head of the Stanford project that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and took second place in the DARPA Urban Challenge. I suggest you read the paper in order to understand what's being proposed here, and then we can talk shop.
IAACE. (I Am A Controls Engineer)
Oh, I completely understand why you like it. The function itself doesn't even bother me. What bothers me is the name. If I say "you've got a range of options to choose from when programming, from C++ to Python," 100% of people would understand both C++ and Python to feature in the list. When we talk about functional programming, I understand programming that can be read outloud. This might be incorrect, but it's the way I imagine it should be.
So, really, it's not a programming problem at all, it's just a terrible syntax problem. There's a myriad of bad and confusing function names that can be imagined, and more than a few seem to have wound up in Python.
P.S. I'll have to look into the advantages range gives you. What you describe makes it seem like a nice function, in spite of the name.
You say you don't like 'len' as a name for a length function, that you would prefer using the name 'length'. Well, python is so superior, that you can fix that problem really fast in your code:
length = len
That *is* a neat feature.
My only beef is that it can't help to solve the mess that is everyone else's Python code. Once I'm programming in Python, all these things will seem very natural. (It can't be worse than C!) But for people who are new to Python, and just want to modify a tiny section of code in someone's script because it almost, but not quite, does what they want it to, all the myriad Python bizarreness jumps up and bites them.
Oh, please. What hogwash. You're making an assumption that not liking enforced whitespace means not having consistent style and respecting whitespace norms for all published programs. Anyone who does serious programming is capable of instantly figuring out whitespacing, even when it's inconsistent. If it's code that's been incorrectly formatted, it's dreadfully easy to fix it. Matlab, for instance, will automatically apply correct indents to an entire file, so I imagine that that's a feature available on many other editors.
What's hard to figure out on your own is uncommented code. Should Python mandate comments, then? (Maybe just!)
You do realize there's no dynamic typing in F#, right? It's very rigidly typed, in fact, more so than C/C#/Java - it won't let you use an int where a float is expected! (it's the price you have to pay for type inference - it doesn't play well with ambiguity)
I do. They're not quite the same beast, but since I've programed a lot in C the question of dynamic typing or not is not so important.
On the whole, it looks like what you're looking for is actually called Ruby.
Really? I had always thought of Ruby as a web language. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it.
I'm going to say something anathema to the /. crowd, but I'm looking into it with interest for replacing Python. I first teethed on FORTRAN, moved to Matlab 10 years lates, and have been using C extensively for the past 2 years. I'm starting into Python as a quick and dirty replacement for Matlab, and am quickly falling into a love-hate relationship with it.
The love comes from all the cool things that Python can do, for free. Dynamic typing, .append() functionality, etc. It's just awesome.
The hate comes from the sheer lunacy that is Python syntax. Forced whitespacing doesn't suit my debugging style (why not just have the compiler recognize either whitespace or accolades?); functions names like len() are just, frankly, idiotic (length() is much more readable to beginners, and takes only a few extra milliseconds to type for experienced users); and the way of working with indices is just weird (2:5 means the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th elements, but not the fifth; range(2 5) gives you 2 3 4, but not 5.).
Python reminds me of many of these incredibly powerful scientific projects that never got used by a non-scientist until it was far too late to make changes. range() is a good example of this, as while it perfectly emulates "for i=2; i < 5; i++", it is NOT what you expect to get when you say, outloud, "I want a range of numbers from 2 to 5". Having contributed to Scilab, I should know as I'm equally guilty of this kind of thing.
If F# can fill this void, by giving functional programming with functional syntax, I'll probably stop my Python experiments and move directly to F#.
Although to be honest, I'd love to find a python front end that uses non-insane syntax and then simply precompiles it into python syntax at run-time. Then you don't have the MS, Windows, and .Net ickiness.
P.S. I'm not looking to start a flame war about force whitespacing. There are really good reasons to like it. All my programs have consistent whitespacing, except when I debug (I like to put debug programming all the way against the margin, that way there's no possibility of ever forgetting it in the code)). However, you can't have it both ways on readability vis-à-vis function names and indices.
Wow, way to overgeneralize. Having spent 8 years in the EU, I can guarantee that that's not what I lived. France, for instance, required none of that.
Maybe next time you'd like to say the countries you were in, instead of just the blanket "EU"?