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If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor - meaning you have to work on the manual. Bjarne Stroustrup…
A giant CS/Lisp rant
Read the whole piece here, here’s a flavor: Why are we not out there to offer a real database system with Common Lisp datatypes instead of the tragic mess that SQL imposes on us in the C-based APIs o…
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Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 perce…
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An old article, on the original Sims game in the 1990s. Scroll down to where he talks about what attributes people chose for themselves when given the freedom to do so. The most popular zodiac sign w…
A long, but relevant comment on language popularity
Original link Complexity of implementation? Slowness? Lack of marketing? Unfamiliar syntax? No, none of these explain the lack of popularity. I think you dismiss these factors too quickly. We need to…
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PG: How far will this flattening of data structures go? I can think of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened mind. Will we get rid of arrays, for example? After all, they…
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but today only the computer knows for sure and it’s not talking. http://www.oliverlehmann.com/project-management-sources/Nasa-Hundred-Rules-for-Project-Managers.pdf (“NASA: Hundred rules for Project…
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If they emptied their minds they’d have an easier time. Analogy will betray you. (on learning new concepts …)…
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The good news about Erlang can be summed up at this: Erlang is the culmination of twenty-five years of correct design decisions in the language and platform. Whenever I’ve wondered about how something…
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Such is modern computing: everything simple is made too complicated because it’s easy to fiddle with; everything complicated stays complicated because it’s hard to fix. Rob Pike…
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I liken TAOCP to Proust. Fawned over by a small subset of people (rightfully so), a larger subset who talks about it but doesn’t actually read it, and shunned by the majority as dense and intimidating…
On syntax, in Haskell and Lisp
Yes, but not so much simplicity of syntax. I’m misled here by a superficial resemblance between the cultures of Haskell and Lisp. Both cultures are obsessed with mechanically processing code, and ther…