Hacker News Reader

Comment by abenedic | Hacker News Reader

So, I am a person who wishes there was a proper article I could read for this. I don't know how much this matters to people, but I can understand written English far far better than I can understand spoken English. I know auto-translate works for some. I am trying with applet and get nothing. I like core idea. I feel often people outside English land get second class experience.

View on HN

I've followed Gary's stuff for a bunch of years now. His preferred medium seems to be screencasts and the occasional conference talk. His blog dating back to 2011 has 10 posts (he does seem to tweet often, though). His screencasts are very thoughtfully done and dense. So I imagine you'd have to find that article from someone else.

As a native English speaker, I generally have the same preference you do. Articles I can skim, they're easier to refer back to, and I can search.

I hope you can take solace that I will sometimes search for an error message and the only result is a forum posting in a foreign language that Google Translate barfs on.

People inside English-land get second class experience too. Audio and video are inferior tools for this kind of content, in the same way a linked list is inferior to a vector if you need random access.

In this particular case, I'm annoyed too. I've learned (what I think is exactly) this concept from other sources, and I've been recently linked to this video a couple times. What I would love to do is to quickly diff my existing knowledge with contents of the talk, but I can't do that because it's in a video format. I've been putting off watching it for couple weeks now.

I'd say this one (as well as other classics like 'Simple Made Easy') is worth it.

That said, I'd also prefer an article that tells me the same thing.

You're not alone. I immigrated to the US from Asia in the 90s. For many years I didn't understand spoken English fully. Arguably I still miss some words now and then, even nowadays, after over 20 years living in an English environment. I had great grades throughout high school and college here mostly thanks to having excellent reading and writing skills in English, since I came from a place in Asia that emphasized learning English since childhood. Listening to spoken English is not easy for non native speakers.

> Listening to spoken English is not easy for non native speakers

Thank you for saying this. You clearly have a good understanding of English(far better than mine at least). I feel like this is an area that is glossed over. For every article that is written in english there are at least 10+ non-native speaker struggling to understand the work, who could extract something useful or help explicate the work.

In the case of this video, you aren't missing much. It's deliberately 'dense', according to the author, but the concept is simple.

Almost any app will involve some imperative code, but using pure functions within that, where possible, makes it easier to reason about what is going on. That's all there is to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency

Reply on news.ycombinator.com