Telescope Rule (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Telescope Rule (2008)

wiki.c2.com

13 pointsmelling9 comments

"Thomson's Rule for First-Time Telescope Makers: "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."" This seems to be true in my experience, and is a great way to phrase the idea.

In my experience, the gulf between not understanding programming and any beginner language - say, Scratch - is much wider than the gap between any two languages in the same family.

Java is a terrible language to teach early programming: the features chosen to get to OOP get in the way of understanding basic control. Perl is better. Python is miles better. A dialect of Python with more explicit blocking instead of whitespace sensitivity would be excellent.

As for constructing a toy system with the plan to throw it away after you've learned from it -- isn't that what an MVP is?

> Java is a terrible language to teach early programming: the features chosen to get to OOP get in the way of understanding basic control... Python is miles better.

Absolutely. I managed to teach myself enough basic, procedural Python to make CLI games. I later took some courses in Java, and really struggled to grasp the OOP concepts that are pretty crucial there. I managed to figure it out by translating examples into Python, and learning how Python's OOP works; once I understood the ideas, it became straightforward to apply them in Java.

> A dialect of Python with more explicit blocking instead of whitespace sensitivity would be excellent.

It's called Scheme ;-)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/4284.315122

It's "Thompson's Rule", submitted by Bill McKeeman of the Wang Institute (a/o Sep 1985).

> This site uses features not available in older browsers.

This site can't even render a document.

This is a rant, hopefully not a strange one, though -

I have a strange objection to this wiki. After all, it's mostly text, right? Why does it need Javascript to render it? Also, on the desktop the article shows up as a thin column on the left side occupying only about 20% of the width of the screen!

The C2 wiki used to be bog-standard text. A few years ago it was revamped with some grand ideas about becoming more interactive and collaborative, giving the server less control over the content, etc. Unfortunately this didn't seem to pan out, but it's now stuck with a reliance on client-side scripts :(

crappy website:

> Uncaught SyntaxError: top level await is not currently supported

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