6thaccount2

There are still grave social injustices in the world, but do you think the US (for example) is worse off than in the 1850's or 1940's?

What would your ideal curriculum be?

Not underrate. There are only so many hours to spend learning. Current school systems put Math on the same footing with History, PE, foreign language...etc.

I have literally been saying just this for years when someone says "STEAM". At that point, it is just school again.

I agree that History, Art, Music, Literature, Philosophy...etc are important and can't imagine a world without them, but the whole point behind STEM was to put a focus on Math and Science because those help us keep our economic edge and solve the world's upcoming problems on the technical side.

Providing some after school programs to cover programming, computers (real computing principles and not just how to use Microsoft products and type), robotics, and additional math is good and gives our children a leg up. 1-hour of Math a day might not be enough.

I've tried googling paxos algorithm a bit, but don't understand what it does and why it is useful. Could someone please explain it to me like I'm five?

I once had to work a 5-hour production issue in a Hilton hotel room. The temperature, desk ergonomics, and lack of distractions (people or things) led to nearly superhuman levels of efficiency and clarity of thought. This solidified my view that open floor plans and cubes that are only a few feet high are absolutely horrendous for getting any work done. It perturbs me that offices are wasted on management that is typically in meeting rooms 90% of the day and thus can't take full advantage of them. I'm an extrovert too, so I can't fathom the annoyance of people who really don't like being in a crowd.

That is impressive!

That's interesting. I've seen you make these statements, but have never been able to confirm even though I've meant to. How many actual users do you have btw?

How fast is your Perl11 project compared to Perl5 and Python?

Thanks for the information!

Yea... libraries are always good (especially for math and analysis), but I find that powerful languages need far fewer libraries to get things done. APL can do something with a few characters that might commonly be implemented as a lengthy function or library in some languages.

Windows Powershell can surprisingly do a lot of what Perl 6 can do and people mostly understand the limitations. You can automate processes, build your own DSL, have full OO support, full .NET interop, concurrency, you can pipe data around kind of like with FP...etc. It doesn't have some of the more perlish features though.

Some things are already significantly faster, but there are other common operations that are still slower.

I wonder if the JIT will interfere with scripts where startup time is not acceptable?

Lizormato and some other folks have put in hundreds of performance fixes...I think these things just take time. The language might have been in development and design since the 90's, but it only just got to 1.0 or a "stable release" in 2017 I think. I'm surprised Larry Wall hasn't written a Perl6 book yet. Plenty of other authors have, but I was really looking forward to something from him or Damien Conway.

If Perl6 is ever performant, I'll be dropping Python for a lot of Scripting uses.

Perl6 is a big language, but has a lot of power and beauty.

Engineering is nothing like a trade school if you mean Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering... etc (probably not what you meant here by context, but I felt I should clarify).

You basically do 4 years of math and physics with several years of calculus, differential equations, numerical methods, programming, and solving difficult problems. It is nothing like a trade school (no offense to that line of work...they probably make more money than me :)).

Very wrong I'd say. I was able to read more at 3 weeks than I could with 3 years of Spanish. Spanish might be easier than Latin, but verb conjugations and irregularities in the grammar is no joke. Esperanto gives you a detour around all of that.

I've been learning on Duolingo and Richardson's book. It really is simply so elegant. Easy to learn, easy to read, easy to understand, easy to speak. It just sounds cool to me as well. I think at 3 weeks in I had made more progress than 3 years of Spanish as you don't have to worry about irregularities and even the vocabulary is easy to remember.

I see a lot of Python and not Prolog.

This is an awesome book. I had no idea it was free when I bought it lol. It is also the only book that made Prolog seem pretty simple and not super confusing.

I just wish I had the kinds of problems where Prolog would be performant enough.

How does one not use leiningen? Do you just substitute lein for the other build tool provided by cognitect? All the tutorials I've seen have you jack-in to a lein REPL. I guess I could just use the jar file from the download directly as my REPL? I wish more tutorials started that way so I could learn without all the tools that I don't need at this point.

Thanks for helping point this out. Cursive has a trial license and is pretty cheap, but it is still annoying to get a license to something you might not need in my organization if others aren't already using it (probably easier to get visual studio for over $1k than $100 cursive license). VS Code asked me for the leiningen REPL path and I just gave up at that point for the night. I wish the Clojure download zip came with a very simple IDE like Dr. Racket or the GroovyConsole with line wrap, parenthesis matching/highlighting and a pane for the file and REPL and some pre- loaded tutorials. I would have no excuses.

Thank you! I think I've seen the "if" and "when" examples before, but it clicked better this time.

I've read a few Lisp books and dozens of internet blog posts, so I know about macros and why people use them without getting the full understanding which comes with actually writing code.

I'm apparently too stupid for you :). Please excuse my ignorance. Why can't you do something like the below?

(defun swap (x y) (y x))

Then you can call it like:

(swap (2 3)) => (3 2)

> How well does the IDE warn I've made a type error before I've gone through a long compile & test iteration loop?

This doesn't really exist in a lot of dynamic languages and especially in Common Lisp, Clojure, APL, Forth, Smalltalk...etc. You write a small piece of code and interactively run it with some data...test if for some scenarios or build actual tests if you want. When it is good, add it to your actual code and you're done. You interactively test everything. Once you get used to it, anything without a REPL is like wading through quicksand. The type error would probably be caught quickly when using the REPL. In Common Lisp, when your code errors out, it drops you into the REPL and you can patch your code while it is running. Smalltalk also has this. Again, when you've seen this, a Java app crashing seems hokey.

Why not just do that as a function though? Why use a macro?

There is a swing example on the getting started page (or there was a few years ago). It was a one liner to have a Swing pop up say "hello world" or something like that. I'm not sure how easy it is to write actual apps that way.

I don't think this is remotely true. Compare doing file parsing in Python, Perl, C#, Java, Common Lisp, OCaml, Ada, Fortran, C++...etc.

Doing it in Python is easy...it is a bigger pain in several of the other ones. Even your Clojure examples are definitely more work than in Python. You even defined a helper function (something I've never needed to do in Python) as the default is so easy. Mind you, the Clojure isn't too bad and definitely better than some of the others I've mentioned.

To your average developer...this is indeed probably irrelevant as IO might be a small part of your codebase. I do a lot of process automation though and do a lot of IO.

I've been told that before and respect your experience even if it is very different than mine.

Let's talk about writing code in Python. You write a script and either run it through your IDE or via the command line via Python pythonscript.py. With D, I write some code and feed it through the compiler like dmd scriptname.d.

With Clojure in addition to all the cruft I have to learn (Emacs, leinegen...etc), I still have to know something of Java. One of the big selling points is integration. If I know zero Java, how am I supposed to make use of the various classes? Even if I largely stick to just Clojure, how does one interpret the Java stack traces? What is the best method for running via the JVM? How do I performance tune the JVM? How do I use GUI frameworks that are largely all OO Java?

I think both are very production worthy as far as reliable code running in production.

Check out the success stories on the Clojure site. One of the biggest ones to me is Walmart using it for Black Friday e-commerce. That is a good indicator to me. They've had good success stories with F# as well, but C# uses F# as a research language and the best bits are kind of bolted back onto C#. It keeps C# as less painful than Java, so less devs make the jump. Honestly, the future for both languages isn't 100% secure. I just wish both languages got more love.

I'm in the same boat as you. Clojure seems to really be meant for someone who already has a few years of Java experience. There are plenty of examples where someone dips into Java and I'm totally lost.

Many lisps like Common Lisp are multi-paradigm (imperative, OO, functional). Some like Clojure are built on OO runtime and can call Java OO code, but in general heavily favor immutability and functional programming. So you're focusing on one sentence (that is arguably incorrect or only partly correct) and missing the intent of the article.

Great question as I'm trying to make that decision myself. I love Lisp in general and the JVM is great and ubiquitous, so Clojure seems good. The reality is that every time I try to learn it, I get stuck learning leinegen, Emacs...etc, which is more than I have to deal with when using Python, so I skip it. Also, it seems like you get a .jar file and have to run it in conjunction with something like "Java -jar clojurefile.clj". I know that isn't too bad, but once I installed F#, I just put the compiler "fsc.exe" and the REPL/interpreter "fsi.exe" in my path and it is pretty simple now. I normally have an fsi window open for testing and write my full code in Notepad++ and then feed that to fsc.exe when I'm done and I get a little executable that is ~5kb. As long as a coworker has the .net runtime on their computer I can give that to them no problem. I'm sure Clojure can do something similar, but as I'm not a Java/JVM person I have no clue how.

I'm with you. Reading a text file (line by line) is the thing I do most and what I look for first. If you can't do that in a simple way, I move on. I also look at returning datasets from SQL databases, how you can make a GUI, and a host of other practical things. I think fibonnaci is a sort of one step up from "Hello World", so in a sense it gives a little taste of the language and syntax.

Thank you good soul!