GeoffWozniak

I have tried. And I can't. It's just too slow when working with tons of output (which is common in my work). (term-mode is no better.)

Emacs is one of my favourite tools on a computer. I love Lisp (even Elisp, which is getting closer to Common Lisp as time goes on) and I love the interaction, but Emacs is not good for serious terminal/shell work and it, sadly, is pretty annoying as a tiling "window" manager.

Maybe with multi-threading it will get better, but until then, I can't see a compelling reason to work exclusively in Eshell.

What I didn't mention in my post was that I did use SQLAlchemy Core to write some pretty complicated queries. It's actually quite good. I like it.

There were some spots that things got hairy though, and the code was pretty hard to follow. I don't fault SQLAlchemy here, but I wrote the query in SQL and it was simpler to work with.

SQLAlchemy is absolutely on the right track, but using the core doesn't diminish the fact that you need to know SQL to use it effectively.

I agree with your assertions that just an ORM is not enough, raw SQL is hideous, and that raw SQL spits in the face of programming language advancements. Sadly, it's the assembly language of databases and, unlike CPUs, doesn't have a good abstraction model.

> What if someone went around the entire country and put every book into a huge safe.

Assuming "every book" includes books I own, then that constitutes theft.

Saying the PDF reader on Playbook works is like saying a bucket of cold water works for having a shower.

I actually enjoy reading on a Playbook more than an iPad or a Kindle. But the PDF reader is abysmal software.

> Where RIM went wrong was underestimating the importance of software and the surrounding ecosystem.

RIM is quickly discovering that it is not a software company -- and never has been. They are also discovering that software is hard and is the future of mobile.

I say this as someone who was happily employed there a little as three weeks ago (I left to join a startup -- and yes, I absolutely loved my job at RIM). They have some good people but the majority of upper management is lost without a map.

They opted to create another mobile OS/ecosystem. The talent is certainly there, but the time is quickly running out. Apple has been working on iOS for years. Microsoft has been in the OS business for decades. Android is based on Java which has countless man-years behind the tools. RIM is working from QNX which is nice, but is not a full-blown OS/toolchain. There's a lot of work to do there; they've really only been at it for less than a year.

And let's face it: BBOS was something only its mother could love.

Taking into account the snark, it doesn't change the fact that you're presenting a false dichotomy.

Ungar isn't saying that we have to give up determinism. What he's saying is that to take advantage of massively parallel systems, determinism comes at a high cost.

Clearly, we can write programs on current architectures that are deterministic (well, perceived as such, at least) and we don't have to forgo that. But there is no reason to believe it has to be the only architecture. Ungar is looking at what happens when you try to do computation in a highly networked environment with low latency (like say, a brain).

Also, if you don't see it helping for the practitioner, perhaps practitioners aren't asking good (or enough?) questions.

Or the SVN repositories of binaries that are 4G just on the trunk branch. The HDD basically never stops.

"It's not the language, honey, it's the runtime." (apologies to Indiana Jones)

> "A big corporation ripping off small businesses and independent artists is wrong."

That's pretty specific. Why not "Ripping off is wrong"?

I wonder the same thing when I hear "Violence against women is wrong". I tend to think "Violence is wrong".

The first step in saving my coder eyes is to not use light text with a dark background.

This sounds analagous to governing by polls.

I think of it as GNU/Xanadu.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

No one I've ever met who has used Blackboard has ever expressed anything nice about it. Professor friends of mine actively avoid it; they use Wordpress instead. Others use Moodle.

In fact, it's so bad that my alma mater has put out a call for something else. http://webct.uwo.ca/owlflightplan/ (Admittedly, they make it sound like it's due to licensing, but if people were happy with it, they wouldn't be asking.)

LMS strikes me as a problem best dealt with at the course level, not the university level. Give profs some web space and let them put up something and go from there. The centralized "hub of all courses" seems overly complex.

If I sign in with my Twitter/Facebook account, what do you do with it? Will things I say on WatchThis site show up on Twitter/Facebook? (I say this as someone looking to sign in and even clicking the Sign In button -- there's no indication of what will happen if I do it).

Right now it doesn't look possible to sign up without a Twitter/Facebook account.

_"Pick one task around your house that needs doing that is small and can be done in short order and go take care of it."_

Doing the dishes is a good one. It doesn't take all that long, it gives you time to reflect as it rarely requires great attention, and, even in a dwelling that is habitually cluttered, a moderately clean kitchen will make it seem like you have accomplished something.

Doing the dishes/cleaning the kitchen is my number one low-tech way to feel better about myself and my surroundings. (With the added benefit that my wife greatly appreciates it, since she can relax and watch video clips on her iPhone.)

It seems nice, but it's more of the same: programming by specification.

There's a place for that, but the future of programming languages, in my mind, lies in changing the metaphor of the process from specification to experimentation. After all, the problem with the specification metaphor is figuring out what the specification actually _is_. To me, the best route to get there is experimentation.

Make programming more about experimentation and I think we'll get somewhere.

(I'm still going to read more about Omega. It looks interesting enough.)

> "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

Perhaps he should talk to few. From my experience, it involves writing grants.

I hate to be a picky grammarian, but I would really appreciate it if this person would learn the difference between countable and uncountable nouns.

http://rwc.hunter.cuny.edu/reading-writing/on-line/countable...

I beg (plead!) of the submitter to update this to read "Too Many Things That You Want To Do?" to prevent the regular wincing that results from reading the grammatically ugly version.

I floated the idea of essay questions by the students for a 3rd year programming languages course I taught at university (in North America). I was just about run out of the classroom.

Since I was bring paid about $1250 CDN a month and was trying to finish my PhD, I didn't press the matter. Still, it seemed as though students didn't want what likely would have benefitted them. (Or perhaps they knew how to play the current system to get passing grades...)

I did a thesis that explored aspects of generating code that passed tests, but it was limited to deriving adequate structural representations based on behavioural specifications.

Two approaches were shown: changing data structure representations to meet requirements and generating class structure/hierarchy. The thesis showed that it is possible to do this and how to do it, but it is a huge topic.

If you're interested, I'll put more effort into making my thesis available online in HTML format. In the meantime, you can get it in a variety of places.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Structuring%20Data%20via%20Behaviou...

Incidentally, generating behavioural elements (like entire functions) to pass tests would be very difficult although I have been toying with ways to try it out.

Same here. It has consistently gotten slower since the 0.9+ days. My simple test involves loading up Slime, opening a Lisp source file of moderate size and holding down C-n. The recent releases of Aquamacs consistently spikes at 25-50% CPU usage on my MBP. The lag is noticeable while editing.

That kind of flippant response is part of the reason depression and other mental health problems are still widely misunderstood.

I guess I'm worth about 60 pounds more.

Protip: look for heavy, entrepeneurial employees.

Second for Meditations. I'm slowly reading it, reflecting on the passages. Seems like the way to read it.

It's a bit like an ancient Roman Twitter account.

I tried this when I taught a programming languages course a couple years ago. I thought it went well enough, but to prevent wasting too much time in class, you should rehearse.

During office hours and personal consultation I would also do live coding with students, but that wasn't rehearsed. In some cases it went really well, in others, it didn't (usually because something would just take too long -- or maybe because it was Scheme). Still, I enjoyed it and I know at least some of the students did.

The article says that this was a talk so perhaps it should be considered as a mild form of entertainment. I've read "On Writing Well" and (as I recall) it's considerably less abrasive than this article.

This talk was, to me, an entertaining rant to get a point across, not a serious critique of others' writing.

> On Mac... I never did memorize all of these combinations...

Isn't that what Keyboard Viewer is for?

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=mac/10.4/en/mh2...

The unit tests are the contract. That's the point.

Dumb on whose behalf? If you need to know the inner workings of the shell in order to know that is "dumb" then I submit that in and of itself is dumb.

I don't know and can't provide anything but anecdotal evidence, but I do get the sense that "they don't make 'em like they used to" (== those old cars were solid) is the prevailing belief when I talk to people my dad's age (50+).