J_McQuade

I ended up rattling around a shared house full of people that I largely suspected of hating me, slowly sliding out of school, having only the few things that did matter to me sustain me in a life that increasingly didn't. Doing what mattered to me got me through, but doing so at the expense of what mattered to other people put me there in the first place.

Sadly, the gung-ho tone of the piece would be spoiled by a notice that any extreme either way would be bad, but I think it needs to be kept in mind.

A couple of months ago, for instance, I bought two pairs of trousers on one day - one pair from a department store where I could use the changing rooms provided to ascertain that I needed a 34", and one from a more "discount warehouse" type place that was having a rather cracking sale. Having tried the first pair on in the department store, I was chuffed - "Great, I'm in a 34!" - and so automatically bought the same size in a pair of jeans from the second place (with no changing rooms), because the price was right. They were at least two inches too big. I'd just bought two pairs of bottoms, in identical sizes, that had clearly been designed with two totally different ideas of how tape-measures actually work.

I learned my lesson and swore never to pay for anything I haven't tried.

I also bought a tape measure of my own - and learned how to bloody well use it!

(the greater shame, of course, is that these people are less likely to find a satisfying job in the area than their seemingly uninterested CS-grad friends (grumble grumble))

Also, it has the plus-side of being 'interesting'. People are attracted to scribbles they understand them - but crack open your laptop in a pub or cafe and people will assume that you're a rabidly, uninterruptibly busy, professional. And hell, maybe you are, but whose day isn't brightened by someone asking them what they're so engrossed in?

Figuring out scope can be the least of your worries - I've known python programmers cry when a wayward editor messes up their whitespace. I'm not sure where the author gets the idea that relying on your tools to do their job is some kind of grubby taboo.

No, I didn't notice that it was by Jeremy Clarkson to start with, either.

For the benefit of the non-Brits, that's just sort of what he does. Seeing him on HN actually makes me feel a bit queasy.

Also, when I was at university, a black friend of mine went to study for a semester in the USA and he found the amount of times that he was referred to as 'African American' absolutely hilarious. He was born and raised in London and his parents are Caribbean - making him, as you say, neither of those things.

It seems our perception of colour could be like our perception of temperature - comparative, rather than 'quantitative' in any way. Anyone here know of any studies into this?

But on a serious note, the actual interface of the OS seems to be far less important for tech-savvy people. I'm using Windows 7 right now, alt-tabbing between a web-browser and emacs (finally getting around to exploring Clojure, if you're interested), and would be doing exactly the same if I'd booted into Linux this evening instead. 'Computer people' know what they want to do on their machines and do it; and cross-platform is king for 'their sort of app', these days.

My dad, on the other hand, thinks that computers are largely operated by shout-recognition. He'd love an iPad. He can point at the thing, it does the thing - he's not prepared to learn, to know or to think about it. That's the market Apple will be aiming for; people who view computers as being more like toasters than toolboxes - that thing they use to do that thing. And people love toasters.

However, I genuinely believe that the likes of UNR offer a far better compromise over-all, because most people start out with flailing and shouting - it would be an awful shame to deny them the tools to move beyond that, should they be so inclined.

To be honest, that could describe almost the entire (vocal) Lisp community these days, and I say this as a quite embarrassingly commited Lisp fan and user.

Anyway, I wouldn't say that dynamic scope is evil, but to most Lisp users is does just feel a little backwards. Un-natural, if you will. That's just one of the reasons why everyone secretly (or not-so-secretly) longs for the never-coming day when emacs lisp can just 'go away'.

[edit] NLP being Natural Language Processing, rather than Neuro-Linguistic Programming ;)

(I'd probably pick PAIP as the best of the lot, though)

Basically, I don't think about those things (in any depth, at least) because nobody else does. Subjects such as the double-edged sword of nationalism etc. plague our collective consciousness and as such are worth the brain-cycles, if you're that way inclined.

How important any of this is is definitely open to debate (we argue about it all the time, actually), but he's a smart guy with an interesting point of view, and I think he serves as a good example of why you shouldn't automatically associate patriotism/nationalism with racism, protectionism and bigotry.

That said, though, he is probably quite an exception in this regard.

I was speaking to an American friend of mine recently and he brought up a very similar point. I simply could not understand how fast food could have come to be associated with the poor in the United States - he simply pointed out that I live in England, where a decent take-out often costs the equivalent of $8-$10 US, for a much smaller portion, and that almost any American would see that as bordering on extortion.

If nothing else, I feel that this highlights how ill-conceived our ideas can be when we try to reason about a world that many of us simply don't live in.

It's annoying because I definitely do believe that sci-fi is getting 'watered down' with 'relationship drama' (see the recently launched Stargate Universe as an example - if one were prone to puns, it could probably safely be called "'Lost' in Space"), but I can't help but think the tone of the piece suggests something of an ulterior motive for its vitriol.

~ahem~ Common Lisp and Lisp are not equal. Well, maybe in a sense, but they're definitely not eql.

Anyway, I'm still unsure about Clojure myself (not really had the chance to dive in), but a lot of the 'unproven' ideas you mention (persistent data, STM, also lazy functions etc. etc.) have been doing the rounds in PL circles for quite a while now. It's interesting to see them taking root in lispsville, if nothing else.

I like Lisp and I like Haskell - Clojure seems to take cues (very well proven ones, I might add) from both but, like I say, I've yet to really see how well they've been married.