Jebdm

Definitely. I can't wait until gradients go out of style again.

The only thing which redeemed this article for me was (somewhat ironically) the comment by Robert Scoble.

Maybe I'm odd, but I generally prefer reading stuff on a computer, especially if it's computer-related material (search is invaluable and paper is cumbersome).

If you find reading on a screen difficult, I'd recommend turning the room light on, positioning your screen so you don't have a glare or reflection, blowing up the text, and sitting at a good distance from the screen.

According to http://blog.plover.com/law/Godel-dictatorship-2.html :

"Apparently, the "inconsistency" noted by Gödel is simply that the Constitution provides for its own amendment. Suber says: 'He noticed that the AC had procedural limitations but no substantive limitations; hence it could be used to overturn the democratic institutions described in the rest of the constitution.'"

Turing-completeness doesn't guaranty any sort of I/O, which I would make a requirement of a nice language. I may be able to write a Lisp interpreter using Conway's Game of Life, but then I have to represent my Lisp code within the cellular automaton. (The same thing applies to, for example, Brainfuck.)

Also, I'd say that any language which requires me to write a Lisp interpreter to be nice is not a "nice language".

Morgenstern's descriptions of Einstein and Gödel are neat to read. Gödel seems really naive, and Einstein is a bit meaner than I would've imagined.

I don't disagree. You should definitely be a good role model to your kids; in fact, I feel that I hold parents to a higher standard than most. I just fail to see how letting your kids see the word "fuck" is intrinsically bad for them.

I agree. Eleven years old is ~6th grade; she probably hears words like "fuck" on a regular basis at school.

The only logical arguments I've heard for not letting kids swear are:

- It's against the social norm (it'll get them in trouble)

- It lessens the words' value.

Since kids invariably will encounter swear words at some point, trying to shield them is pretty hopeless. The best solution is to mitigate the two problems above; teach them when they shouldn't swear (mainly in front of adults) and not to swear like a sixth-grader ("Hey, man, what the fuck are you doing today? Shit, I've got a fuckton of goddamn homework.")

Swearing at people is another thing entirely, though.

Also, for the record, there is this: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/

It's not really a license, it just lets you certify that you are putting your work in the public domain.

I think the dangerous part is when other people receive them.

Yeah, that's very true. Usually, it's "where's that?"

What year?

Bard College at Simon's Rock (currently, will be transferring after this semester)

How will bloggers stop it?

Ah, but if you run it slowly enough (step through it, for instance), you get the same thing in effect; anything you want to know you can find out before anything changes.

Maybe I just got lucky, but I'm a millenial and I never experienced any of this stuff. I agree that more students are considered gifted than ought to be, but I also think that the whole three-tier gifted/normal/special ed thing is broken. It's a spectrum, so treat it that way.

That said, I've never gotten a gold star that I can remember, and I've definitely received my fair share of red X's.

I did get stamps/stickers on papers which were A's or, in the lower grades, check-pluses or E's. But I don't think that these in any way gave me a false sense of accomplishment; they only gave them out for top marks. (For the uninitiated, sometimes for minor assignments we were graded on a scale that went v+, v, v-, X or Excellent, Good, Satisfactory, Poor.)

Maybe this is a big issue in other places, or perhaps private schools (that seems likely to me, based on the accounts of some people I know who attended private school), but it's definitely not happening everywhere.

I agree with you. I guess sometimes it's important to do a type check, but duck typing seems more appropriate for Javascript.

This seems fairly obvious to me; self control involves doing something extra. For instance, take the Stroop test (where a color word is shown in another color, e.g. "red" in blue ink). When asked to read the word, you don't have to do anything extra (assuming you are an experienced reader); you kind of automatically just "know" what the word is, it is your strongest identification with the written text. Identifying the color isn't any harder than reading the word, but you have to override your automatic propensity to say what's written.

Thinking of it in programming terms, you're not just doing "sayColor()" instead of "sayText()"; you always do "sayText()", but you also have to do "blockSayText()" and "sayColor()" in parallel.

I guess it doesn't hurt to have it, especially if you're writing a lot of singletons, but it just seems strange to me to do it explicitly since singletons are extremely easy to implement in prototype-based languages.

  singleton = Object()
  singleton.x = 0
  singleton.foo = function(){
      return x + 1
  }

Edit: Also, why not http://www.prototypejs.org/ ? Not that there's anything wrong with playing around with stuff of course.

It seems like a neat idea; it's not the normal Javascript way of operating, but sometimes classes do make more sense. I don't really get why you did Singletons, though. Why not just use a normal object?

If it has a significant community, have meetups with an entry fee with prizes, etc. Get sponsored prizes. Make a Facebook app (increased ad revenue). Honestly, I don't see it being incredibly profitable, but it is a neat idea.

I'm currently running Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Firefox 3.0.4, but I dual boot and I've never had that problem on Windows Vista and Firefox 3.0.4 either. I don't think it matters, but my processor is an AMD Turion 64-bit dual core.

Maybe it's a difference in some algorithm between FF/Chrome and Explorer/Opera/Safari, though Chrome and Safari share at least most of their rendering code. That leads me to believe that it's probably something to do with Flash or something embedded. I don't know what to tell you, though, I've never had any problems, and my computer isn't even that fast.

What are your computers' specs?

Huh, that's me. Time to code, I guess.

To an extent, sure, but he didn't say "unambiguous", just "less ambiguous". In fact, just since 1987 a "less ambiguous" natural language has been developed: Lojban (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban).

Lojban still has semantic ambiguities, but it is free of the syntactic variety (think "Time flies", which could either be a command or a statement) and thus is a less ambiguous language than most others.

I still haven't gotten around to learning it though. Someday.

Sometimes I'll use one if it's someone I don't talk to regularly, but if it's someone I know I don't. I have a similar policy with endings. If I'm asking for something, I'll use "thanks" because it seems polite. If I'm apologizing or being formal in some way, I'll often use "sincerely" or something similar.

Otherwise, what I do depends on how often I email them and how well they know me. If they don't know me or I don't often email them, then I'll close with just a dash and my name, in order to make it clear who I am and build an association. If they already know me well and we email fairly regularly, I won't use my name ("Thanks-\nJeb" becomes "Thanks!"), because it just adds noise.

(These aren't hard rules, of course.)

These scroll fine for me, but the pages are very long, which itself could be considered a usability blunder.

I agree with most of his points, but two of them seem a little off to me.

STOP underlining text that isn’t a LINK - There are a lot of places where underlining makes sense. If you've got the links in a different color, then it shouldn't be an issue; besides, after one click users will figure it out (please don't tell me this isn't true or I'll lose all faith in humanity).

I still really hate dynamic dropdown menus. A lot. - Sometimes they make sense. They probably shouldn't be part of your main navigation, but they work well for things like country and state/province selectors. Remember to have it degrade gracefully, though.

I love evolution.

:(

A family?

It's all about the concepts which the language bases itself on and the way that people think about problems.

I think the easiest way to see this is a (somewhat contrived) example. Imagine there are two languages, which run equally efficiently for equivalent problem specifications. The first one is basically just C; its conceptual model matches the way the hardware it runs on fairly closely. The second is something like Haskell; most of its concepts come from mathematics and formal computer science, and as such it places fairly strong restrictions on what you can and cannot do.

Both of these would be capable of calculating whatever you wanted (assuming they're both Turing-complete), but the C-like language would be better suited for tasks that require knowledge of the hardware (systems programming) while the Haskell-like language would be better suited for mathematical/theoretical type programs. (The difference between two C-like languages would be negligible, assuming equivalent libraries and efficiency.)

Both would work for other things, of course, but they may not be as nice to use.