ToastOpt

Suppose then I run a lottery, drawing 5 decimal digits. We have a special deal though -- if all 5 digits match, we draw again, up to 3 more times, and award a unique prize to the ticket holder for each result. We always sell precisely 10000 tickets (you don't get to pick your ticket).

Last week, the results were 11111 11111 11111. This week, the results are 48611.

In this case, would you suggest that last week's results convey less information? It does convey overall more facts than this week's results.

Human designed devices _also_ function in this regard throughout their assembly. Varying the definition of "function" for only one side would make the argument spurious.

It really depends on your motives. If you will be needing to port to new platforms in the future, it's better to have a hard-and-fast crash now, so you can learn and avoid the undefined behavior now, rather than face a large bug backlog years down the line.

But you're correct that sometimes it can be expedient to exploit such technically undefined behavior. (I've committed this sin myself, most commonly in serializers/deserializers)

Could be worse. Last year when I tried ZumoDrive (a similar service), I noticed it marks the web-browser login cookies as safe for HTTP, and defaults to open session pages via HTTP. All it takes it checking your ZumoDrive once from an unsecured WiFi and your account may be compromised.

At least Dropbox gets the endpoint-to-server encryption right.

> a language and its compiler/interpreter

I heard "high-level program translation framework".

... Isn't that exactly what the New York Times does with its required sign-on? You get prompted to sign in unless the referrer URL is google.

Apologies for going off topic, but I just read the articles on debunking the MMR <-> autism link. I misread your open paragraph to be:

"It's important to note that (as far as I can tell) the author doesn't actually debunk the existence of precognition, only the claim that studies show precognition to exist."

Yes, but quite vacuous. The author can't prove the non-existence of evidence supporting the 10x claim. He was critiquing our folklor-ish belief in this 10x claim, without evidence, and our gross indifference to this fact.

Let my try another tack, proposing: excluding some bottom <10% that are incompetent, and those with less than 5 years of experience, all programmers have exactly the same 1x productivity capability; all apparent levels of difference are really either ramp-up on new technologies or flaws in development processes and tools. <citation of irrelevant study on something else> <citation of myself, citing the aformentioned study>.

... do you now believe in this 1x claim? No? Hmm, perhaps I need to get it quoted more and then you'll believe it?

The author's point is that "quoting it more" and "it seems reasonable" are the only basis for our belief in the 10x claim. But neither are scientifically, empirically relevant. We should follow up with further studies to confirm the effect, and then investigate the cause. But we don't. And because we have not, we don't have any scientific basis for believing this 10x claim.

This isn't a matter of "dismissing all of our research based on it" -- there is nothing to dismiss. There has been no sufficient research.

Oddly, my initial misread is inaccurate. There are far more studies supporting the existance of precognition than supporting this 10x claim. ;-)

Arguably, it's a matter of isolation from 'irrelevant' changes. In a function, one wishes to keep the ability to redefine their local variables (perhaps, to implement a faster/smaller-space algorithm) without otherwise affecting the overall program -- when they call other code, that other code should avoid accessing the caller's variables, lest the caller be stuck with precisely those variables and that implementation. If this isolation exists, I have more freedom to vary the implementation.

Likewise, private members of a class are implementation details I may wish to change later -- but I would like some assurance that other components will be isolated from this change, so as not to break.

Edit-add: oh, I of course forgot to mention -- for those not familiar, python permits both :-)

It's still high paying, and still has a lot of job openings, for the A, B, and C level programmers (as it were, keep the "F-level" out).

I see two likely posibilities here. One, you classmates were all terrible -- i doubt that is true, but maybe one or two never 'got it' in industry. Two, most of them discovered that they didn't love programming, and if you don't love this line of work, it's really easy to hate it.

Maybe they just found their passion elsewhere?

You seem to be lost. Reddit is that way --->

your "improved" version illegally modifies 'i' twice in the same statement; its results are undefined.

Yes. Many a time I have wished to import a library's symbols without importing its macros. Or better yet, import its symbols under alternate names. "namespace x = import<y.h>" anyone?

you still can have dynamic semantics at read-time -- eg, does the macro-expand in reading the first form load new macros that affect the next form? Eg, in (progn (M) (M)), is it ever the case that the second M will dispatch to a different macro definition than the first M?

In the world of Common Lisp, yes. In the world of R6RS's more static semantics, no.

Don't you mean 'lambda'?

Here's one anecdote of my own experience. Learning LISP (and Haskell, and Smalltalk) has given me even more appreciation for computer science, for the theory and universe of knowledge that lies underneath the surface of programming.

And as for my day job in C++? Well, I prototype in Python for a couple hours, then spend a week translating it to C++. My boss doesn't understand the whole languages thing, but he's happy when I get a 2 wk job done in one.

As for my feelings? Well, I keep reminding myself that I get to move from project to project faster. And that's fun.

Floating point ops used to take a while. A 16Mhz Amiga with a floating point co-processor might have had one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68881

Yeah, 16 Mhz ==> 160 KFlops, if you believe wikipedia. Supposedly the i7 has a peak of 79 GFlops. Sure, you can't get all of that performance out (either then, or now), but 79,000,000 / 160 is a bit larger than 143.

You used to measure the number of cycles an integer multiply costed, in the dozens or hundreds. Now it takes 1/4 of a cycle. A factor of 10,000 might be a fairer number

View -> Text Encoding -> Autodetect.

This seems to resolve the issue well enough.