1,527 karma · joined December 29, 2014
The law only needs to hold up and silence dissent until Merkle is re-elected in a few months. Rank cynicism.
Nope, I don't believe you ever gave me the benefit of the doubt—your undoubted assumption that I was just throwing rocks perfectly explains your arguing style ;)
A good part of that reluctance is entirely rational.
There are many dozens of programming languages that might be worth learning based on what communities of current users say about them.
But you can't tell if they're really worth investing all over again what you already invested in other languages without, well, investing.
It's a lemon market. Sellers know more than you about the true value of the car, err, language, but they have incentive to tell you it's great. Even worse, with programming languages even the most honest sellers might not know how their language really stacks up to the ones you already know because by symmetry they are underinformed too.
For example, I tried getting into Smalltalk based on the intense hype coming from the community, but I came to suspect it really doesn't offer that much of an advantage over languages I know better and stopped. But maybe it really is better... I'll probably never know.
In recent times, people have become afraid of being perceived as anti-science. See it all the time.
Assume Bob uses one such not-entirely-random UUID variety and actually makes use of the embedded information. Charlie uses random UUID. Bob and Charlie merge their data.
If Charlie had filled the version bits with random garbage, the merge would poison Bob's use of the embedded information.
Basically, UUIDs are a discriminated union type.
(modify-syntax-entry ?\{ "(} " lisp-mode-syntax-table)
(modify-syntax-entry ?\} "){ " lisp-mode-syntax-table)(Note to submitter: Including "Trump" in headlines seems to trigger a penalty on HN. I guess the site's original headline would have kept your post afloat a little longer.)
This fist stage is a blow to the Google data monopoly.
I obviously don't know if there's a second stage, but there might be, if this spreads awareness that private coroporations store everything they do online—if it makes Americans more privacy conscious—there could be a second stage.
The second stage would be to introduce strong privacy regulations applied to everyone. This, again, would hurt Google more than the ISPs.
To someone like me who doesn't think Google can ever be hurt enough, this looks like a good law.
If strings in Emacs are mutated so rarely that making them immutable would cause almost no breakage, it logically follows that strings in Emacs are mutated so rarely that using them from Clojure as if they were immutable would cause almost no problem either.
Here's one approach: http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=pwp
Scroll down for examples. You might disagree, but I think the fit between Prolog semantics and expanding XML templates is surprisingly natural.
> It turns out there is very little code that would break if Emacs strings became immutable
Which means that very little Clojure code would break if they just went ahead and used Emacs strings.
> Common Lisp fans claim that lisp-2s have first-class functions, but the way they are kept separate from other first-class values in their own namespace ghetto brings to mind claims of "separate but equal"—at best it is Jim Crow functional programming.
Jim Crow functional programming?? The virtue signalling is strong in this one. He's wrong on the facts, too.
A Lisp-2 doesn't keep the function inside the ghetto, it keeps everyone else out. Functions can be everywhere, but a non-function can't be the value of a function binding. Function's aren't second class in this system, they're royal class.
Perhaps, but you could turn it around, too.
Statically typed languages had time to catch up because innovation into "more powerful/better language mechanisms" has stalled, for some other reasons.
Why am I spontaneously thinking "Trojan Horse?"
> I’m beautiful. I’m having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me “Apache” and respect my right to kill from above
(What infuriates me about this story is that it reminds me of how far companies like Google have destroyed Mail as a protocol usable without their intermediation. Use Googlemail or get your mails spam-binned.)
The only question remaining for me is why Googlers still enjoy the respect of their peers. It was fine in 2000, nobody knew how it would turn out. Today, we need to start disrespecting the kind of person that would still work for that company.
The consequence wouldn't be that ants are conscious, it would be to question why "self recognition" was made out to be such a big deal.
That feeling may be the result of some questionable syntactic design decisions in Clojure.
Hickey went over Lisp syntax and tried to remove parentheses wherever possible. (It was the hip thing, PG's Arc did it, too, which may be where Hickey got it from.) As a result, you get a sub-par editing experience —generic sexp-based structure editing doesn't get you as far as with a Lisp— and diminished readability once you get above three omitted pairs of parentheses in a row.
On the other hand, Clojure arbitrarily mandates a secondary kind of list literal in some places of the syntax, again making Clojure harder to write and edit. I don't even see a readability benefit, but of course YMMV.
TL;DR: Clojure syntax is a "complected" derivative of Lisp :-)
Moreover, there's a difference between "the universe is a simulation" in the sense used in the article and "my conscious experiences are a simulation." The latter is unconstrained by "number of qubits in the universe." The apparent complexity of this universe you think you're inhabiting isn't real, and neither is Scott Aaronson.
Sure boss, I'll fix it. Would have fixed it already, if only nontermination wasn't the most unhelpful kind of compiler error message, ever...