fogus

I clip the end off of a Montc Blanc ink cartridge to make it fit into the G2 chamber.

> I hoped for actual fiction, like "The Laundry Archives" ...

I think this subthread fills that desire nicely. :)

That would be the most likely answer... and is indeed the correct answer. ;)

I was a voracious reader of programming books prior to reading Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built." However, it was this book that made me (finally) realize that some of the best programming books are not about programming at all. As a result I've cut back drastically on my "language-specific" programming books[1] and have sought programming-relevant books instead.

[1]: And I've made it a personal goal to limit the "language-specific" books to those written before 1995.

> What's left?

LISP in BAYSICK? https://github.com/fogus/baysick

Transit does specify a json-verbose mode that generates a human-readable JSON packet. I suppose readability lies in the eye of the beholder, but I think it looks reasonable.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. It may not be novel, but it'll definitely be useful.

I wouldn't say that it's a reinvention of MessagePack. Indeed, Transit uses MessagePack at the bottom (when specified) to provide a level of extensibility and richer types.

A tour of the JS implementation is at http://cognitect.github.io/transit-tour/

This sounds like every project that I've ever been on. My co-workers could have written a series of these types of posts:

* MVCless GWT

* Makeless Builds

* Eclipseless Java IDEs

* Hibernateless ORMs

* Freemarkerless Templating

I've seen this story many many times. I'll give you one guess as to how many of these *less solutions were worth the effort put into them.

It varies week-to-week, but I try to hit 30 minutes a day, minimum. I wrote more about these things at http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/23/extreme-reading/

> innovators (will try new tech because it's shiny)

That doesn't sound like innovation to me. It sounds more like fashion. Am I reading too strictly into definitions? (I assume that I am, since I'm not familiar with Crossing the Chasm)

Thanks! I use the same technique as you and have found many interesting repositories via https://github.com/swannodette and https://github.com/namin.

That title paraphrasing is... unfortunate.

From what I've gathered while researching this blog post, the term feminism has as many facets and internal conflicts as any other system of thought. It seems unfair to dismiss "feminism" as a whole.

Did anyone say that it was genius? Taking something that some people see as "duh" and phrasing it in such a way as to provide clarity is a valuable thing.

> My suggestion for future articles

The interesting thing about putting things out into the world is that people feel compelled to have an opinion. The fact of the matter is that this only exists because it's something that I feel motivated to write about. I am under no contractual obligation to produce anything, so that it exists at all is the result of a labor of love. You're probably right that there is nothing ground-breaking here and that the same information is available elsewhere, but where? Two dozen blog posts here, a few dozen Usenet posts there, a few books over here and a few papers over there. The value that I'm attempting to bring is through curation -- value to myself and as a side-effect others. The information is free foremost and is created on my free time.

As an author I have very little control over my readers' expectations or desires. The topics that you list are definitely interesting, so I hope to see you one day write about them on your blog (which I like BTW). I think that if this newsletter does not meet your expectations then maybe you will not like future installments. I appreciate your constructive criticism, but if I am to write a newsletter then I should stand true to the topics and styles that I would like to read and hope there are others who feel the same.

Thanks for reading.

I won't argue for the aesthetics, but I am curious what you mean by "loss of generality."

Author here. The announcement with some preliminaries can be found at http://blog.fogus.me/2013/09/09/read-eval-print-%CE%BBove-v0...

Enjoy.

Probably for the best -- I have a strong impression that you wouldn't like the rest either.

In my time as a professional programmer I've come to notice a trend. It's true that there is a lot of bad code in the world and much of it is worthy of derision. That said, time after time I've noticed that when confronted with a smelly codebase junior and/or less-skilled programmers are quick to blame the code and the person who wrote it while more senior and/or highly-skilled programmers will start by placing the blame on their own lack of understanding.

An s-expression syntax would be nice.

A good way to think of the difference between pattern matching and destructuring is that pattern matching is a conditional construct and destructuring isn’t.

It's almost worth creating an MVC framework just to call it this.

> The thing programmers do...

The thing that programmers do is the exact same thing that your post says "normal people" do. Programmers build buggy systems that lose data because someone's name has a ç in it and fail 5% of the time (or more) and rarely do they understand algorithms (and especially not the complexity characteristics) and very often they build the wrong thing, even if they get it done and few have a formal education in anything resembling engineering and very often programmers are indeed getting shit done, but it just turns out that what they got done was just shit.

We have to stop putting programmers on a pedestal. There are great programmers and there are bad programmers. Just because someone slings some code doesn't make them a bastion of clear engineering practice. Many programmers that I've met would benefit greatly from the kinds of systems that Victor describes.

> never considered them mutually exclusive.

I never implied mutual exclusion.

I specifically tied simulation and people together to mean simulated-people. I apologize that was not made clearer.

If that were the case for me then anything I would write would get upvoted in bulk, but that's just not been the case. I wrote it because I thought it might be useful to some people and presumably it has been for those who've upvoted it. On the other hand, those who have found it worthless have expressed so very strongly in this comment thread. So it goes.

This kind-of hearkens back to simulation I think. That is, if two objects have the same properties then it might be useful to identify them as distinct things because they are in fact distinct entities. That they happen to have the same properties is a matter of fidelity only.

I'm not sure I would say that. There's no reason that a single language needs to solve both problems.