456 karma · joined June 27, 2010
In a past life, I was a computational cognitive psychologist.
Using the "+" operator to denote composing parts of visualizations is not the greatest syntax but I think we're basically stuck with it for a bit due to historical baggage. See this note from the creator of ggplot, Hadley Wickham: https://community.rstudio.com/t/why-cant-ggplot2-use/4372/7
FWIW, I don't have a strong opinion on the evidence presented in the paper -- the analyses seem sensible, but this isn't my field of expertise, so I'd be hard pressed to point out, for example, what alternative analyses they could / should have done.
Also, it's not even obvious to me that unbacked Tether causing the BTC price rallies is necessarily a reason to pull out; markets are weird.
GP seems to say that it worked wonders for them, so I'm still interested in trying it.
A classic algorithm for inferring regular expressions was given by Angluin: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/teaching/s10/pape...
(This isn't quite the same setup as you're thinking of but there are a ton of variations on the basic idea)
1. Pedagogically, the lispy syntax was a big stumbling block for beginners. Probabilistic programming is hard enough as it is; prefix notation and parens only added difficulties (and these difficulties were unrelated to the conceptual material).
2. webchurch compiled to Javascript anyway, so it was nice to be closer to the target language.
3. Lisp can be a bit awkward for certain contemporary programming idioms (e.g., accessing object properties).
But give webppl a shot -- it's a good language!
He would walk down the hall to his office, saying his hellos to everyone with a deep, sincere enthusiasm for life. It brightened the entire floor.
There are few reasons I do this: (1) uBlock is overzealous -- it breaks some websites and I'm not interested enough to tweak it to not break them. (2) Sites I like (e.g., boingboing, The Sweethome) don't get any money when I use uBlock, but they do if I use Contributor
I recognize that I'm a weird Silicon Valley type but I'm hopeful that we aren't too rare. There are dozens of us. Dozens!