michaelneale

yes this is the second time. I am guessing the _why posts tripped the trigger?

There had been rash of things I have flagged lately, so obviously enough people it was decided to "cleanse" things a bit.

I would deeply love to know the answer to that question. And why do I feel so angry about thing like that?

I liked _why's code, his tools, shoes, hpricot I think was his (it is really a work of art, a truly great library). However I didn't find his writing helpful - never was able to learn anything from it and it mostly got in the way when I tried to search for things when trying to work out how to do something in ruby.

I guess I wasn't his audience, but some awesome libs.

please make sure you flag it.

The way I have had it explained to me (which I still don't quite get) is that an object is immutable if there was no time. When you mutate an object, it only happens due to time passing (ie if you were to "go back in time" the object would be as it was) - so changing something creates something else (in time). Confused.

If you don't see:

>Posted by Bill Magnuson, Hal Abelson, and Mark Friedman and >Scheme expertise was readily available among our team

And smile and chuckle a bit, you need to stop what you are doing immediately, and go read/watch/learn the SICP stuff from MIT - if for no other reason then to learn some of history.

Yes Obj-C - not sure of the details as it was only what people had showed me (second hand knowledge)

One approach I have seen people take in Objective C (and Scala) is to return a Maybe "monad" from functions instead of the value directly - forces the caller to match for cases when the actual value comes back versus the "non value".

Yes there is probably a name for the affect of things like gloss, or brightness in a shop causing increated sales (yet its actually an inferior feature). Its the same reason LCDs have brightness and colour cranked up in shops, stereos are played loud etc...

Having said that, the glass on the unibody does look easy to keep clean.

I agree - I am not at all comfortable with facebook, even though I use it, I am very very wary... They seem to be happy to do as they feel by default.

I guess an XML aware diff could work though? certainly not at all line based...

unfortunately I hate how the current actors are deliberately type-unsafe. Has burnt me a few times ... the reason is that they were "borrowed" from erlang, as much as possible - the idea being that pattens could be added to the match on an actor (after it is created), so any unmatched "messages" in the "mailbox" will just sit there in hope that one day a pattern will fit - which I can't imagine is a common thing to want to do in reality.

I agree - it seems to be usurping some of the attention and certainly does not deserve nor has earned it. It really isn't innovative - isn't lightweight, and isn't based on some "killer app" - its just made up of interesting ideas (perhaps too many?).

I certainly hope it doesn't reflect too much on scala. There seems to be a bit of a hang over from java framework-itis where people get more exited over generic meta frameworks rather then solving actual problems.

Yeah I thought it was the patents that were the issue here - not the implementations.

They irritate me a lot on the iphone as well - I really hope this metaphore goes away, checkbox type thing is just fine...

He also has some notoriety by going in to bat for SCO (which I recall he now regrets): http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/08/07/daniel-lyons-fake-s...

>things like having the ability to set heap sizes

Oh that has always irritated me, and others - having to know what to set it to up front - interesting that you like it?

Definately one of my favourite essays. I am sure I wasn't the only one who got hungry reading the recipe at the end !

A lot of the comments on the wider internet are of the tone "oh I wonder what 4chan will do, AT&T have messed up this time" - but isn't that missing the point - that AT&T have censored a site? I didn't know that was the done thing, ever (in the US). I mean people are free to go to other ISPs, but it does seem a bit odd...

Thousands do in major cities every day. Often there are mental health issues at play, but anyone can do it.

Have had the same experience with multi touch interfaces and my kids: they instantly get it. They drag things around, stretch, move etc... all without being told.

Will be interesting to see what the future holds - perhaps the idea of a separate mouse to a screen will be seen as quaint one day.

The funny thing is the mouse should be a a very basic instrument - its basically point and grunt. But the dexterity required for kids is a bit of a step - touch seems to make it even more intuitive.

Wow - thanks for the summary. Certainly didn't need wads of text to say that.

Its one of those things "seemed like a good idea at the time, worked well, I feel clever" and then you move on. Then it bites you (or one of your users).

Similar with Android.

Thank you for saying what the inner cynic in me also thought.

It is ironic that this "cynical" attitude is actually non cynical: a belief in objective data, and an attempt to find meaning based on facts and logic. Yet by many this sort of thing would be viewed as "cynical".

I think scala partly achieves some of that "beauty" you describe, but it has made (or had to make) some compromises that make it perhaps less pure then the ideal (that means people can write things in the more imperative style just fine - not sure if thats a good things or not, but thats the way it is).

I think it was Paul Graham who said Java was an evolutionary dead end (which doesn't mean dead so much as that branch of the tree won't continue).

It seems now at least the JVM, or the best bits of it will spawn other branches.

As for the java language (which is probably what pg was referring to?) - I agree it is probably a dead end. Except in some shallow basic syntactic sense - javascript and so on (the continuation of the "curly braces") - not sure if that means anything though. In any cases, certainly the lessons learned will continue (what worked well, what didn't) into a whole lot of other languages and has been.

In nearly 35 years, I have not lost a watch, nor a wallet. I have nearly lost a finger a few times (don't turn on a drill while you are messing with the chuck).

I have also lost a lot of skin from different parts of my body.

For a chip to stay, would need to be somewhere inconvenient and deep. Certainly nowhere convenient that a reader could reach, unless its RFID style in which case I have other concerns...

I guess this is reflected in the popularity of the "app store" for iphone - and now others trying to replicate that (not just for phones either). Its the proprietary equivalent of the open source repository approach.

hahahah - yes, so true.

Actually in this article, when I re-read it, I think it is written in a sort of ironic/fun tone.

Although I love clojure, I understand the disappointment in not being "lisp all the way down" - there is something satisfying about the purity of that approach, if it is practical. Maybe one day...

It is interesting, how if someone doesn't like something they seem to see it as their mission to make sure no one else uses it? (or it appears that way, what I think it really means is self promotion, and its easier to tear down then build up when building your profile in public).