Thanks for the pointer to `cmdliner`. I've built a handful of command line tools using Command from the Core library (as described by Real World OCaml [1]), but I always have to have the book open to use it. This looks very nice and it looks like it might fix an annoyance I have with Core's `Command`, which is that it won't parse flags without spaces (i.e., `-r2` failes to parse as equivalent to `-r 2`).
That's nice, but what about adding backoff? I just came across this blog post[1] over at AWS about exponential backoff - timely because I'd just been working on some retry logic myself and wondered if I'd made good decisions about how to implement jitter. Turns out, I hadn't.
This is really neat. As a professional Scala hacker who's played a bit with SML/OCaml, I always seem to find problems that would be best solved using discriminated unions like this, but I've never loved the traditional Scala idioms for achieving that sort of thing. I'm interested in Shapeless, but my coworkers are suspicious and I'm too inexpert in it to really argue strongly for it. This looks like something useful that I can implement when a union type is really what I need, without having to get Shapeless in the door.
Neat! This actually happens all the time, although maybe not so dramatically. When I visited the Jökulsárlón (the famous glacial lagoon) in southern Iceland, there was a large iceberg there that had flipped a day or so before. Unlike the ice around it, this iceberg was smooth and deep blue from having been underwater.
This is my family's situation as well. My wife has a 9-month salary for her tenure-track position at a state university. Her startup package hardly covered anything. The university has virtually no money to give out in small grants to help along until she gets an extramural grant from the NIH or the NSF, but the kind of research you can do at a small state university that's focused on teaching is not sexy enough to garner big money from most extramural granting agencies.
As a result, she's applying for grants at the moment to pay a few students a paltry sum to stay and work in her lab over the summer. She will work for free. Any students who can't cover their own room and board on their own probably couldn't afford to stay and work; they need to spend 30 or 40 hours a week in the lab, which pretty much excludes other sources of income. My wife makes the point that it's unfair that poor students can't afford the experience to work in a lab as an undergraduate, even if it will benefit their careers in the long term.
Luciferin isn't what makes jellyfish glow, that's GFP. GFP, at least, requires a specific light input to cause the glow (UV at a particular wavelength depending on the molecule). I don't know about Luciferin, though.
This is exactly the point. I don't mind the extra typing in those first few examples because jQuery is mysterious and it's nice to cut through the mystery. However, I don't want to have to fill my code with conditional logic based on the user's browser - that's lame.
The real value of this site is not what it says, but rather a reminder that jQuery is an abstraction and is made of code rather than magick.
I've never heard of Elixir, but I always assumed that the |> originated in F#. Ocaml has it pretty much standard, too, although you can define it in one line in Ocaml:
I was never convinced that the city needed anything more than a surface street. It's a little dicey putting any tunnel there against the waterfront in landfill in an earthquake-prone area. Moreover, it was never clear that the traffic patterns would have been improved by any sort of tunnel option. The whole thing always had the feel of a land grab for real estate developers, too. On top of that, a tunnel was really the worst for Seattle since it wouldn't help anyone get into or out of downtown, just through downtown.
These are easy to accidentally throw out at the office, unfortunately. Mine lasted about 2 weeks before I forgot to remove it from the machine and it went out with all of the other K-cups that everyone else was throwing out.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that - R for Programmers is exactly the kind of thing I'd need, even if it's not useful for my friends and family (largely scientists rather than programmers for whom the legacy of programming language syntax is completely unknown).
Julia looks cool; I think the syntax is meant to look familiar to people who've used Matlab or Octave extensively. I don't do tons of scientific computing, but Julia is on my list of tools to learn.
R is one of those languages that looks like it was designed in a vacuum by a very smart person. It has many common, modern PL constructs, but they're expressed syntactically in a way that in no way resembles any other language I've seen. The entire syntactic legacy of Algol, Pascal, C, etc, all are thrown by the wayside. Familiarity with any of those syntaxes felt to me like more of a liability than a help. That's not to say that the concepts don't apply, just the syntax.
DDG is excellent most of the time, but way behind when doing video or map searches. I have it as my default in most places, but sometimes I just have to fall back to Google.
You can do a lot of traditional 'OO'-style things with functors and modules, though, so you don't need objects necessarily to get a lot of OO features.
I definitely agree that it's really a great, mind-opening experience for developers to learn a LISP and a functional statically typed language. I feel like you might be missing some things about Clojure here, but I'm too inexpert at it to really fill you in. Anecdotally, I find that when I'm faced with a problem in Clojure, I spend a lot of time thinking about what to do, but rarely spend much time actually writing or modifying code. In Scala, I feel like the type system and more familiar syntax (just because of my own experience) lets me just dig in, but I probably do more actual editing/typing/work. I basically really like both languages, even though both have their annoyances and rough edges, and I wish I could use them both at work - Clojure for when it made sense, and Scala the rest of the time.
Definitely. I was also going to add Steve Reich, although his music is mostly not what you'd call "orchestral". But you could add Jonny Greenwood, Krystof Penderecki, George Benjamin, and more, and more. It's such a tragedy to see classical music as being "Beethoven or film scores". There are great modern recordings of Beethoven by good orchestras, too, and I'm as excited to hear a fresh new recording of Beethoven as I was when I discovered that Augustin Hadelich had recorded the Ades violin concerto (there are now three recordings of this marvelous work).
I'll bite. Thomas Ades is making astounding music today. So is John Luther Adams, and Nico Muhly. I've enjoyed works by Mason Bates, Andrew Leshnoff, Yehudi Wyner, and others. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Some symphonies are shutting down, but the Chicago Symphony just announced increases in ticket sales and attendance. Excitement over my local orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, is increased in recent years since they hired a new music director and commissioned a Pulitzer-prize winning piece by John Luther Adams.
Boundary Bay's pub has sadly gone downhill, and while their beers are still excellent, I'd highly recommend folks checking out the array of other good options in town: Kulshan Brewery and Wander Brewing, especially.
C brings in its own problems. Compiler (in)compatibilities, the need to install libraries on a machine to be able to compile and run programs. And besides, in C you still have a build system problem - Make is fine, but it is definitely opinionated about how things happen, and you potentially have to write a lot more boilerplate to get a complex project built with Make than you do for Leiningen, Maven, SBT, etc.
Java has Maven, Scala has SBT, Clojure has Leiningen. That's not so bad. I use all three languages, and the appropriate tool for the language. I don't use hot-swapping for anything.
For IDEs, in Clojure, you have the choice of Vim, Emacs, Cursive (for IntelliJ), Light Table, and Counterclockwise (for Eclipse), and more. All of them are good, pick your favorite.
Agreed. And in this case, I think it's significant that the family member affected has controlled his illness long ago. The point of this donation is to help other people for whom such control is not yet possible.
I really appreciate that the Broad keeps a lot of attention on basic (or at least, pre-clinical) research. That kind of work is critical to making big discoveries but it's harder to defend for funding in a world where we want to put drugs on shelves. I still want to see drugs on shelves, but starting at the clinic isn't the best way to make discoveries that lead to real therapeutics.