morphir

I feel the need to point out that when I submitted a link to khan academy, no one up-voted it. Why is this?

ref. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911882

Don't be evil, right? ;) Instead of being the bully, pick on the bully, as that will bring google even more of the 'good guy' points that Ballmer so desperately needs.

If you think the Chinese gov. will give after for this kind of pressure, then I would say you are naive.

Forgive me, I see that I have miss-interpreted the article. (I skimmed it). Reading it again, I see that I do agree.

<EDIT: I toned down the harshness.>

Abstractions are key to every good design. Let me try to explain more in detail:

Abstractions can be built in two ways, I top-down II bottoms-up

A top-down approach is per SICP described as 'wishful thinking'. We simply assume we have the function. And then we drill down, and we let George (the programmer) worry about the implementation. Taking the UML approach is not necessary - traditional black box abstractions will suffice.

A bottoms-up approach or Domain Specific Language (DSL) is not very well supported among the typical boiler-plate languages today, small languages like scheme is perfect for DSL, because of its smallness.

You design top-down - and you implement bottoms up.

Naming functions is a art of its own and is key to good software engineering.

Personally I'm sick of programmers who don't understand the art of abstractions - as much as I'm sick designers who don't know what the limit of a computer, or the capabilities of their language.

A note on UML: Uml got one thing right, and that was the 'Use Case'. A proper use case forms the foundation of a good top-down design.

this is exactly the kinds of articles that I could expect to see on reddit - but has historically been ignored on HN.

I use a plugin called no-script in firefox - is there any news on when it will be available for Chrome? I will hang on to firefox until I can decide what js to burn my cpu cycles on, thank you.

No its not 'harder' to learn. You just have to understand the concept of applicative evaluation and prefix notation. Then recursion and higher-order functions. That is four things. (Macros can be considered advanced). In the end, all functions evaluates to a value. Thus functions are considered to be data. This value (data) is then passed on to the next function as arguments, and so on.. Anonymous functions is also something which kicks ass, and you miss such features when programming in C. This is one reason why C programs should be left as simple as possible, with as little abstraction as possible. (Fortran? Come on!)

exactly my point. Unfortunate for us schemers that we don't have such a mainstream implementation. Also, it would be cool if linux distributions could ship with a minimal scheme. Modules could be downloaded & installed as we need them.

sure, but neither of them are shipped with the operating systems that I use (linux and osx).

Yeah, I forgot - scheme does not have a repl... Come on! Multi paradigm? scheme is mp but encourages fp style. Such that side-effects are reduced to a bare minimum. And most lisps are mp. Even better - the object systems are many and modular with lisp. How many object systems are there with python? The problem with scheme is not with DSLs either, it is where most LISP shines like a rockstar! Building domain specific abstraction is trivial with scheme as long as you do a bottom-up approach. Scheme DO have FFI - not only that, scheme can compile to C. Can python do that? NO! And its not because of the prefix notation either. Sure it takes a little while to get used to applicative order of evaluation, but thats only because some idiot taught you the imperative way first. I used python before I got aware of scheme, and believe you me, I got a lot more educated on how to create applications when I watched SICP and read the little schemer books. Also, lets not forget how much time you spend doing memory management when doing C/C++. It's painful, and a waste of good time and money. Python has matured faster than scheme because it has focused on building libraries rather than being standard. Also, there is only one python implementation - where there is many schemes (most of them half-assed) and lisps. This makes it difficult to choose and land on a lisp that can do all and be all, and as such does not provide any traction for the language. There is one modern lisp that could change all this, and that is clojure. If clojure can provide all necessary libs that the working programmer need to have at hand we can see functional programming hit the mainstream of enterprise developement, research and whatever domain there is a need for computation.

why is python preferred above scheme or any other lisp, like clojure? Can we stop promote imperative-ish languages and focus on where lambda can take us?

C is for simple low level system libraries. For all other kinds of computation one has scheme.

3 - but usually around 10.

This is a classic scenario where a human is overspending and don't have any insight to economics. He also thought he knew his domain, while he didn't. The SEO-guy was ripping him off, and he should have taken legal action against the SEO-scam that effectively pulled the plug on his cashflow.

a curious mind will be a learning mind.

russians are gearing up. Lock & load! It's time to kick ass and chew bubble gum - and I'm all out of gum!

I know scheme (r5rs), but I can't figure out how this code works. Are there any good introduction text for this lisp?

I wonder how accurate that statement actually is:

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

That analogy is wrong. If you read what the other ones said, you will see that the 'linux is just a kernel' vs 'freebsd is a entire Operating System' is more correct. BSD provides the userland tools and thus supports the entire OS experience. Linux just makes the hardware available to the user. This also depends on how one defines the word Operating System. I remember linus was stating in the documentary 'OS Revolution' that "your never supposed to see a operating system - no one never uses a operating system, people use programs, the operating system makes it easy for the programs to access the computers resources"

reference interview at 2,20 min. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409&...

Here is a 3 minute install video of FreeBSD 7.0: http://www.installandboot.com/freebsd-70-installvideo/ Nice to follow along while booting a virtualbox.

What is it that makes FreeBSD more viable than linux?

A concurrent REST api, written in scheme. That support a parallel/multicore environment. Which in turn compiles to C.

how can you say that C is challenged by Go? Go is built with C. This is true with python as well - in being a C abstraction. C is well suited for the UNIX-like programming, where you create efficient system libraries. With as little abstraction as possible I might add.

your link doesn't work. Try this one instead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself I was not aware there was a term for this. Also called DIE (Duplication is Evil).

I initially thought recursion where less cpu intensive than traditional for-loops. Is this even true?

so I suppose many here can read Japanese since they vote it up? What about a round up/review? Me no japan.

C is indeed imperative, but so is python and scheme too. In fact, both scheme and python are multi-paradigm languages, where both support functional (lambda calculus), object-orientation and imperative statements. If you want to focus on learning your computer, in a von Neuman way, then C is perfect. C++ is a dead horse, that should be left alone. But with scheme, you can focus 100% on algorithm development. That is not true with C/C++, which strictly speaking requires extreme caution with regard to manual memory management. Python is fun too, but has mainly gained more momentum than scheme because it has a more pragmatic focus on building and maintaining libraries with backward comp.. If the God of scheme manages to summon their rXrs camps into one 'multi-cultural' one - then we can expect scheme to mainstream adoption.

In what sense does this prove that they are receiving quite a bit of traffic? I see one article, http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu_9_10_Karmic_Koala_released got 1512 users, which means we have proved that digg.com got at least 1512 unique users. Granted, that this is not a fixed voting system of course. Secondly, how do I quantify 'quite a bit'? I think we can settle to say that you got no proof nor documentation that shows us the amount of traffic that digg actually got.

could you document that traffic?

are there anyone who cares about digg these days?