ricky_clarkson

Thanks for the link. While that looks interesting I was talking about English writing by Argentines, whereas that subreddit is almost entirely in Spanish.

I'm a native English speaker living in Argentina, and yours is the first English writing I've seen by an Argentine that is enjoyable (I read some of your other posts) and doesn't contain errors, and that includes people who were schooled bilingually.

Is there anything in particular that pushed you over the edge beyond fluent?

Having typed since I was 5, I think while typing, and going back and forth in code is the same as thinking for me. I'd expect that most of these amazing hackers are from the era where they wouldn't see a keyboard until being 16 or 18.

I'm not a vim/emacs shortcut freak, but I do appreciate environments that don't make me use a mouse.

Java makes excellent code unreadable.

They're an implementation of the untyped lambda calculus. What you're thinking of are better named tags, not types.

I wonder whether Functional Reactive Programming might work better.

OO exists on top of the imperative paradigm, never the functional one. If you disagree, please define OO.

Lisp/Scheme are untyped.

Yes.

Java has a lot of crap, actually. Take a look at Java Puzzlers sometime.

Procedural does not mean "has a main()". It means that the code within a procedure (or method, or function) is always a sequence of steps, i.e., a procedure. OO is a procedural paradigm. doThis(that) is replaced by that.doThis().

You mean that no Haskell programs can do I/O? Given that I've written Haskell programs that do I/O, I'd guess you're wrong.

Yes, actually, that's what I meant.

Go for the one with lambdas.

What will you do with the concealed weapon? Shoot his bullet in mid-air?

Stallman's point is not that working on proprietary software is evil, but that imposing it on others is. If giving your friend a copy of some software is a crime, then the law is an ass.

I'd suggest using your mouse less - you can increase your speed more with the keyboard than you can with the mouse.

There are a number of looks that emacs can have, from emacs -nw (runs in your terminal emulator) to emacs with GTK. And there are colour themes within each. M-x color-theme-select

"On the other hand, it is also capable of superhuman focus on the right task"

No, it's not. It's a human brain. It's not capable of anything superhuman.

I consider it poor taste when a hacker uses a loop (other than a tail call). Nesting is irrelevant.

Exceptions suck. Prefer monads.

There are other return codes besides ints. E.g., replace a function that returns an int or throws an IOException with one that returns an Either<int, IOException>.

I happen to know that Tony used to work for IBM on their Java implementation. I find it difficult to imagine that he hasn't been involved in some kind of integration testing.

So you're saying that America is a bigger market than the world?

I think Scala is a must-learn language IF you plan to use it. If you're on the JVM, and for some reason CAL doesn't work for you then Scala might well be the best thing available.

However, for learning interesting and useful stuff, I'd probably point people more towards Haskell.

En espanol, sí. Pero en inglés, "American" es para los de EEUU.

Get used to it.

I think it would be nicer if each blogger did that themselves. They'd probably find their own typos better that way too :)

I once touched 2,700 lines in a day in a grand feat of manual code manipulation. That certainly made me want to code differently.

I expect that ] to close all open parens would lead to code that is even tighter jammed to the left margin. I like that I feel comfortable writing nested code in Lisp, and if I was always looking for somewhere to put a ] I'd be tempted not to write nested code, and hence start leaking private identifiers.

If you look at the relevant logs, and see what Peter Seibel said to you, your question was answered immediately. I'm not sure that you noticed though.

You made assertions that possible things were impossible, and asked how to do intrinsically non-functional things in a functional way.

I think you experienced a typical IRC reaction of "annoy the newbie because it's easier than answering him". It seemed to work. I've seen it in non-Lisp channels too.

You need to store things on the heap or on the stack, there is nowhere else. When you're thinking in objects, program in objects. To think in objects but then try to write functionally is going to cause you difficulty. You can write procedurally in Lisp, without OOP, it's not just a choice between OOP and FP. Lisp programmers treat these as tools, not lifestyle choices.