rml

I was born and raised in upstate New York. I have never seen an article that better describes the rotting corpse that is the Rust Belt of the United States - "You can't make money with some goofy website! When are you going to get a real job? I hear they're looking for people at the Old Mill." Never mind that the Old Mill, in its heyday, employed ten times as many people as it does now. It just boggles the mind...

... where "utilize social connections best" is defined as "being born into the right family." I see your point.

No particular reason -- I just read it several days ago, enjoyed it, and was hoping others might have suggestions as to further reading. Thanks for the link to Stross, I'll check it out.

What is it about his style that you dislike? For example, is it the colloquialisms, the pace at which the story moves, or is it something more structural?

Point #3 ('Use succinct languages') deserves special mention. I've noticed time and again that writing small helper functions (especially new predicates) at my Scheme REPL leads to being able to express the problem at hand with ever more clarity. Also, a REPL with the ability to dynamically reload code is an invaluable weapon...

Thanks to whomever posted this... I love getting the chance to poke through someone's code and (hopefully) learn from it.

Reading the comments here, I don't think the commenters are fully grasping Adams' point. Especially interesting is his desire that the hole-digging robots be self-replicating, so as to allow for ever greater numbers of replacements, lower costs, and so on. It reminds me of a post I read regarding the feasibility of space colonization written by an engineer who went on and on about the "long tail" of industrial production -- basically, there are so many thousands of parts in any sufficiently complicated piece of technology that there are whole billion-dollar industries employing thousands of people just to create a subset of the required components. Cars are a perfect example, although the idea has implications for many technologies we use (computers, anyone?). An interesting approach to this problem (I read about it in Make magazine) is the RepRap Project, at http://reprap.org. They are trying to solve the "long tail" manufacturing problem by creating an inexpensive machine that can be used to build almost anything, including copies of itself. Perhaps something like this will lead to the future Adams is hoping for...