route66

(I admit that I try to make summations reading backwards, starting with the last paragraphs)

Statement: The common belief that the modern homo sapiens evolved from an archaic homo sapiens during a revolutionary step in evolution. Study of flintstones produceed during a long timeframe show consistent variations in sophistication and nothing hints at a 2001-space-odyssee-black-monolith moment.

"... stop looking at artifacts as expressions of evolutionary states and start looking at them as byproducts of behavioral strategies"

Yes, nil and '() are the same. Alas I'm of no more help for your quest. Also SQL with false and NULL does not it the picture as NULL means unknown and is treated as such , not as false ...

I would be interested to know where the borders lie between being intrigued enough to follow the link and being repulsed by a certain threshold of text, yet still being attracted enough to the subject ask someone to reduce it to a quote ...

Lisp: nil and the empty list '() are equivalent and are falsey. C: 0 is falsey, the rest not.

While we're at it... this piece of ruby is about operator precedences. Not strictly in the truthy falsey department but still slightly in topic. The participants are 1, nil, or, ||, assignment and puts ...

  puts (i = nil || 1) => 1
  puts  i => 1
  puts (i = nil or 1) => 1
  puts  i => nil
  puts  i = nil || 1  => 1
  puts  i => 1
  puts  i = nil or 1  => nil
  puts  i => nil

He even mentions that it would blow up the stack ... so, no TCO is applied, which does not exist in javascript (at least not in V8). But tail recursive it is, as the recursion is the last statement. What he implements in the variation is a kind of pseudo-trampoline through setTimeout ...

Some years ago I was coding for a inventory/financial administration completely built in OpenBasic (remember to leave space between your line numbers!), gosubs instead of functions and the like.

The problem is, that this was one of the most solid systems of this kind I worked on (think "hot code swapping" and "constraint driven development"), but mentioning it on a CV does not exactly evoke the same vibes as using node.js on couchdb.

EXIT

The better analogy would be: if you business depends on Delta Airlines you should have a good chat with other Airlines to expand your business. It' s a common pattern in the non-virtual world that dependency on one exclusive channel/customer (Ask textile producers in Pakistan about IKEA) is prone to fail.

And indeed, if your business depends on airfreight you will also be strongly coupled to the destiny of that part of the industry. There's no need to develop your own oil well, but to have a vision about alternatives is a good thing in that case. Branson's Virgin sells records. And airtravel. And Mobiles. Would he have survived by betting exclusively on Sony MiniDisc ?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users-... is, what happens if you use your real name on quora...

You could find one answer here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(data_structure)

In short: a data structure where the last thing you put in is the first you get out.

To others it means everything you can pile up in one or the other way. Like MySql on Linux with Apache and PHP which gives us the LAMP stack ...

To some weird people it might mean this: http://www.rocktownhall.com/blogs/media/blogs/rth/MarshallSt...

While the standard is obviously written with OOP in mind UML is just as well a usable tool for desribing e.g. Erlang actors (sequence diagram) or the functionality buried in lisp packages. It helps drawing boundaries and responsibilities which might be just as important in FP.

The bulk of code generation tools and diagram "helpers" might be pointless in FP, but when you sketch on a napkin boxes and arrows just do their work in a way that even OO people can understand what you are talking about.

And they industry likes the watermarking possibilities of digital copies to trace copyright leaks. (which means the "copies" can be somewhat unique).

My problems were in fact with Java web services. There are different interpretations possible of the recent SOAP standards (or non-standards, as some are more de-facto than ratified) of smaal details as where to put type-info in the wsdl and if it is allowed to be redundant. This way sensible tooling is defied. Serving and consuming smaller services with light messages and shallow structure works mostly out of the box.

The going gets rough when people put half their strongly typed domain logic in the wsdl which has to be recereated on the other side. Hint: Collections != Arrays != Hashes

So, problaby not .NET but bloat related. Interoperability is a problem on all sides though.

To give a slightly different spin to the discussion: does REST solve some of the problems SOAP addresses? First there was REST, now closely related to HATEOAS... I see the acronyms are coming.

How to discover the meaning of data in the absence of a WSDL/RESTDL? Will we have microformats with links pointing to ontology-servers? Wat if its JSON?

I wonder what REST looks like five years from now, when for instance, IBM and M$ become involved in a standardization process ...

I don't know what wsdl's you were dealing with, but I met a fair amount of them who were not consumable by neither php-soap, python and even a java client while trying to read a .net one.

The reason people are writing their own envelopes in cases (like I did also) is because the tooling is not delivering up to it's promises. (Let alone that the server might not even understand the two-line-code genertated nusoap reponse because he interpretes some ws-* rules about namespaces differently.

The conclusion is: nobody wants to write his/her own envelopes.

As I understand it it's not a problem of the API but the nightmare of layers upon layers upon layers together with the promise that this will be hidden from you. (Not that having to fumble out what that REST service is actually sending back to you sounds that promising)

But the last three SOAP services I had to swallow ..err.. consume, leaked their abstraction over my desk and I had to start to xpath my way through responses from a Java service after having curl'ed my handwritten requests to the other side. This was not due to a problem with the published API but with the protocol annoyances as such. (e.g.: your OrderClass is not my order_class and your Array() is not my [] )

http://www.hackernewsers.com/ seems to have some information also.

Just some personal observations which are anectdotal, but neverthelss give a hint:

More than 2/3rd of the software companies our (web-related) company is collaborating with provide services which are not web related, they might use port 80/443 for webservices but not more.

Casual observation of people around me reveals that almost no-one uses web based software at work. Instead all these companies they work for have invested their budgets into small, medium or large desktop or mainframe packages.

At least 20 of the devices lying around the table I'm sitting at now are stuffed with embedded software. Somebody built these, someone else put a price tag on them.

While it might be equally difficult to develop your customers when selling noWeb (hey!... quick, register domain...) software, the contact with the customers is closer leading to high retention. Moreover it's easier to server them well because you have more methods than just A/B testing to reveal the impact of changes. On previous jobs writing desktop/server-client software I never had the idea that web-based software would fit the customer better.

At the same time I use a lot of web-based stuff without a monetizing strategy, meaning, they charge me nothing.

2ct.

Some time at home, some time at the office (small software comp) and since I move away from the place where I work I enjoy my laptop in the train to work on my own stuff.

Deal. You make the poll, I tell you where i work.

Aperture synthesis. For instance: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/telescopes/coast/handout.html

"We'll use JSON" is the 2.0 version I ran into during a recent project. Sigh.

Not only that. Promoting Sokrates and defying Plato, doing away with Kant while praising the rise of enlightenment is, too say the least, amusing.

I already feel irritated with the apparent need of the companies to describe themselves as having a "philosophy" (read: 2 points which distinguish them from their competitors), but this rambling is different, though not better.

To enjoy your lunchtime, i suggest though you read through until you find that Lisp is a language with moral baked right in. Bless JMC.

Signal vs. noise => Low.

I would be surprised if the said 100k-1M LOC programs would not be decomposable eventually into 100-1000 line subunits. The "faster" aspect might be overrated, but in a concise language the 1M-LOC might be reduced significantly or might be more manageable.

I Agree. If one would take "concepts a day" or structures/modules/interfaces/whatever-intelligible-concept a day I could follow he author. But lines per day? Put this way developers seem coding monkeys using smaller paper in their typewriter to produce more pages.

Your preference looks a lot like the linux-kernel list.h.

(e.g. http://isis.poly.edu/kulesh/stuff/src/klist/).

Requiring idiosyncratic setup of your list struct though.

In this context: no. It's just the astronomical description (by convention) for the 180 degrees of longitude "left" of Greenwich. But sometimes I have problems with "western" designating a cultural/political unity where Australia makes part of whereas Brazil might not (depending on context).

And indeed: when, actually, is Summer 2011 in Australia?

Google for "webmasters complain ad-blocker" or "fighting ad-blockers" to gather some opinions out there ...

Important is the life cycle of a swarm. Unlike wasps, bumble-bees and lots of other insects a bee swarm survives the winter as a whole and can start the pollination cycle earlier than other insects. Furthermore honeybees have a structured way of flying "on: plants, meaning that they do commonly not change pollination rate.

Bees are actively used for guided pollination, which is not possible with most other insects (not withstanding some experiments with bumblebees in greenhouses). Interesting fact is that you will often find the phrase "crop xxx requires yyy hives" while describing the role of bees in pollination.

hth.

About the bees you could check with http://www.sfbee.org/beekeeping.html if it's a city-related problem or just a neighborhood/plant related issue. In some busy city-areas in Europe it turns out that bees have more varied resources there than on the often mono cultural countryside.

Thanks for the tip: I will threaten my bees with a toothbrush when they are lazy next year.