I was going to point this out for them. It's particularly harmful because it's in the second sentence...
500 karma · joined February 10, 2011
Readability has a completely different (if any) business model. They're following the standard approach of using venture funding to gather as much market share as possible and then exploring way to extract revenue once they have a large user-base.
Do you expect him to shell out a large sum of money to develop an Android app to _hope_ he'll regain the money through sales? There's a large amount of risk there, and it's definitely not your call to make how risk-averse he should be. How many apps are only available for Windows or OS X? As an independent developer, it makes more sense to focus on one high-quality product.
Is it a mistake for the developer of TextMate to not spread to Windows?
I'm also working on a senior undergraduate thesis project in a vaguely similar domain (static typechecking of Python, github.com/jruberg/pyty), so I have a couple questions:
- Is the code open source? If not, did you just choose to keep it closed source as your work on it for the thesis?
- The site mentions that it's statically typed with type inference; has your thesis work also involved formally proving such things?
- Is the goal of the thesis to make something academically interesting or practically useful? Personally, I've struggled with balancing time and wish I could focus more on packaging and making my project accessible.
Besides, this is just a rephrasing of the original article's argument, and doesn't counter mine at all. I am open to the possibility that there is a flaw in my argument, but where is it?
Let's try a simpler problem. Suppose we know that a
certain man has two children and we also know that the
older one is a boy. In this case we would say that the
probability that the other child is a boy is 1/2. After
all, the sex of one child is independent of the sex of
the other child. That the older child is a boy has no
bearing on the sex of the younger child.
Now suppose we know simply that a man has two children
and that one of them is a son. This time we would reason
that there is no possibility that the person has two
girls. It follows that the sexes of his two children,
ordered from oldest to youngest, are either BB, BG or GB.
Since these cases are equally likely, and since only one
of them involves having two boys, we would say the
probability that the man has two boys is 1/3.
In a visual medium, I really think that a bunch of screenshots does exactly what "show, don't tell" is trying to counter; you're just 'visually telling', not 'visually showing' (if you'll allow me to bend words). This landing page shows me that this product is something I want to try.
There does seem to be quite a bit of inconsistency on the part of the publishers, though. They complain that ebooks are destroying their business models, and then restrict Amazon and other retailers to charge comparable prices for ebooks, but they don't treat ebooks comparably themselves. Ignoring the fact that releasing an ebook doesn't require physical printing and the multitude of material and labor costs associated with that, they don't seem to apply the same editorial (and typographic) effort that they do with printed books.
On a serious note, does anyone know if there are plans to continue these courses next year? I suppose it will really depend on how well each class goes, but I mostly feel pressured to take these because I'm afraid I'll miss them.
Here are my arguments against it:
- "Explicit is better than implicit."
- If there's need for a table as reference for what is intrinsically true and what is intrinsically false, then it's clearly not "elegant" enough for people to just understand from looking at the code.
- Conventions vary across languages. You're basically forcing anyone who looks at your code who's not used tons of Python (and who would otherwise completely understand the code) to look up that table.