ruricolist

I do this in Common Lisp. It also makes sense as a technique for documentation: why leave examples rusting in comments when you can incorporate them into the program?

Add a Quickcheck-ish type-based test case generator and you start to blur the line between tests and types.

Clojure's persistent vectors and hashmaps are both the same data structure, the hash array mapped trie, which can be implemented both simply and efficiently. If you look at the Java code in the Clojure source, there are no tricks, beyond the cleverness of the HAMT itself.

Keene's "Guide to CLOS" is good for understanding how CLOS was intended to be used. (Actually, since I read it, I use CLOS less, since I have a better sense of what it's good for.)

My question would be: how deterministic is this algorithm? On a large corpus the program outputs something in the "style" of the composer. (This happens to human composers too, sometimes: late in life they start turning out self-parodies.) But given a single piece, can the EMI algorithms (without jiggering) produce the same piece, or a piece indistinguishable from it? Unless it could do that, I don't see in what way it replaces or replicates the composer.

How do you account for disagreeing, not with someone's conclusions, but with the means that they used to arrive at them?

I usually think it in vain to post a comment on something that I fundamentally disagree with, because I rarely find an author with a strong point of view who has not already found a choir to preach to, so that speaking up would be futile—I would be drowned out, or villanized.

The only kinds of comments which seem to me to be worth making are those in which: You agree, and offer some novel corroboration; You agree with the conclusion, but disagree with the means; Or you raise a question, without treating of the conclusion at all.

The obvious possibility would be to reproduce the entire hierarchy, but to a different purpose.

DH0: "Stop agreeing with me, you're making me look bad." DH1: "You should let someone else make that argument." DH2: "That (arrogant,presumptuous,juvenile) tone won't go over well." DH3: "You're going to offend people who believe X." DH4: "I heard an argument Y against this," or "How do you solve problem Y"? DH5: "Have you considered solution Z' to problem Z?" DH6: "You're formulating your own belief incorrectly."

But I don't think that your bounds hold here. DH0 is still maximally unhelpful, but DH6 may be just as bad. DH1 may be the wisest advice that you can receive. DH3 is less helpful than DH2 (better to be asked to express your beliefs more politely, than to be asked to conceal them). And DH4 is more polite than DH5 (better to solicit the author's opinion on a difficulty, than to obtrude your own).

The lesson itself is less troubling than these teachers' undertaking to shape the children's beliefs without any parental involvement or input--not, note, as part of a curricular course of study at a school, but in an after-school program at a children's center.

Still: If they'd done this to me as a kid, I'd have brought in one of my Lego pirate ships, sacked and plundered Legotown (Legograd?), and shared the booty with anyone who volunteered to join my crew.