treerex

What's wrong with old software. If it works, why change? Just because something is "new" and "cool"? C'mon.

I'd be interested in seeing some screen shots to get a feel for its integration and new features.

Though, IIRC, in the book the pilot of the plane was an actual airline pilot: hard to defend against an "inside job".

"Concrete Mathematics" by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik is probably the best preparation for tackling TAoCP, though it is not light reading either.

You could also look at "Mathematics for Computer Science" by Lehman, Leighton, and Meyer. It is available at http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/fall10/mcs-ftl.pdf .

Absolutely nothing wrong with Fortran. In the 90s I worked on source-level optimizations in the HPF (High-Performance Fortran) compiler at Thinking Machines: not having a numerical processing background (and having only used Fortran for one course in college, which was Microsoft Fortran with each compiler phase on a separate floppy) it was fascinating to work on, and I found Fortran 90 to be pretty compelling in a lot of numeric operations. There is a lot of code out there that was written and debugged years ago and there is no reason to change.

I suppose it could, but the point of the object being defined as an unordered collection is because the most straight-forward way of implementing this is through a hash table, where the order of the keys cannot be guaranteed without additional work. I'm sure they didn't consider a parser randomly permuting the lexical order of the pairs as something a sane person would do.

> [B]ut the keybindings are horrendous. Even if they don't cause hand pain they're long-winded and distracting.

Ha, after 26 years using Emacs I find Vim's keybindings long-winded and distracting. To each their own. However, unlike many people I don't dismiss vi because of unfamiliarity, or use them as an excuse not to learn the editor. I try to use it all the time, but I can never seem to train myself to do non-trivial things with it.

I have the similar problem with other editors: I've seen people rave about Sublime Text, yet none of its killer features (modulo multiple selections) really strike me as worth switching. And any of its features I think I want I could (conceivably) implement in Emacs, so...

I always get a chuckle out of people complaining that Emacs is too slow. Maybe I've just "gotten used to it", but when I first started using it I was sharing a Sun 3 with ten or fifteen other people.

I'd also argue that modes in other editors are ad hoc regexp parsers in some other form... regexps, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, work well.

And yes, virtually everything is implemented in Emacs Lisp. That's the whole point.

People have been trying to build "another programmable editor" for 30 decades. It hasn't happened yet. Why do you think it will happen soon?

The article makes it sound like Apple has never had a presence in Cambridge: ATG East was there in the late-80s through 1996. After Jobs came back the office was shut down. (Source: I was there and was laid off because of it.)

The fact that they are setting up shop in the CIC makes me think this is just an experiment to see how well a remote development site will work in Apple's New World Order.

Don't forget that the NSA is, when all is said and done, a Government organization with all the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy. I have no doubt that their electronic mail systems are under the control of an IT staff that is just as competent as any many of us deal with in the corporate world. But they have the added restrictions that secrecy entails: it would not surprise me if the server software is a decade old because that was the version they vetted way back when and it has never been updated.

The groups that work in the basement do not have such restrictions: or at least have very different restrictions. This dichotomy is not a surprise to anyone who thinks about it for any length of time.

> this is harder to read than the callback approach right now

Why do you think this is (I'm asking honestly, not trying to be snarky). Is it because you are not familiar with reading Lisp? The notation used to access channels is confusing? Unfamiliarity with the go-block concept?

It took me a while to fully internalize the combination of syntax and power of go blocks, but now that I have reading core.async code (I have not yet had a need to actually use them, and no time to port an existing codebase) is much easier.

I question whether the statement that callbacks are easier to read and understand is merely due to being accustomed to them. Core.async represents a radical departure from existing designs, and that can be jarring. Does this mean better syntactic sugar won't be created as developers gain experience? Or course not.

Any of the later (or heck, even the earlier) Infocom text adventures are far from minimalistic. And contemporary interactive fiction written with Inform quite complex. Far more so than this.

I was in high school in 1985 and our computer club built a Heathkit HERO-1, which had a 6808 processor and also had to be programmed through the hex keypad. After a few months of hand writing machine code and typing the opcodes into machine, I wrote a simple assembler on the Apple //e that would then download the assembled programs to the robot through the RS-232 interface. So much fun.

They touted themselves as a "Google Killer". They basically came out of the gate claiming to be the best search engine in the world, and then they went down in spectacular flames. Whoever developed their launch PR should have been put up against a wall and shot.

If they had rolled their technology with less fanfare they may have made a minor dent in the market, but even then its unlikely. But at least then they could have taken their IP and gone into the Enterprise Search space and perhaps have gotten bought out by someone evil.

Because they originate from a time where plain text was what you had, and the format was created to be consistent and easy to format by hand. I still prefer my specifications to be in plain text so that I can view them easily and quickly.

Of course Springer has one of the most onerous paywalls I've come across. I hadn't heard of the Papers acquisition: I use it on my iPad but only because it sucks less than every other solution I've looked at.

Zotero is unlikely to go the way of Mendeley: may be worth checking out.

It depresses me that GLS was a better programmer at 17 than I probably will ever be.

I took it as a reference to the clitoris being "Nature's Rubik's Cube" --- the most difficult puzzle in the world. Pretty funny, actually.

"PC"? Watson's hardware weighs in at around 40 tons total.

"The Pragmatic Programmer" is one of the best books on programming I've read. When it first came out I read it and then went out and bought a copy for every member of my team. It's fabulous.

This is where Common Lisp comes in: through macros you can expand the language to include the abstractions your application needs. PG talks about this extensively. The issue is that doing this requires a deep understanding of the language, and many programmers are not able to grasp what the CL toolbox gives them.

On MacOS X and Unixen it is just a command-line toolchain, though the Emacs support is excellent. On Windows I believe the Harlequin IDE is available.

Apple's Dylan environment was never released in source form.

Most Lisps do this as well.

Wow, that brings back so many memories: thank you for posting this.

I loved Merlin.

For me the advantage of Emacs over a set of IDEs is its ability to support multiple languages very well within a single unified environment. In a typical day I'm writing Common Lisp, C++, XML, XSLT, shell scripts, documentation. The only time I'm not working in Emacs is when I switch to Eclipse for the odd Java project, because that's what everyone else uses in my department.

Have a I spent a lot of time customizing my environment? Absolutely. But it fits me like a well oiled leather glove and makes me incredibly productive. I don't need to learn separate environments for Lisp, C++, XML...

A lot of this is personal preference and familiarity. When I sit down with Visual Studio or XCode I'm completely lost and feel like I'm wearing shackles.

This initial rollout is not intended to be used by doctors to determine (or even suggest) treatments for patients. IBM is usually very careful to point this out: they are not looking to replace doctors, at least not yet.

(Source: work for a company that has worked with IBM on this)

Huh, first thing I thought of when seeing "BBRY" was Burberry (which is BRBY on the London Stock Exchange).

This is fabulous to see, very excited to download and give it a go. They're very responsive to questions, comments, bug reports, and are an all around great group of guys.