zephyrfalcon

Um, the title of the article is "Why I’m NOT ready to switch from Mac to Windows 10"...

"""When starting a new project from scratch, I see no reason NOT to use python 3. Maybe if a few libs you depend heavily on are still not ported."""

wxPython comes to mind... :-/ Also PyGame, although it seems that there are now development releases for 3.x.

Location: Archer, FL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, unfortunately this isn't an option right now.

Technologies: Python, Prolog, Scheme, C, MS SQL Server, AngularJS, Delphi, Postgres, SQL, Linux, OCaml, HTML/CSS, etc

Resume/CV: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Email: zephyrfalcon@gmail.com

Looking for work, part-time or full-time.

Location: Archer, FL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, unfortunately this isn't an option right now.

Technologies: Python, Prolog, Scheme, C, MS SQL Server, AngularJS, Delphi, HTML/CSS, etc

Resume/CV: http://aquila.blue/misc/resume.html

Email: zephyrfalcon@gmail.com

The problem is that it's free. Whenever the client has a problem of any kind with their software, this allows them to toss it at you immediately, at no cost to them whatsoever. Charging a fee, even if it isn't a very high fee, would probably make them think twice about doing this... it would encourage them to look at their problem for a few minutes at least, to see if they can't solve it themselves, before they decide it to hand it over to you and incur costs.

Hm, in Python, 2 + 3 is just sugar for (2).__add__(3). Not that different; Python just doesn't allow symbols like '+' in method names.

Here's a video of another version (although I'm not sure if it's available for download (yet)):

Happy Flappy ~ http://vimeo.com/87434521

For what it's worth, I have related projects on Github (although they haven't been updated in a while):

https://github.com/zephyrfalcon/magicripper2 (to scrape cards from Gatherer)

https://github.com/zephyrfalcon/magicquery (to query the card database)

I also made a set of files (not on Github (yet)) that indicate a card's keywords and other properties (e.g. flying, protection, split card, etc etc). I found it very hard (read: ~impossible) to extract this kind of info reliably from the card text.

So am I...

At least 16 hours a day lately. :-/ (No joke.)

Can somebody explain what is so bad about seeing individual pixels? Serious question from an oldschooler.

I did something similar a while back: http://zephyrfalcon.org/weblog/arch_d7_2003_11_29.html#e420

It was more of an experiment than anything else. Certainly not too practical. :) One nice thing is that you can easily "scale" the image by changing the size of the table cells.

4DOS used to have this. It was especially useful back in the day with the 8.3 DOS filenames, which often weren't very descriptive. It's nice to see this feature return.

Well, yeah. Admittedly the phrase "being good with people" is kinda vague. In most jobs you have to deal with people in some way or another. But when people use this phrase, they often mean something similar to "extroverted", "talkative", "persuasive", etc. Like for jobs in sales, these qualities (?) are often required and expected. However, I don't see how they matter much in a desk job, assuming you manage to communicate well (in some form or another) with your co-workers and clients.

This comment nails it:

"""Please read "Quiet - The power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking" by Susan Cain

Saying its a habit is saying that you can easily overcome it. I don't feel it's a choice, do you know how many times I thought about ending my life because I hated being born an introvert and shy?

This article might as well be called: If you are shy, its you're fault, stop being lazy and change.

Once gays are accepted the biggest issue is probably going to be that introverts dont feel accepted in this extravert world."""

The conflation of terms like shyness and introversion (etc) has been discussed before, so I'll leave that one alone. The last two sentences of the comment are more interesting. If you are shy, is that necessarily bad? And is it your "fault"?

The other issue applies as well. It's not OK to fire someone because of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, etc; but firing someone because they are "shy" or "introverted" or "not a people person" seems to be perfectly acceptable and legal. Shouldn't that be considered discrimination as well? (Assuming that "being good with people" isn't a requirement of the job.)

The actual title of the article is: "Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need to Succeed".

That doesn't seem correct. I know of at least two Scheme implementations that have reader macros (Racket and Chicken); there might be more. However, whether their reader macros are as powerful as CL's [1], I don't know.

[1] as demonstrated e.g. here: http://letoverlambda.com/index.cl/guest/chap4.html

"""But Common Lisp is so flexible that at every stage in your development, you can tweak and twist things left and right, but in the end you still get a convincing, clean, and efficient design. As far as I can tell, this is not possible in any other language (not even Scheme)."""

Of course, this kind of begs the question... why not in Scheme? Considering it's part of the Lisp family as well, what makes CL more flexible? (Taking into account that "Scheme the language", as based on R5RS, R6RS, etc, is limited; but a particular Scheme implementation might have everything & the kitchen sink.)

Phone calls and meetings...

In cases like these, parents are usually the last to find out...

Reading the title, I immediately thought of Python's "is not" operator as "prior art". However, it seems to me that the patent is specifically about an operator called "IsNot" (one word) used in a BASIC compiler. So that might not be the same at all (but then again, IANAL etc).

Still, it seems a pretty silly patent... :-/

I'm not sure if this matters or not, but the submitted title calls it "Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion", and 10.8 is indeed the version number I would expect; yet this number is nowhere to be found, neither on Apple's page nor in Gruber's announcement. Instead, it's just called "OS X Mountain Lion" everywhere. I wonder if they dropped the version number, or are downplaying it? But for what reason?

The racist/anti-Obama/anti-Democrat remarks are getting many more "likes" than those with opposing viewpoints. That does seem kind of odd for a site like NBC; I would expect the numbers to be more balanced, at the very least. I wonder if an influential right-wing site linked to the article, and this is what's driving all the traffic.

You had me until "Dynamic typing will come to be perceived as a quaint, bizarre evolutionary dead-end in the history of programming."

It is probably the most controversial feature. Most people either hate it or love it. I think it's hated mostly by those who don't use Python, and well-loved by those who do.

It was not the first programming language to use significant whitespace, but it is probably the most mainstream one that does, and it did pave the way for other languages to do the same. So it makes sense (IMHO) that sometimes other languages copy this feature, because it makes code shorter and more readable.

I haven't really heard any good arguments against significant whitespace, just the usual "but when I copy & paste a block the indentation might be off" (so use the indent/dedent function in your editor) and "I cannot mix tabs and spaces" (which you shouldn't do to begin with). The "hate" is mostly because people are not used to it. Not unlike Lisp's parentheses...

""" It's much easier for the average person to spot an unbalanced parenthesis that an incorrectly sized whitespace."""

Is it? Assuming you use a fixed-width font, any incorrect/inconsistent indentation should stand out like a sore thumb. More so than counting { }s in nested blocks. (Of course, decent editors help with both cases, so I think it's essentially a non-issue.)

Yeah, because it totally didn't work for Python... :3

Seems like an awfully small percentage though...

An OK introduction to Forth. But this doesn't seem right:

There are two types of programming language that cover 99.44% (the Chambers Constant) of programming language design.

1. Languages designed and promulgated primarily by academics like Prolog, Lisp, Haskell, Pascal, etc.

2. Languages designed and promulgated primarily by corporate entities (factoring government as a corporate entity) such as C, Java, Erlang, Ada, etc.

Where does that leave languages like Python, Perl, Ruby?

"In fact if you go back in time and look at some of the first versions of Python it's a very, very ugly language and it does not come as a surprise that not too many people took notice of Python in the early days."

I don't know... Python in the early 90s looked pretty much the same as it does now. Unless you mean that some features (or lack of them) required inelegant workarounds?

I think most machines were just not powerful enough yet in the 90s to make Python a viable solution for many problems. As computers got faster, that became less of an issue. Also, there was already a scripting language with a large following back then (Perl, naturally). Whether it was "ugly" probably had little to do with it. (Quite the contrary in fact, I recall that Python was often perceived as clean, elegant, concise and very readable.)