Viewing profile — al-king

Oh cool, his Bondi Language / Pattern Calculus was the first thing I thought of seeing this, so I guess I wasn't too far wrong.

It's recently gotten a great deal easier to play with thanks to Strudel, a JS variant. Strudel REPL: https://strudel.tidalcycles.org/ One interesting feature of Tidalcycles is Eucl…

I think _entirely_ ignoring the kinds of considerations it covers is such a typical failure case for inexperienced programmers (or non-career coders) that it's an excellent prod to…

lexi lambda of "Parse, Don't validate" fame has compared this favourably with SICP ( https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/a/7481 ).

Important to note that the book is an adaptation of content from Sussman and Hanson's Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming course[1]. My sense is that the 'Flexibility' angl…

Peter Norvig and Noam Chomsky ~famously clashed on this, and Norvig's argument shared a lot of similarities. https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

My friend Phil put this together for a React Native project, when he got fed up with the mess that standard Javascript module imports and direct dependencies created when introduci…

Let's be clear: I don't think this article has created any confusion. It's manipulative, like a lot of headlines that hit the front page - you click on it expecting one thing, and …

If anything WSL2.0 has made it clearer than WSL is a development environment, not a universal compatibility layer.

I don't think the advice entails lower quality discourse. The prescription here, read literally, is to say the same thing, phrased in a way that invites relevant discussion. Langua…

The article is pretty up-front and unapologetic about that conceit: the argument is "that mythology isn't useful, here's a better one." That said, it's certainly a bait-and-switch …

Clojure isn't a Common Lisp implementation, it's a different Lisp dialect with an emphasis on immutable data and interacting with host systems like the Java VM. This is Clozure: ht…

apparently not!

ah, well, for preexisting Keybase users with linked GitHub accounts it fits that description - I found out about it because I got given some without doing anything.

The 'airdrop' analogy doesn't really capture anything about the involvement of branching ledgers, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair to use the same giveaway jargon the community's…

It's mostly interesting biologically - it relates specifically to how synapses' vicinity to the main cell body affects their action, or more generally how the spatial configuration…

They're researching the behaviour of real neurons by making computational models, rather than creating a "neural network" model for AI purposes, so the definition of "single neuron…

'boot repl' works just fine too. Imperative builds are a different mindset - where lein projects feel like a different language which emulates Clojure syntax, boot feels more like …

If you're not into his style, GEB can be a bit perverse, but Hofstadter is genuinely excited by the ideas (and the games and wordplay he uses to convey them). If you look at the su…

On the thermostat, I get the impression McCarthy was being a bit obtuse just to goad Searle a little. What he was illustrating is that simple systems can exhibit apparent intention…

Dead on! Thinking in terms of "choosing" to do things rather than "needing" to do things has really helped me recently.

Fry's point in particular is not that IQ is bad or useless; it clearly indicates some kind of talent. It's that treasuring IQ to the point that you join a society for people with h…

Point 3 is poorly thought out. Speaking carefully includes emphasising important points. Think of communication the same way Don Norman thinks about design. 15 is iffy. I'd prefer …

I don't think he gets what makes Circles good. Their privacy and asymmetry is exactly why I like them. You don't want other people knowing 'how you classify' them, and it doesn't m…