Viewing profile — cchooper

On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your bo…

Although the lambda papers talk about Scheme, that's not what they're really about. They're really about... lambda. The takeaway is that many common features of languages can be th…

Well if that's not an invitation to finally start my blog, I don't know what is.

Having just quit my job for a contractor role in London, I am so glad to see this here.

The Economist and Financial Times are both modern success stories for selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.

I could make tomorrow evening, or most other dates after work.

Zero-click info for error messages would be a great resource. There are already some sites that do this for specific kinds of error (e.g. ora-code.com for Oracle errors) but a gene…

That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?

Several Lisp applications have config files that are just Lisp files run at start-up. Emacs is an example. You can (and people do) put absolutely any code in there. There's no need…

There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul. …

There is not a single great movie in your 2005 list. In fact Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much be…

If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X? If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented? At the ve…

These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidenc…

I upvoted this because it's a wonderful example of mathematical crankiness. I've always wondered why cranks are attracted to the same things: Cantor's diagonalization proof, squari…

I'll second Hacker and recommend his Wittgenstein's Place in 20th Century Analytic Philsophy as a reasonably accessible starting point.

This thought struck me when I observed the reverse process in some poor countries during the oil boom. Where people are poor and energy is expensive, there's an incentive to 'deind…

But why do you need to offer them something when you could just take it? The answer is that they will shove a gun in your face if you do. Property rights are just as much based on …

The FT called it the Great Unwinding, on the basis that the unsustainable debt/trade/current account imbalances would start to reverse their direction. It seems the only thing anyo…

It sounds to me like an expert system. What I can't see is how it's different to any other kind of expert system. Just more data?

You're both (a little) wrong! :) You can't call something an illusion just because its true nature is misunderstood. An illusion is something that looks deceptively like something …

I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are: 1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought d…

Interestingly, almost everyone posting to the Reddit thread got that it was a joke ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81s36/i_hate_li... ) but most people posting to HN…

Creole and pidgin languages are special cases though. They are simple because they are relatively new constructions, rather than because they are unwritten.

I understand why. Thanks for replying.

Other than news.arc, is there any particular aspect of the language you're focusing on?