Viewing profile — gordianknot

And authoritarians, believing in criminalization of both. Gun laws reflect a society's general property rights, and drug laws their intellectual freedom.

No, but it is a Brave New World. We're the ones out on that island with the artists and scientists. We make tools of change, but sell them off so that we can go on bike rides. It's…

Humans are social animals, and awareness of a negative state of our community makes us sad or mad, which seems meant to drive us to action. Evolution appears to be mostly about the…

I hear you, and can relate to the romance and frustration! I was in grade school when JS was released... but've been writing it for over 10 years now. I tried "everything" else, an…

I use Python at work because I have to, but I'd rather be writing JavaScript.

To me that's the value proposition actually. Invest in learning and collaborating now, then be ahead of the curve in a few years (if interested in getting hired) or be ready to cap…

Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's there, people will get it. The inf…

"Consider the source" is always relevant, and always a weak argument. Regardless of who wrote it, the main point of the article seems to be that hackers working in essentially utop…

Or we just migrate to self-driving electric cars, with the batteries serving as Intergrid energy storage.

You should write What Made Basic Different.

I'd tend to agree on those who want to replace HTML/CSS/JS with some other abstraction. What I'm suggesting is that they're arbitrarily divided and should be unified under one synt…

Built-in data structures are a big point of categorization of langs on my end. To me, the defining feature of Java is its classical structure. If you got rid of classes, you'd have…

Okay, and I would look to hashtables as the best way of describing these "sets."

Maybe they have. What system are you using?

I was only talking about the code itself, the primary metaphor of the programming language, not what the language actually represents. Most langs that I've encountered are structur…

I've never looked at CLOS. But, what I mean is the "dominant metaphor," which I suspect is still lists. I'll just go through my probably plebeian understanding. Arrays are to lists…

Really what are classes other than sugary hashtables?

Thanks for the tip. I've heard some good things about Lua, but never gone further than Wikipedia.

I mean failure like the tyrannosaurus rex. That is, from an an evolutionary perspective. Not at the arbitrary present. And I'd wager that Perl is still actually more used than Pyth…

Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all interesting failures. They are important for their effect on languages that will last longer (Lisp, ECMAScript) though. Edit: I don't mean these…

The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their ha…

What makes Lisp a "smart" language?