Viewing profile — mattjones

That is a great demonstration that Scheme's problems are not Lisp problems. I'm hoping that we're about to see a lot more experimentation with new Lisp dialects.

From the point of view of a person at an instant in time, libraries are a concern. But when we're talking about Scheme being displaced by Python at MIT, where Scheme was developed …

Libraries aren't the issue. I use Chicken Scheme for a few things, which has plenty of libraries and a fantastic package system called eggs. Sure, other languages like Perl and Pyt…

I don't think "self-aware" is the right way to summarize the results of these tests. One thing that this article doesn't say is that the mirror test is geared toward animals with g…

How different my experience has been. I'm an avid drawer and programmer. I don't know how similar the mental processes of drawing and programming are. But what I do know is that th…

I am using Sequel.

with Ruby, you only have one choice. I disagree vehemently. I myself have started using Ramaze, and like it better than Rails. In any case, it's more important to me to know Ruby w…

I don't know the specific reasons why CL and Scheme are not very popular for those things; my general answer is that they're adapted to other things (like classrooms and smart stud…

Actually, it might be more accurate to think of programming languages as genes rather than animals, or at least, to include programmers as an important part of the phenotype. A com…

"Unpopular" needs to be further qualified. Rather than ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular?", ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular for X?". Lisp is actually reasonably popular for some things, and …

Interesting question. Perhaps we will witness a renewed proliferation of domesticated animals in this millennium, a sort of "domestication 2.0". Robotics may actually help inspire …

This excites me. If they become common, people are going to spend a lot of time exploring the world -- an antidote to sitting behind your laptop all day. These things would make gr…

Hungarian notation, perhaps.

To some degree, using open classes is just how you write functions in Ruby. Say there exists a class called Errors in some Ruby library. It doesn't have an each() method, but I'd l…

I don't think the problem is developers being afraid of SQL. There are still lots of Perl and PHP programmers who don't use ORMs. Instead, ORMs have been sold on the idea of databa…

Constructing queries actually isn't one of the things ORMs do very well, so far. What they do well is provide a layer of logic for things like validation, triggers, and security. W…

Here's a possibility: I've noticed that the more time I spend here, the less tolerance I have for other sites. So while I spend more time here than I used to, I spend much less tim…

As a primary interface for blogging, perhaps not. But using irb and your ORM as an admin interface to your database? Absolutely.

And it doesn't matter anyway. He's talking about adding records to the DB and uploading images, the same things you'd do through a web interface.

There's a place in the comments of the last article in this series where a guy called Tony says, "I have one word: Scheme." And chromatic replies, "I wonder if a language that stic…