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What Is Code?

bloomberg.com

261–270 of 368 posts

Re: What Is Code?

#261

I hate to sound hyperbolic, but I can't overstate how impressive this work is. For me, it evokes nothing so much as Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine [0] for opening up an obscure world (the one many HN posters live in, but obscure to most people). I am amazed both by the technical fidelity and by the quality of the story telling. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

I agree. This is the best piece of writing I think I've ever read on the web. This touches on everything, and so accurately, and so concisely... this article is giving me a stroke I think.

Re: What Is Code?

#263
post #143

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…

This is a really ugly, selfish attitude. It's like opposing literacy because it will put pressure on jobs for those who can read and write. It's circling the wagons around people who had the privilege and opportunity to learn these things before everybody else.

Re: What Is Code?

#264
> Writing this article was a nightmare because I know that no matter how many people review it, I’ll have missed something, some thread that a reader can pull and say, “He missed the essence of the subject.” I know you’re out there, ashamed to have me as an advocate. I accept that. I know that what I describe as “compilation” is but a tiny strand of that subject; I know that the ways I characterize programming languages are reductive. This was supposed to be a brief article, and it became a brief book. So my apologies for anything that absolutely should have been here, but isn’t. They gave me only one magazine.

Re: What Is Code?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres tons of successes, we just refuse to count them. Photoshop (as hinted in the article), is a super special purpose language for doing image operations. It no longer "looks" like coding, so we don't count it as coding for the masses. Excel is a much more general purpose language used by tons of "non-coders" (and arguably the most popular programming language on earth). Again, doesn't (often) look like normal pro…

Excel is a perfect example. The core Excel experience is basically functional programming on a virtual machine with a matrix address space laid out visually right in front of you. It even looks like traditional programming if you dive into the VBA stuff, which plenty of non-technical specialists, including MBAs and managers, do on a regular basis in the pursuit of solving their problems. Any specialist user willing t…

Thanks to John Foreman's book "Data Smart" I now regularly test small-scale machine learning problems in Excel. Sure, a developer will translate the end result to scikit-learn or AzureML, but this is stuff that's easily available to even mildly-technical enthusiasts.

Re: What Is Code?

#266
post #143

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…

This is a really ugly, selfish attitude. It's like opposing literacy because it will put pressure on jobs for those who can read and write. It's circling the wagons around people who had the privilege and opportunity to learn these things before everybody else.

Agreed, we need more Bloomerg articles that increase the supply of financial and negotiating skills.

Re: What Is Code?

#267
i viewed source to see how they did the custom skin and noticed this:

    if (!console.log) console.log = function(){}
shouldnt it be if(window.console) ?

Re: What Is Code?

#268

I hate to sound hyperbolic, but I can't overstate how impressive this work is. For me, it evokes nothing so much as Tracy Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine [0] for opening up an obscure world (the one many HN posters live in, but obscure to most people). I am amazed both by the technical fidelity and by the quality of the story telling. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/03164...

I agree. This is the best piece of writing I think I've ever read on the web. This touches on everything, and so accurately, and so concisely... this article is giving me a stroke I think.

I've never seen anything like this on a website before. The writing, the formatting, the structure, the animations; it's near perfect.

Re: What Is Code?

#269
post #143

Watch it when capitalists pushing incessantly people to learn coding. They're trying very hard to cut the costs of their input "materials" and they will do everything that they could to devalue us in every way possible. So, if you're a talented and competent dev, be super aggressive with these predators and take everything your hands can grab before they have the upper hand and show us their true colors. Happy Coding…

Let us keep the sacred arts secret, brothers.

EDIT: Just being sarcastic. You are clearly incompetent, coasting along in your job, and afraid of someone with 6 months of experience being better than you.

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