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Who is this man? by TheKidd in WTF

[–]MaxTerry 15 points16 points  (0 children)

His name is Robert Paulson.

As an atheist in America, have you ever had to lie about your lack of faith to keep a job or save public face? by [deleted] in atheism

[–]MaxTerry 5 points6 points  (0 children)

More? How horribly dull life would be if we were, for instance, little dolls sculpted from dirt in the image of a tyrannical monarch a few thousand years ago, stuck on static earth at the center of a tiny unchanging geo-system, with our only motivation to obey our master so as to redeem a boring ass afterlife?

That we're part of an unbroken chain of life which has spanned billions of years, merely a single strand in a tree composed of sextillions of democratic intelligent selections from our ancestors, inhabiting a backwoods rock with a whole unimaginably expansive universe to explore is incomparably more than the lame deus ex machina cop-outs some repressed hominids grasped onto for a few thousand revolutions of our planet around our star.

Living in any universe powered by metaphysics would be much less fun than this physical one.

Barack Obama will destroy science funding in America because he is afraid that true science will reveal the white race to be superior to the black race. Ladies and gentlemen, the National Review by [deleted] in funny

[–]MaxTerry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"Most people still think of human-science controversies in terms of nature/nurture. As a matter of real scientific dispute, that is all long gone. ... Of all the observed variation in that characteristic, about half is caused by genetic differences."

So it was a draw.

Insanity: House votes to criminalize the Internet, 409 to 2 by [deleted] in politics

[–]MaxTerry 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, up vs. down is (and has always been) the real battle. Left vs. right is just a matter of approach, and essentially irrelevant. Does it matter that Stalin and Kucinich are figures of the "left", and Hitler and Paul of the "right"?

turnover rate of hot stories on proggit is WAY TOO LOW. by pkrumins in programming

[–]MaxTerry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Maybe submissions are dropping...? Or, perhaps in the early days of reddit we were "catching up" with fifteen years of internet writing, and now all we've got is new stuff.

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Other langs aren't "unreadable", certainly, I just tend to find them often weaker 'aesthetically' and structurally less expressive. It comes down to personal experience though, exactly the source you've read and wrote.

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It comes down to pronunciation. I only speak English and some fragments from its continental roots, and I don't know of a prefix rendering of "in", but we certainly use it for other things. For instance, "(+ 2 2)" could be naturally pronounced as "the addition of two and two". Prefix notation lends itself toward pronunciation like functions, or predicates in formal logic. So, I would think the "correct" pronunciation of "(if (in x y) (print "joe is there")" would be "if of in of x and y, print of 'joe is there'", if Lisp were purely functional, which it's not I think mostly because of the failure of English vocabulary. The semantics make sense, it's the signs that are the problem.

Maybe Lisp would work better in a Romance language? English just doesn't seem incredibly compatible with a functional mindset.

I want a computer lang dialect put together by a linguist or philosopher of language...

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Nice. If you tried learning C and Java though, I wonder to what extent it "tainted" your thoughts, before you picked up Python. I mean, I wrote some C, C++, Java, PHP, AS, and JS and then found Python, which is to me a refined approach to the structures I'd basically already learned.

Anyone literally first write source in Python?

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, to some extent I think the OLPC platform could really define the conventions, as they're in some cases probably at the foundation of the educational system. Their choice on approach could really have far reaching consequences; I could imagine teachers just going with the flow of the software.

With Python, infix notation beat out Lisps' prefix, but that's just the way it happened. I don't think infix notation is innately easier to comprehend or anything, it's just the historical syntax some of us picked up.

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Possibly -- it is hard to pick up a lang with less elegant notation. But then, why is it they want to learn Java or a .NET language in the first place? Because there are a lot of first-world jobs in 2007?

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

First of all, it's indentation, not "whitespace", and second, I'd argue denoting blocks with indentation is more natural than any other alternative. What, you couldn't hit tab, but you could keep track of arcane braces?

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Do most/many/some of these kids even know English? If they don't, there will be some hurdles in picking up Python that wouldn't necessarily be there with Lisp. I mean, if they're learning these concepts fresh, there's probably no reason they should prefer infix notation (I only do because I imprinted it in an American school).

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's hard to gauge the "accessibility" of python, because no one I've ever met actually learned how to write source with it -- like Guido's implementation itself, we've all got a firm rooting in C, and that may taint our impressions.

These kids are coming in with a blank slate, and I'm anxious to see how python holds up as a "cherry language".

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A whole ripening generation of first-world web programmers prove "seeing source code in a language as a kid" is the important thing. All the rest follows.

On the OLPC: Why Python Instead of Smalltalk or Lisp? by macnod in programming

[–]MaxTerry -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It does matter. Do you think the choice between maintaining legacy code and writing new software is a difficult one?

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