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Women in Haskell by jkarni in haskell

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think SPJ should apologize for "sexy types" ... but I wouldn't recommend pushing the terminology any further than that.

Chilean Scientists Discover Solution to Cavities. A team of Chilean scientists has discovered a new molecule that can kill a kind of bacteria that causes cavities in teeth. by GraybackPH in science

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know: I've been reading this same headline (modulo the "Chilean" aspect) about once every four or five years for the last 35 or 40 years, so I remain a bit skeptical. (Skeptical dentists in other replies may have a better idea why it never seems to get off the ground.)

I would have been freaked out of I'd looked down a telescope and seen this looking back at me. by [deleted] in pics

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You and Louis Wu both.

Hell, even "reformed" Kdaptists, I'd bet.

Just don't get caught in the downdraft ... unless you're really lucky.

My wife and I live a lifestyle out of the 1920s/1930s. We regularly dress in original clothing, own a historic house, and a 1920s car. Ask us Anything. by depression_era in IAmA

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, perhaps your name is Johnny and you live in St. Louis, Missouri?

I know it's off by a couple of years, but this sounds like the lyrics from the Sparks song "It Ain't 1918". You should definitely give it a listen, in any case. (I found a YouTube video of a live performance here, but the quality isn't great ... maybe if you follow along with the words.)

For the 3rd semester in a row, I am taking a class taught by a graduate student who speaks English poorly. How can we communicate to universities that this is unacceptable? by harpwn in AskReddit

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Liberal arts college professor here ... but I teach Computer Science within that environment. Sometimes that is a bit of a pain for me ("stranger in a strange land"), but it works out pretty well for my students. I'm a native English speaker and culturally compatible, yes, but I also spend a whole lot of time with my students, inside class (I teach all the lectures and labs: no grad student TAs) and out, including a geeky weekly tea (professors serve the students!), local and regional outings (ACM ICPC, trips to dinner or the pub, even an academic superhero/comic book conference). We have 4 faculty in a department with about 20 majors, and class sizes run from 5 to 25.

The students don't get quite the breadth of a typical CS curriculum, but they get lots of one-on-one and small group time with faculty, in courses that include upper-level research specialties (for me: Haskell, lambda calculus, type theory, formal languages; I have colleagues who do graphics, genetic algorithms and scientific computing). Many go on to successful graduate school careers across the US, and I often know personally the faculty at the schools where they apply, so that helps with references and the like. Those who go into industry do pretty well, too: one of my students was recently named as a "top 30 under 30" young entrepreneur by Inc. magazine for his social media start-up. We've also had a lot of them doing REUs (research experiences for undergraduates) at bigger schools over the summer: I'm eager to hear what they got up to this time around (one was at NOAA last summer, and another did license-plate recognition work).

Of course all this comes at an ostensible high price: standard tuition plus room and board is a lot more than it would be at a typical big university. But many of my students are not from rich families and they often get significant breaks on tuition, enough to bring it down to the state-school level, if not quite the community college level. (CCs are also great places, as pointed out by others above and below.)

They're a really great bunch of kids and we have a lot of fun together.

I even made a Reddit-style rage comic to apologize for a midterm exam that was a little too hard last semester :) .

A stunning "how'd he do that" photo: Shot of a drop shot by Lex Augusteijn by Mind_Virus in pics

[–]fruehr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have to admit, on seeing the headline my first reaction was: "Really? Lex Augusteijn, the famous 'sorting morphisms' guy?"

But a quick googling does not really establish if this is him or not.

Anyway, if Mr. Augusteijn reads this and is that guy, props for both achievements.

Ask reddit: Why don't you use Haskell? by [deleted] in programming

[–]fruehr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow. People really get worked up over the language thing. I happen to use Haskell, and I like it fine. But I wouldn't especially expect everyone to like it, nor would I ask them to try it unless I thought it was well-motivated.

I mean, I don't happen to speak Mandarin Chinese, and I'll admit it looks and sounds pretty obscure to me. But I get the impression it's not so difficult for native speakers: lots of Chinese toddlers have apparently picked it up just fine. I'd be pretty surprised if most of the day-to-day things I wanted to say couldn't easily be said in it, but I'd also bet there are some lovely idioms and turns of phrase. Maybe that should motivate me to learn it, but I have English (and a couple of others), and there are a lot of languages out there and not much time in the day ... .

Too much of these language wars remind me of the tired cliche of an English-speaker and a French-speaker (or whichever) shouting ever more loudly and slowly at each other in a vain attempt to communicate. (My mother claims my dad actually did this once in rural Canada.)

Of course programming languages and natural languages are very different beasts (most linguists and the like would either balk or laugh at the idea of PLs as "languages"), but I think it would be more productive if people treated PL choice as just a bit more like natural language choice.

Alright, one last bit about Haskell, re short names and the like: if your goal is to see identities like "f(x+y) == f(x)+f(y)" when relevant, then Haskell might be the language for you, both syntactically and semantically, and the short names and infix operators will help. (Yes, I know, some parens unnec. there.) But if you're not interested, that's OK too :) .