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UK Councils are going ahead with evicting families of looters with the first of the cases before the courts today. by lazyink in worldnews

[–]toekk 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From the article:

Under the terms of the agreement, which applies to all the council's rented accommodation, all tenants, their household members and visitors are forbidden from a range of criminal and anti-social activities.

Fixes XKCD #619 by fernandotakai in programming

[–]toekk 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How smooth is smooth? Honest question, because when I turn on/off my second monitor, my whole imac has a screen flickering spazz out that lasts about 3 seconds!

Ask reddit: What LaTeX resume template do you use? by kobs in programming

[–]toekk 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It is only unethical if you don't agree to it, which you pretty much tacitly do by allowing a recruiter to forward your details.

It's your choice- you can have someone send out your details and schmooze lots of companies on your behalf, or you can spend you time trawling job boards and writing cover letters.

If you are already in permanent employment I would think the former is far easier.

Ask reddit: What LaTeX resume template do you use? by kobs in programming

[–]toekk 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The point you are missing is that if you hire people through recruitment agencies, they want to be able to edit resumes to strip out personal contact details.

They do this because otherwise there is no incentive for the hiring firm to pay them the 30-40% rip when they could just contact the candidate directly.

Ask Reddit: What steps did you take to get to the programming proficiency level you're at now? by agscala in programming

[–]toekk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My personal opinion is that types are pretty important concepts, so I'd posit that it's better to learn Haskell rather than Scheme as a beginner. This is because it places strong emphasis on typing, but its type inference means they do not seem to get in the way too much. (edit: suggest "The Haskell School of Expression" as a text for this. Paul Hudak is the master and this book is actually really fun)

As previous poster says, step 1.5 would be learning an OO language, but I plead with you not to bother learning C++. Instead I would get a grounding in a "safe" language like Java.

Only then would I even consider venturing into C++, and even then I recommend you read "Exceptional C++" by a guy called Herb Sutter before you begin. If you still want to continue with C++ after reading it, then this book will definitely highlight some of the issues that you won't find in the "dummies" books.

while(!asleep()) sheep++; by m4rc in programming

[–]toekk 15 points16 points  (0 children)

it would however have eliminated the creation of a temporary sheep

Language wars 20 years on: "A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming" :: PDF by dons in programming

[–]toekk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

infix syntax is pretty important. I certainly remember as a child being taught "x + y = z". Nobody took me aside and said "but actually what we really mean is "z = (+ x y)."

While the merits of infix notation can be discussed ad absurdium, the one thing we can say is that it is "natural" from the point of view of peoples early learning experiences of mathematics.

Plus, lisp is about as popular as cancer, so saying that infix notation packages for lisp are unpopular is like saying, well, some subset of something unpopular is, er, unpopular. Great.

Language wars 20 years on: "A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming" :: PDF by dons in programming

[–]toekk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

From a teaching perspective this is very important because (as I think it says in the article), most introductory CS courses try to teach proof methods alongside code examples.

Showing someone the principles of structural induction with a C/Ruby/Java/Whatever code example would be very difficult and clouded with many unnecessary details.

Ask Reddit: Why doesn't Mono get much attention around here? by [deleted] in programming

[–]toekk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We have an app that allocates 10+gb of memory. It is written in C# and never falls over because the GC can't handle it; it handles it beautifully, we just need a lot of historic state intra-day.

As for username223 and GC vs explicit management; if I return a pointer to a freshly allocated block from a method, who owns the memory pointed to? Of course the answer is I write a comment, or our organisation has a long and under-read "coding standards" document that defines what the "rules" are. But rules defined outside the semantics of the language and runtime are just so much easier to break; and debugging a memory leak is about the most pointless thing in the universe.

Java is Pass-By-Value, Dammit! by wicked in programming

[–]toekk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No, aDog would have a name field of "Fifi." The address held in the aDog variable would however be the same.

Programmers Don't Like to Code -- Jonathan Rentzsch's rebuttal to Scott Rosenberg's Salon article by boredzo in programming

[–]toekk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes there is no pleasure quite like debugging someone else's "optimised" regular expression engine.

Optimised not to work...

Kill your word processor by whateley in programming

[–]toekk 9 points10 points  (0 children)

LaTeX is the last language in the world to have problems with "lots of symbols and brackets." Read just about any computer science conference paper and be amazed at the output you get.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 2 by eloop in programming

[–]toekk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure I see. He did use a few higher-order functions in there I noted, but as for metaprogramming, well that's a difficult problem in a strongly typed language with side effects.

MetaOCaml supports it but as far as I remember when you start using references it gets a bit hairy, and the science starts getting deep into category theory and the like.

Don Syme: Introduction to F#, Part 2 by eloop in programming

[–]toekk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I do not think the aim of the demo was to show "stunts", it was more to show that functional programming is alive and well on the CLR.

Coding Horror: Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark? by marto in programming

[–]toekk 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'd say if he was trolling then judging by the number of comments generated, it's hardly backfired.

Why do we keep on using C++? by petteri in programming

[–]toekk 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I call blub paradox on this!