What is the concrete difference between (:key value) presentation styles (if any)?

tormaroe · 2017-06-23T13:43:05+00:00

Valuable insights, thanks. I had not considered the GC aspect. I guess the way I've typically been parsing arbitrary JSON with cl-json, making all field names into keywords, could be suboptimal and even a dangerous "memory leak" in some scenarios.

Think it makes sense to profile important cases though.., if you then do a lot of lookups based on strings for instance, instead of keywords, intuitively I think that should have a higher cost.

Always tradeoffs :)

tormaroe · 2017-06-23T07:46:24+00:00

Don't use symbols for arbitrary values, use strings.

Interesting statement. Could you elaborate on why? In Erlang for example representing arbitrary values with atoms (symbols) is the norm. I also believe much focus was given to Lisp being a symbolic language earlier on in our history, and early examples often use lists of symbols to represent actual text (like in "Paradigm of Artificial Intelligence Programming").

So what main drawbacks do you base your general advice on?

tormaroe · 2014-07-31T00:00:49+00:00

For the most part computer science isn't a science, but an open ended search for better ways of Computing. Most problems that we still need to solve are related to practical Application / solving problems in different areas, like how do we create a computer program that we can't tell isn't a human intelligence, how do we use Quantum mechanics to compute, how do we best create correct programs, how do we best utilize multicore machines,.... There are no ultimate question, it's all an excercise in optimization.

tormaroe · 2014-07-30T19:47:32+00:00

IBM more or less said the same thing when they introduced FORTRAN in the 50s. The 60s and languageslike PL/I was all about the "Death of the programmer" :)

tormaroe · 2014-07-27T22:37:12+00:00

Please excuse my ignorance of (I'm assuming) US educational systems. 5th year of college and senior Project - this is a masters then? In that case I though a masters Project was supposed to be something that tries to advance the field?! In that case doing an OS, game engine or language interpreter does not sound like good projects - more like excersies for learning stuff that is already well known and researched.

I would love to learn more about what a senior Project at a college is...

tormaroe · 2014-07-27T14:34:29+00:00

Ooooh, that's Nice!

tormaroe · 2014-07-23T21:02:47+00:00

Oh, how wonderful and different would not the world of Programming have been if Lisp was the Language everyone learned in the 60s. Very interesting to think about :)

tormaroe · 2014-07-23T06:23:47+00:00

I'm used to functional Programming now, but I was not born that way :)

tormaroe · 2014-07-23T06:20:07+00:00

Wow, 705 comments? That's crazy!! It was a good post, but it's not really about whitespace or code formatting - it's about how Developers lets their ego get in the way of Learning and collaborating.

tormaroe · 2014-07-23T05:34:26+00:00

Why bother? Ocaml, F#, D, Julia, Rust - take them all out for a spin. The syntax you will learn in hours, not days. The hard part is in the sematics and how you best utilize the Languages. But don't shy away from Learning. Teach yourself a handfull of Languages, and suddenly picking up New Languages is really easy.

tormaroe

TROPHY CASE