cchooper

On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their expensive 'requirements'. Support? Someone else's problem. Maintainability? How is that going to get me promoted? All of those things cost time and money, and therefore are risks to be avoided. Better to spend your time burying bad news and selling your failure as 'success' to those who really matter.

All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.

Although the lambda papers talk about Scheme, that's not what they're really about. They're really about... lambda. The takeaway is that many common features of languages can be thought of as disguised uses of the lambda operator. So lambda is actually the unifying abstraction behind many languages, even if they don't know it.

The original 'Lambda the Ultimate X' papers are very short, so no reason not to give them a try.

Well if that's not an invitation to finally start my blog, I don't know what is.

Having just quit my job for a contractor role in London, I am so glad to see this here.

The Economist and Financial Times are both modern success stories for selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.

I could make tomorrow evening, or most other dates after work.

Zero-click info for error messages would be a great resource. There are already some sites that do this for specific kinds of error (e.g. ora-code.com for Oracle errors) but a general "put in this error and I´ll tell you what it means" site would be fantastic.

If I were to add up all the searches I do in a day, then searches for programming advice (e.g. how do I fix X, what's the syntax for Y) would outnumber all my other searches put together, so I definitely think there's a bit opportunity here.

That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?

Several Lisp applications have config files that are just Lisp files run at start-up. Emacs is an example. You can (and people do) put absolutely any code in there. There's no need to restrict it to just setting variables.

So what's the difference between a config file and code? Config files aren't compiled (so no need to rebuild when you change them) and they are intended to be modified by the user, while other code isn't.

There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul.

Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!

Winston Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!

There is not a single great movie in your 2005 list. In fact Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much better decade than the current one. The 70s were even better, much better than the 40s.

> is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?

Not good movies, great movies.

If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X?

If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented?

At the very most, object-orientation is a particular mechanism for achieving a particular kind of polymorphism (namely ad-hoc object-based polymorphism). At most. Given the vagueness of the term, it could not even be that.

These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:

1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights

1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator

1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels

Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.

I upvoted this because it's a wonderful example of mathematical crankiness. I've always wondered why cranks are attracted to the same things: Cantor's diagonalization proof, squaring the circle, 1=0.999.. Perhaps it's because the problems are easy to understand, but the proofs aren't.

I'll second Hacker and recommend his Wittgenstein's Place in 20th Century Analytic Philsophy as a reasonably accessible starting point.