dbpatterson

The "blues" created the legislation & forced the workers to accept a shitty contract with no sick days. They could easily have refused to vote for it and let the strike happen w/o real sick days.

Umm, if everything was built around the idea that tweets were immutable, yeah I could imagine it's quite a bit of work to change things. Immutable and mutable data can be treated _very_ differently in systems bigger than the little toys you make for fun.

I think this still, somewhat, misses the point.

Sure, Racket has facilities to make implementing languages easier (that's the whole point), but that simply makes it _easier_ to implement BSL, etc. I could certainly, with more effort, implement BSL in Java or in any other language: the language that students are using really has nothing to do with the _host_ language. Things are somewhat confused by DrRacket (or, made simpler, depending on your perspective); the IDE is somewhat mixed up with everything else, but again, this functionality can and does exist in other editors: I could implement a mode for my BSL implemented in Java in, say, VS Code, with comparable features to DrRacket.

Or, to take a completely different tack, implement the IDE via the web a la WeScheme or, if you want an actual concrete example of something that isn't Racket hosted, Pyret.

So... unless Grinnell does things very differently, the author did not learn Racket, they learned (Beginning/Intermediate/Advanced) Student Language, and that's the point.

Racket is a complicated language, designed primarily in order to support the easy creation of other languages: it would be as bad a choice (perhaps worse) for a first language as any other. All of the simplicity, focusing on learning to program, programming structurally based on data, that comes out of HtDP, is enabled by the restricted language.

It's too bad that this naming confusion persists, as I think it hurts the effort to focus on teaching _programming_ in intro classes, vs. teaching X language (I don't want to teach people Racket any more than I want to teach them Python or Java. They can learn those on their own -- they'll probably learn at least a half dozen other languages over their career, all on their own, if they stick with it). This curriculum is about figuring out how to most effectively teach people to program: the language was created, after the fact, to support that.

At least for me, the main reason for the remarkable to exist is reading scientific papers -- not having to print them out (and keep track of them) is a great benefit, but sometimes color is an important part of them. As a device for _writing_, I don't miss color at all, but for reading / annotating, it would make a big difference.

Ad-free doesn't necessarily mean they aren't tracking you, right? Viewership info is _still_ valuable, even if it's not being used right on the device.

Extending your point, 4% more would go down to just under 3:42.... which has not yet happened, over a half century later.

There are (at least) several goals:

1. persistence, which obviously is hurt by them running out of money. Dropbox links apparently die eventually, static websites bitrot, etc. Things put on arxiv can be trusted enough to put links to them in papers, if needed.

2. Discoverability. Pre-print archives send out digests (usually people subscribe to particular areas). It's a low-effort way to distribute them. Related, by having things semi-centralized, it's easier to discover papers (they get indexed by google scholar, for example...).

Maybe other benefits? Not sure.

Have you actually done any proofs in one of these systems? (or used one?)

Natural numbers are used because of the induction principle you get: it's very useful, and generally straightforward to use in lots of contexts (e.g., just the other day I had students proving the correctness of multiplication implemented as iterated addition; the multiplication is over integers, but the inner loop is after you've ensured what you are iterating is non-negative, since you decrement each iteration, and _proving_ it is much more straightforward if you interpret the loop counter as a natural number).

And your point about syntax is also baffling: Coq will display natural numbers as decimal literals, not "S(S(S...".

The fact that this was on your list of "improvements" rather than being a minimal requirement before being willing to launch, sell, etc, is pretty damning on it's own. No need to get misty-eyed.

That the task description is only posted at the start of the competition?

Link to the "full privacy policy" 404s, which is not a good thing, given you are asking people to enter their full names, addresses, CC numbers.

you ignored "and mark every sensitive field with a special value", which is the key part. As long as all sensitive data has been essentially zero'd out (for some value of zero), all is fine.

I believe in the past you had to open some kind of support request, as there wasn't an "automated" way to do it (and there was maybe still some kind of waiting period after having deactivated the account). It's certainly been made easier (they've gotten a lot of flack over the years oven this...)