torr

What's the typical workflow for this look like? That is, if you're making changes to the code live, and you're trying this and that in the REPL to fix things; once you get it working, how do you then get those changes out and then into your source code repository?

What? No. It's quite easy for teachers to locate a school that's looking for them. The state teacher's union usually has a website listing jobs and everyone just uses that one single website.

Just curious: Why was mzscheme chosen to implement Arc rather than some other Scheme implementation?

Step 1: Around lunch time, in a very nonchalant way, stroll out to your car, set your watch/portable-alarm-clock/cell-phone-alarm-clock to wake you up near the end of your lunch break, tilt back the seat, and zzzzzzz.....

Step 2: After waking, splash cold water on face, then eat your lunch at you desk.

But wouldn't a large (and growing) population of frustrated young men serve to change this demographic trend? Or do you see a vicious cycle here?

Wrap a GUI around it and package the program as a single executable. I'd suggest $15. Asking for $20 seems like too much (to me), but I've been told that I have bad judgement in such matters. :)

Also, I agree with others that trying to sell a CLI version will probably go nowhere. In fact, it may stifle adoption after you switch to the GUI version (since prospective users might think "Oh, that's that terminal program, right? Yuck!").

And if there is other software that does what yours does, what is being charged for it?

I've having a particularly bad time right now (big and manifold responsibilities, not enough time) and only getting 3-5 hours / night on weeknights. This has been going on for months now (with some regular 7-8 hour sleeping nights once in a while).

Results I've found: Mornings really suck. I'm putting on weight. I also feel terribly unhealthy. I'm not as sharp as I am at full power (though this is subjective and very hard to discern). I can fall asleep in minutes if given a place to lay down. Also, I get sick much more often than usual (which was hardly at all). Subjective opinion: it feels like I'm prematurely aging myself.

Trying to "make up" the sleep on weekends doesn't work for me. Oversleeping just leads to bad headaches.

When I do get a solid 8 hours I feel like Superman the next day.

I'm hoping that I'm not doing any long-term damage to myself, but there's really no way out right now. :( The current job ends very soon (2 weeks!), and then I'll be able to resume normal sleeping habits (7-8 hrs/night).

Which do you prefer (and why), HtDP or SICP?

> As for developer availability - good luck to him finding good C programmers

Are you saying it's difficult in general to find good C devs? Because it would seem that's the case for C++, but not for C.

Sure. Then you simply require hit-and-run commits to be well-commented and also include good docs.

Just because it's not currently maintained does not mean it won't be maintained in the future.

> Enforcing different standards of quality control is unproductive ...

Not only that, but it's poison for attracting new developers.

We've been living with Moore's law so long that young people seem to think it's similar to an actual law like gravity.

Fact is, computing has benefitted from some core technologies (ex. lithography) that have lended themselves to order-of-magnitude increases in things like number of transistors per square cm. It's been a happy coincidence, but, inevitably, that ship has about finished its trip and is heading back to the dock.

Here's what will happen (and is happening) when hardware hits that limit: pretty much nothing. People will still use computers for email, browsing the web, watching videos, numerically solving partial differental equations, etc. There will be no clamour to make faster computers because computers are pretty much fast enough for what we want them to do. If they're not fast enough, then tasks can be spread out and handled in a distributed manner.

Oh, also, computer hardware companies will find that they can't get you to upgrade every few years to get the latest and greatest. This is great news, btw, for, say, schools; since they'll be able to invest in computers and expect to keep them long enough to be worth the investment.

Since, for the most part, "Perl 6" = Parrot + Rakudo [1], the big moment (IMO) will be when Rakudo hits 1.0. There should be a serious spike in interest at that point.

Hopefully the Perl community will take advantage of that spike. For example, it would be cool to see mod_perl6/mod_parrot hit stable at around the same time. Maybe even along with some key modules recoded in Perl 6 too (for webapps, maybe CGI::Application?).

[1]: Yes, I realize Perl 6 is the spec, but my guess is that Parrot + Rakudo will be the canonical implementation.

Heh. Just using `aptitude install <foo>` I tend to forget how long building can sometimes take.

You might try Fink. Seems like they're still active, but their last news update (on their homepage) is from 2008-07-23.