unz

OK .... looks like someone's in a bad mood

They're the same thing, you'll only get paid if you solve real problems (though that's not really true, a lot of people get paid by stealing - most of the finance industry, many government employees, and much of senior management in industry).

His wife, the crowdfund backers, and the net loss to society by him taking himself out of productive business. Those are not 'dumb strawmans'.

And I wasn't talking about him in that comment, but the various starving artists who usually free ride on spouse/family/friends/welfare.

I'm not saying that entertainment doesn't have value. I said it's perfectly fine if you're earning an income from creating it and it's OK as a hobby to create. But otherwise, the market (the people that constitute the world) have told you it's not valuable.

Art for art's sake is great, but it doesn't mean artists should get a free pass to do whatever they want and the rest of us digging coal mines and waiting tables give them money for art we don't like.

Doesn't this guy realize that asking for money they way he did with flex funding defies logic. If you only raise some of the money, how were expecting to finish the project, and what about the people who gave you money - you just scammed them. He still hasn't paid them back yet, instead saying he owes them a game!

Trying not to be harsh, but this guy is obviously clueless - built his own game engine - maybe he should've started by wiring together his own circuit boards and then building an OS.

And another thing slightly disturbing about a lot of game devs - in your teens or early twenties I can understand the desire to make Indie games, you're young and retarded. But later on in life, late 20s and on - can you not find something more worthwhile to do?

Sure, a side hobby making games, or your main job working as a game dev to pay the bills, but for that be the focus of your life? Can you not open your eyes to the multitude of problems that exist out there, in the REAL WORLD, and fix those?

You could say the same about other artists like writers and musicians - and thankfully, almost all of them suffer financially for their insanity. As time progresses, Indie gamers will also realize that they are just the starving artists of modern times (minus the groupies that writers and musicians get).

So paper is the final frontier?

Hundreds of years old tech is the optimum and 21st century tech like tablet computers is a step backwards for humanity?

My point is - why is anyone printing anymore? Everyone can get their hands on a tablet these days

(you tamp down a little with your rudeness - why would multiple decades old tech be 'magical')

Prolog with clpfd and chr, Mozart/Oz, Sql, Clips. Libraries like gecode, java choco.

There aren't any new ways of programming that have been invented. There's basically the mathematical programming (constraint/logic/relational/linear), functional, procedural, oo, concurrent, stack. You're not going to come up with something new during a session of lisp hacking. You'll just reinvent the above multiple times.

But that's not the main style of programming. If you teach someone lisp he'll hack around with functions and macros and not realize that his problem could be elegantly written in constraint programming.

Most of the time the majority of code (written by good programmers) is in constraints or relations, so why encase that in a functional language with parenthesis everywhere (I've programmed a fair bit in lisp and don't mind parenthesis at all, but it get's annoying after you're used to the elegance of prolog syntax).

That's basically the consensus among professional academics on the matter. Also among well respected programmers in senior roles like Joshua Bloch and John Carmack.

(putting aside the rudenss and cluelessness of your comment ...)

Operations research type algorithms can be thought of as forward chaining compared to prolog's backward chaining. Prolog implementations usually integrate them in because they are more efficient in many cases.

Lisp's dangerousness was why ML was invented by Robin Milner.

Lisp is a dangerous language that shouldn't be taught or used these days. There are plenty of superior programming techniques.

Mathematical programming - linear programming, finite domain constraint programming, constraint logic programming, logic programming, relational programming

Static functional programming - ml, haskell

A good modern introduction to programming is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, by Peter Van Roy and Saif Haridi. It's far superior to the commonly mentioned lisp book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Slightly off-topic, Pdf and Ps are just plain outdated for today. They're unreadable on small screens and for people with bad eyesight, and no one sane prints stuff out these days Html is better, but the real thing today is tablet apps. All docs should be published as interactive 10/7/5 inch apps. Books should also disappear and be replaced by that form factor. Scientific paper authors also need to realize this and replace latex with app programming and publish their work as apps.