vinayms

You should consider redesigning the website colors to spare visitors' eyes. I mean, the posted link opens a page with white text on black background, but clicking on the "immutable coffee" link takes to a page with black text on white background. I was viewing in a brightly lit room yet was severely jolted, can only imagine the fate of those viewing in dimly lit room or in the dark.

Chinese is the spoken Lisp.

But the dependence on monsoon balances it out, even makes it lopsided, except may be in some northern parts that rely on snow fed rivers.

This is just alarmist. The bravado shown on TV is surely not taken seriously by the authorities themselves for they know the consequences. So even if the point of impact coincides with the crescendo of tension to the T, sanity will prevail despite it seeming otherwise.

This will go against the grain here on HN. I don't know how anyone can imagine self driving even succeeding in real world, leave alone in the so called third world, unless all vehicles are self driven and operate in a controlled environment. There are some really important things pending, like accurate NLP and computer vision, but no, we need something shiny and useless. I think some smart computer scientists are getting rich by carrot sticking some gullible billionaire investors. Good for them. I hope some of the really useful stuff piggy back on this rather lofty endeavor.

Simply because writing is the best form of communication of ideas after speech, and using speech to program is just silly, not to mention cumbersome and not productive. Writing, since its invention, has become inseparable from humans and its quite understandable that it is extended to instruct computers, with the compiler as the, well, interpreter.

As for the mechanism you talk about, that's basically declarative style and a lot of platforms (for the lack of better word) do this, mainly in business logic and scientific applications. The most famous example is Excel. However, this style works like a charm only when the set of possible actions is predetermined, and is not conducive to creating new actions, which is why every single platform has some kind of scripting. And scripting is editing text. So there you go.

> Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.

That's a seriously weak premise. A bicycle is more than a metal rod with wheels; it needs a good steering mechanism and driving mechanism, not to mention ergonomic seating mechanism. Humans have certainly had a lot of things in their blind spot which makes us wonder why it took so long, but bicycle isn't one of them. Eraser-butt-pencil, may be. Bicycle, certainly not.

Also, the sheer number of crazy models that happened in its evolution is a testament to the fact that a bicycle is anything but intuitive. Remember, it was an age where mechanical devices was a rage. It was sort of like the AI-ML of that era. There was a lot of activity by people of varying levels of expertise - from tinkerers to people who knew what they were doing to people who thought they knew what they were doing. Despite this it took that long.

So its absurd to start off with the said premise.

Points like material and manufacturing process are red herring IMO. This argument is backwards. What needed to be made was a prototype. The things mentioned would follow naturally. No one had to invent a "professional grade" machine at the word go. An example from software: HLL were not invented first and then OS were written in it, but OS were written first, and in the process people realized HLL would be more productive, and OS were rewritten in them.

The conclusion about cultural and economic factors also seems unconvincing. The only plausible reason could be the clout of horse carriage mafia or something like that which influenced the powers that be and stifled rival technologies.

Can someone explain why its fair or acceptable to force Google to make its index public, the one it built with its own time and money, instead of having some open source initiative building another index from scratch?

I think the correct way to go about this is to just encourage people to plant trees suitable and native to their (people's) environment. And let it scale. Better, also tell them not to fell trees left right and center.

In the exuberance of ecological conservation and all that, we must not overlook and override what nature would have done. For instance, one shouldn't plant a water sucking tree where it wouldn't naturally occur, and damage the balance.

In life? No.

At work? Yes. How did I handle it? I quit.

Sounds promising. Will have to check out some time.

> Programmers don't change their ways when new features get added.

The good ones do.

> This is why most of the times, you just start using a totally new language, that way you buy into a totally new set of programmers, practices and community.

What happens when that new language reaches a stage where it needs new features?

I think new languages are unnecessary unless they comprehensively solve the problems of the existing ones, and don't create new ones of their own. I have always felt that creating brand new languages is more of a personal taste driven rebellion against the language one uses. When they find that its too cumbersome for their taste, or the clique in committee refuses reforms etc, those who can will go ahead and create, some evangelize successfully (I feel this is the case because I have created a few half baked languages over the years to challenge C++ lol).

Until we program in natural language, I don't see why we must even bother with this. Its fun but useless. For programming as it is today, its just a bunch of English words that we have to learn. We can always comment and document in out native languages if need be. I say this as an Indian, so obviously not English native speaker. (To preempt the "colonial benefit of English" retort, I would say I would say the same thing had USSR won the cold war and everything had to programmed in Russian in Cyrillic. We just had to learn a few words even then, assuming Soviet tech hadn't made NL based programming a reality.)

I am self taught in C++. I learnt it when I realized my BE FORTRAN wasn't going to enable creating GUI simulation. I did have a few hiccups like any beginner but soon it was alright, so have no idea what it is like to be formally taught in class.

As for Lisp and ML, being Indian, I had no access to these, even in CS section of the library, as you might understand. Many years ago I tried learning Scheme by/after watching the lecture series. I even have the book SICP. It is fun and elegant, refreshingly so, no doubt, but only till a point. I found once we venture into necessity for conditionals & data mutation, its unbearably cumbersome - I can deal with spaghetti C code but not this - may be I am conditioned by exclusive C++ usage. I tend to think those who stick to Scheme like languages and solve real world problems do it for bravado and cry when no one is looking lol.

As for design pattern, I don't see it being exclusive to OO. Its just a bunch of ideas to build software. One would have it for assembler as well if it was used for mass production (I wonder how it was in early days when it was exclusively assembler). Its certainly poorly used and abused, agreed.