akater

5 ms·

1.
by akater 3mo ago
> Is there an Interlisp echo in today’s development culture? Emacs not mentioned. It better have been.
2.
by akater 6mo ago
The question posed is, “With agents, does it become practical to have large codebases that can be read like a narrative, whose prose is kept in sync with changes to the code by tireless machines?” It's not practical to have codebases t
3.
by akater 1y ago
There is a difference. I write a Lisp program, and it runs everywhere Emacs does, including my Android device. I wouldn't do that with Java, as thaw would be extremely impractical. (I might be biased: I probably wouldn't be pro
4.
by akater 1y ago
Could you provide an example of a Lisp program where macros are overused?
5.
by akater 1y ago
> Bolting packages (module system) on top of symbols leads to some problems in practice. Packages are namespaces, unrelated to modules. They are not used to organize dependencies but to remove ambiguity of naming and to provide encapsul
6.
by akater 2y ago
An ordered pair is a useful data structure, and it's beneficial to have special short names for accessors to its elements. Humanity got very lucky with the names “car” and “cdr”. Naggum does point that out. Any rule about any languag
7.
by akater 2y ago
Note that the value returned by cons is guaranteed to have type cons, and it is guaranteed that a fresh cons is created. Neither is true for list*; note that its return type is t.
8.
by akater 6y ago
If by “abstract” linear algebra you mean “course that starts with the definition of vector space”, then it is geometric enough in the sense Artin talks about. It is pedagogically a problem for people who ask questions like the one in topic.
9.
by akater 6y ago
There may be different aspects to programs like this. They may provide calls, they may provide some other features that are significant to understand their influence on users but non-obvious to non-users. I never encountered FaceTime and I
10.
by akater 6y ago
Another evidence that linear algebra concepts are terribly confusing when layed out without geometric background. This had been criticised for decades. Competently and popularly presented criticism goes back to at least as far as 1957 (Art
11.
by akater 6y ago
For a non-technical text about a basic, broadly-appealing topic, this has disappointingly high level of mentions of something called “FaceTime”. I have not yet read it all but I already have doubts it's worth reading further after seco
12.
by akater 6y ago
So-called “anti-piracy” measures are futile. As long as something can be played back, it can be recorded, copied, re-played. If watermarks become an issue, people will develop methods to mangle watermarks and make them unreliable in figuri
13.
by akater 6y ago
> even if he was openly anti-Putin and supported opposition in any way This implies he does not support opposition in any way. This is not true. He does support opposition rallies—when they are held to support his cause, true, but such
14.
by akater 6y ago
Works fine now, thanks! Sorry I made noise like this, I tried to find alternative channels of communication that presumably should work when someone cannot login via web for any reason, and failed.
15.
by akater 6y ago
It looks like it's now impossible to login to gitlab.com web interface via Tor. I only post it here because it was a recent sudden silent change that made gitlab.com unavailable to some, and there does not seem to be a response.
16.
by akater 6y ago
> Live cheaply > Be indepenedently wealthy Both are very good suggestions. And I don't think there are better ones around.
17.
by akater 6y ago
There's a fairly well-known 2018 book on why education (higher and lower) is the way it is now: Bryan Caplan, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money”
18.
by akater 6y ago
1. Everyone (except maybe for murderers and insane people) is a master of their body, so other people have no right at all to decide whether a sane non-murderer should be able to end his or her own life. This has nothing to do with any illn
19.
by akater 6y ago
• I don't want to admin a server. • I don't understand what does it mean “to own a domain name”, what kind of ID is it tied to. • I'd have to write a spam-resilient js-free https-free comments system. It'd take time, it&
20.
by akater 6y ago
Unless you go with commercial Lisps, you likely won't get far without Emacs. Thus, one option to consider (esp. if you're not fond of learning by the book) is to just start learning Emacs since you will need it anyway, use Emacs L
21.
by akater 6y ago
I believe it's important to find a community which would offer quality real-time help. I've seen some, and the really good one was not in English so I can't recommend it, I guess. Freenode emacs chat is said to be filled with
22.
Why are there so few women programmers in the software industry? (2015)(chaource.livejournal.com)
19 points by akater 11y ago|8 comments
23.
by akater 11y ago
I'm sorry but your comment will be grossly misleading to people unfamiliar with the language. There's absolutely nothing painful about If and Function. However, I must note that in a rule-based language both are used far more spar
24.
by akater 12y ago
Everything should be S-expressions, not just HTML.
25.
by akater 12y ago
> Repeated can sometimes be replaced by postfix .. Always, not sometimes. ;-)
26.
by akater 12y ago
Indeed, you can just type “Hello world” in a text editor! A non-programmer, I'm sure making it a welcome checkpoint at a programming language is an incredibly stupid tradition. It should always be an one-liner that does something no ap
27.
by akater 12y ago
Bravo, RMS. I wish I could work on an OS written in Lisp, or in an equivalently expressive language. It's so damn important to have a really user-friendly system easily customizable by non-programmers. Actually, programmers should be r
28.
by akater 12y ago
> It's a lot easier to write Mathematica than it is to read it. +1. And it gets even more easier to read (“read”? :-) when you can select pieces in FrontEnd, with multiple mouse clicks or a corresponding hotkey. I got so used to it
29.
by akater 12y ago
I'm sorry but your links lead to the same continuity example that has nothing to do with real world ( and real mathematics, as well). Can you prove (0^0 = 1) -> (1 = 2), as you claimed above? And no, we don't need “temporary d
30.
by akater 12y ago
> "There is no one definition that always works well for 0^0" Yes there is. :-) 0^0 = 1. Actually, the only case for claiming it to be an “indeterminate”, comes from so-called “continuous exponents”. Which, arguably, somethin

More ›