ericssmith

9 ms·

1.
by ericssmith 9y ago
You should try skimming to the end, where there are two pages of references. Not to mention the fact that Cardelli is a prominent figure in the study of programming languages. And I think you'll find that Gilad Bracha is a more informe
2.
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” – Frederick Douglass(teachingamericanhistory.org)
5 points by ericssmith 9y ago|0 comments
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by ericssmith 9y ago
That conclusion made me laugh. In the early to mid 90s, I was working on 3D interactive software. The video drivers and chips had advanced so much in one year that all of the lovingly handcrafted assembly I had written over that time was us
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by ericssmith 9y ago
Although the OP seems to be asking for "engineering" not "programming" books, I'm going to second this. Benjamin Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" will help you get down to what programming i
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by ericssmith 9y ago
As a long-time advocate of functional programming, I was once asked after a talk what is the "best" FP language to learn. Since I'm known as a Haskell/Scala/ML person, I surprised much of the audience by answering t
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by ericssmith 9y ago
He keeps warning not to write thousands of lines before talking to customers (as you often hear from biased survivors). But it sounds like they didn't find PM fit by talking to customers. Rather they identified -- perhaps out of desper
7.
by ericssmith 9y ago
Speaking from personal experience ... At the time of signing you can see the upside (the offer), but you can't know the downside, which can be quite significant. It's a poor trade-off. Avoid these unless you get some kind of sever
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by ericssmith 9y ago
Kay mentions The Dream Machine, which in my opinion is one of the better books on some of the early work in computing systems. Heartily recommend it. http://amzn.to/2r5cf0h
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by ericssmith 10y ago
"Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là." -- Pierre-Simon Laplace
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Here is an essay I wrote following my son's first technical talk, weeks after his seventh birthday. It references what I believe works in teaching children to program. https://medium.com/@eric2.71828/your-journey-i
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Not at all high-brow, but I revisit the in-the-trenches case study of "Scaling Pinterest" on Infoq from time to time because I find their fighting through the pain inspirational for my own scaling troubles. https://www.
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Absolutely! Every time programming education comes up, someone brings up Scratch. It's advocacy is -- possibly detrimentally -- overused. It may be appropriate in some cases, but it is not a universal tool for introducing people to pro
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by ericssmith 10y ago
I was delighted to see most of the answers here encourage you to continue from where you are in your interests. Only one comment mentioned abandoning your love and going to where everyone else is. Bad idea. You will find that if you keep pu
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by ericssmith 10y ago
The headline and the body are posing two different questions. Regarding books that impacted my career in software. The top three are: 1) K&R C 2) Zen of Graphics Programming 3) C++ Programming Language, 2E I wouldn't recommend any
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Made with Blocks?
1 points by ericssmith 10y ago|0 comments
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by ericssmith 10y ago
I teach my 6yo son using Pyret and Racket simultaneously. Pyret is, hands down, the best teaching language today, but hasn't been in use as long as Racket, so there aren't as many resources. https://www.pyret.org http
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by ericssmith 10y ago
I would suggest that the need for Englishy variable names is due to a weakness in programming languages and possibly the programming model itself. Why should a set of legitimate values for a computation benefit from how you refer to that se
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Sure. The original 1931 paper is 20-something pages long: http://www.w-k-essler.de/pdfs/goedel.pdf Here's an English translation (with a lengthy introduction) http://jacqkrol.x10.mx/assets/art
19.
by ericssmith 10y ago
Although it's nice to see Gödel show up in the popular press, I didn't get what the point of this was. His Incompleteness paper is not that impenetrable. Sometimes it does pay to at least look at primary sources in addition to lis
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Never reassign a variable with a different value.
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by ericssmith 10y ago
I recently gave an intro to coding to young Girl Scouts using Pyret ( http://www.pyret.org ). The screencast is here: https://vimeo.com/163949506 I had to wing it because the ages turned out to be younger than I e
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by ericssmith 10y ago
Elizabeth Warren makes similar observations in presentation at UC Berkeley in 2007 http://www.uctv.tv/shows/The-Coming-Collapse-of-the-Middle-C...
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by ericssmith 10y ago
"And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have." Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Just to weigh in here, since I also taught both of my kids to read at an early age. I also taught them arithmetic early. The biggest win is confidence about learning. This was particularly meaningful when they got into more "competitiv
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Real World OCaml https://realworldocaml.org The Functional Approach to Programming (Cousineau)
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Since I appreciate seeing someone else's schedule, figured I would post ours. I have 6 and 8yo. and we live quite close to school. 10.5 - sleep 0.75 - morning routine (teeth, dress, find lost things) 7 - school 0.5 - tra
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Wow. I think you missed the point there. He is extolling the virtues of Racket and Dr. Racket. I agree with him, and I think it needs a lot more evangelizing. My son is 6 tomorrow and is also using Dr. Racket to learn programming. I post on
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by ericssmith 11y ago
http://elm-lang.org/papers/concurrent-frp.pdf
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by ericssmith 11y ago
No. The author is the originator of FRP and has had a clear definition of it for almost two decades that included a written denotational semantics and modeling of continuous time. FRP has been confusingly redefined by a string of people in
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by ericssmith 11y ago
Example usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cozw088w44Q

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