mattjones

7 ms·

1.
by mattjones 17y ago
That is a great demonstration that Scheme's problems are not Lisp problems. I'm hoping that we're about to see a lot more experimentation with new Lisp dialects.
2.
by mattjones 17y ago
From the point of view of a person at an instant in time, libraries are a concern. But when we're talking about Scheme being displaced by Python at MIT, where Scheme was developed 30 years ago, we really ought to ask what's been happening
3.
by mattjones 17y ago
Libraries aren't the issue. I use Chicken Scheme for a few things, which has plenty of libraries and a fantastic package system called eggs. Sure, other languages like Perl and Python have more libraries now, but that's not what made them
4.
by mattjones 18y ago
I don't think "self-aware" is the right way to summarize the results of these tests. One thing that this article doesn't say is that the mirror test is geared toward animals with good vision systems, and therefore is, to a large extent, te
5.
by mattjones 18y ago
How different my experience has been. I'm an avid drawer and programmer. I don't know how similar the mental processes of drawing and programming are. But what I do know is that the state I'm in when I'm drawing feels the same as the stat
6.
by mattjones 18y ago
I am using Sequel.
7.
by mattjones 18y ago
with Ruby, you only have one choice. I disagree vehemently. I myself have started using Ramaze, and like it better than Rails. In any case, it's more important to me to know Ruby well than a particular framework.
8.
by mattjones 18y ago
I don't know the specific reasons why CL and Scheme are not very popular for those things; my general answer is that they're adapted to other things (like classrooms and smart students' brains). My point is that it's very hard to figure ou
9.
by mattjones 18y ago
Actually, it might be more accurate to think of programming languages as genes rather than animals, or at least, to include programmers as an important part of the phenotype. A complication in the adaptation view is that programmers can st
10.
by mattjones 18y ago
"Unpopular" needs to be further qualified. Rather than ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular?", ask, "Why is Lisp unpopular for X?". Lisp is actually reasonably popular for some things, and it's those things to which existing dialects are best adap
11.
by mattjones 19y ago
Interesting question. Perhaps we will witness a renewed proliferation of domesticated animals in this millennium, a sort of "domestication 2.0". Robotics may actually help inspire it, along with our knowledge of so many more kinds of anim
12.
by mattjones 19y ago
This excites me. If they become common, people are going to spend a lot of time exploring the world -- an antidote to sitting behind your laptop all day. These things would make great pack animals. When you go hiking, you'll be able to to
13.
by mattjones 19y ago
Hungarian notation, perhaps.
14.
by mattjones 19y ago
To some degree, using open classes is just how you write functions in Ruby. Say there exists a class called Errors in some Ruby library. It doesn't have an each() method, but I'd like it to. Nobody would complain if I wrote a function eac
15.
by mattjones 19y ago
I don't think the problem is developers being afraid of SQL. There are still lots of Perl and PHP programmers who don't use ORMs. Instead, ORMs have been sold on the idea of database abstraction, and programmers have been made to feel tha
16.
by mattjones 19y ago
Constructing queries actually isn't one of the things ORMs do very well, so far. What they do well is provide a layer of logic for things like validation, triggers, and security. Whatever backend your persistence system uses, you'll probab
17.
by mattjones 19y ago
Here's a possibility: I've noticed that the more time I spend here, the less tolerance I have for other sites. So while I spend more time here than I used to, I spend much less time on other, less relevant sites than I used to. The time I
18.
by mattjones 19y ago
As a primary interface for blogging, perhaps not. But using irb and your ORM as an admin interface to your database? Absolutely.
19.
by mattjones 19y ago
And it doesn't matter anyway. He's talking about adding records to the DB and uploading images, the same things you'd do through a web interface.
20.
by mattjones 19y ago
There's a place in the comments of the last article in this series where a guy called Tony says, "I have one word: Scheme." And chromatic replies, "I wonder if a language that sticks so closely to the lambda calculus is comprehensible to n