rjberry

6 ms·

1.
by rjberry 11y ago
I agree with this. I also know plenty of full stack engineers who are superior in both domains to the so-called specialists.
2.
by rjberry 11y ago
Hubris, much?
3.
by rjberry 11y ago
Clojure seems too high level for SICP. Scheme was a perfect fit because of how simple it is and how few language features or data structures it contained. You had to build everything yourself, which was kind of the point.
4.
by rjberry 11y ago
Primarily because the people who decide salaries are themselves managers.
5.
by rjberry 12y ago
They pretty much are as without sequencing you can only do the most trivial thing (a single IO action). Most interesting programmes are going to need at least two IO actions.
6.
by rjberry 12y ago
Premature optimisation ... Getting a good idea is usually harder than getting the tech right. Being able to quickly make prototypes is the most important thing in a start up. FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large esta
7.
by rjberry 12y ago
Not sure how that's relevant. Anyway it's a logical fallacy "appeal to popularity".
8.
by rjberry 12y ago
I worry that we're gradually moving towards a society that sees privacy as neither a right nor something desirable to an innocent individual.
9.
by rjberry 12y ago
PHP is pretty popular ...
10.
by rjberry 12y ago
Or you could use a library explicitly designed with these considerations in mind, that offers the same powerful, familiar combinators, with resource safety and speed. e.g., Machines in Haskell: https://hackage.haskell.org/pa
11.
by rjberry 12y ago
If we assume the operations we're talking about take time linear in proportion to the list, you've just gone from a * n time to b * n time, where b > a. Both of these are still O(n) in Big O notation, which drops constants, bec
12.
by rjberry 12y ago
Not that it particularly matters whether we're talking about C++, as it's rather tangential, the original essay by Richard P. Gabriel that coined the term "Worse is Better" talks about C++ ( http://www.jwz.org&
13.
by rjberry 12y ago
Sure ... but if a loop is effectively doing a map, a filter, and a bunch of other operations all at once? It's a lot quicker to figure out what's going on if it's been written with combinators (once you're familiar with
14.
by rjberry 12y ago
Paul explains fairly well why he thinks C++ is a good example of "worse is better", including quotes from the language designer to that effect. I think when you get to more complicated (or at least alien) abstractions like the I&#
15.
by rjberry 12y ago
It's not really a different approach. You had to write a lot of vanilla loops in C, too.
16.
by rjberry 12y ago
All loops encode simple logic? I don't think that's true. Either way, a very good reason for not using loops is to make code more readable. If I see a loop I have to run it inside my head to figure out what the intent is, and if t
17.
by rjberry 12y ago
I dislike it when people say languages are either 'practical' or 'well designed'. As if a language is only useful if it's not built on sound mathematical ideas ... Generics are not a particularly new idea and nobody
18.
by rjberry 12y ago
I think it depends on what you're working on. If the software is completely designed and the desired outcomes known from the beginning then up front planning and processes are probably helpful. But this is such a small percentage of ac
19.
by rjberry 12y ago
It's a nature vs nurture argument. I think Paul believes certain programmers have some innate quality that means they're magnitudes better than others. As it's innate it's not related to culture. As in you could give cer
20.
by rjberry 12y ago
How can you access Python and Perl libraries? However you feel about the JVM, it has led to adoption of Clojure, meaning if you're in a big city you have a chance of finding a job doing it. Not many jobs exist where you can use Scheme
21.
by rjberry 12y ago
Racket is so different it's basically a different language, so I'm not really talking about that. I do know Chicken and Guile have more advanced library support than the Scheme I worked with on SICP, but neither has as advanced co
22.
by rjberry 12y ago
Consider Scala or Clojure. You'll be able to leverage the same libraries you've been using in Java (pretty trivially), while having access to a completely new way of thinking (functional). I personally prefer Scala as I like stron
23.
by rjberry 12y ago
It's definitely possible to learn things from those languages. But languages that are trendy today (at least from my experience in the London job market) - Clojure and Scala - are really amazing, too, and have a lot of interesting idea