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Cosmic Crisps will supposedly not only taste amazing, but be cheaper than Honeycrisps as they're easier to manage and orchard owners are replacing red delicious as it is basically disgusting.

Chicken Scheme 5.0 8 years ago

Julia can show s-expressions for an expression I think...sorta what you asked, but not really I know.

If you really want something like pandas + lisp then you probably need Common Lisp and have to dig for some libraries.

Programming Quotes 8 years ago

This is the greatest sarcastic comment I've seen all year. You nailed the Haskell zealot to a tee. Meanwhile the Forth zealot is getting IBS just hearing about the code complexity from Haskell and all the myriad of language extensions to make it closer to actual mathematics.

Don't get me wrong, Haskell is really really cool and some brilliant coders use it. One day I'll actually make it through Haskell book.

Programming Quotes 8 years ago

"@" is for an array variable or pulling something in array context. You can have variables declared with $, @, or % depending on whether it is a scalar, array, or hash structure.

I've been in hundreds of P6 conversations and it is always such a bummer to see that this is always the number 1 thing discussed. Not the merits of the language, not the grammars, or concurrency, MOP, functional and OO syntax, junctions, running multiple languages, gradual typing, restricting inputs with types, Unicode....none of that.

The fact that it is always brought up to me makes me think they should've just called it something entirely different. Hindsight is 20:20 though.

The impact from greenhouse gases is already either a factor in some power markets (which heavily use state of the art optimization and are among the hardest problems to solve when you look at the size versus the time it has to solve in) or planned to be included. It is indirectly there in all power markets as coal is currently becoming less and less economic.

I received an old washing machine when i got married and a new dryer. That washing machine is super heavy, but still working. The dryer is a POS and the plastic knobs have all started failing, so I have to use pliers to turn the knob.

I'd pay 2x the price of a standard appliance to get a quality one without question.

Ummmm yes & no. It has a REPL, but it sure isn't easy to use and very few C# coders actually use it. Contrast that with a dynamic language like Python where people basically live in the REPL. Common Lisp takes this to a whole new level. You really can't equate C#'s REPL to Common Lisp's. This is one of those things where the sum of the thing is greater than its parts. Note that I'm not saying C# isn't a decent language, just very very different than what you get with languages like Smalltalk & Lisp.

It uses LLVM like Swift, Rust, & Julia. I'm not sure if it can beat highly optimized C code, but generally is in the neighborhood of C, while letting you code like a rubyist. This is similar to how Nim lets you write code similar to Python and it then transpiles to C or C++ code to be compiled by gcc or Js to be run in the browser.

A+ was invented by Arthur Whitney for JP Morgan (iirc). I'm sure they have some things in house still using it, but that it's mostly been deprecated by Whitney's Kdb+ environment which is sold by Kx Systems. It is the APL like "K" language bundled with a database generally run on SSD. I believe it is quite pricey.

Yea, but I clicked around and did a quick Google to find out it's a custom distro. Not too hard, but I guess they could make that easier.

Let's be honest here. Everybody familiar with System76 (slight exaggeration, but mostly correct) is somebody looking outside the box. There's a good chance they already use Linux and understand Pop is just a customized distro. These systems are largely marketed to the power user who doesn't want to build their own PC. In other words, someone who wants to pay a fair price for a good Linux laptop with functioning hardware and a company to support it. They know it won't have bleeding edge performance, but should have good performance. They are comfortable with computers and probably know Windows and a few Linux distros like Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch...etc.

I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but know what you mean. Either I'm too dumb to understand much of what he's trying to convey due to historical and technical ignorance or lack of intelligence, his communication skills leave room to be desired, his talks are just hot air (I don't believe this), or human language isn't the best medium for conveying his impressive and large scale ideas.

I've seen people ask him great questions (or at least I thought they were) and they only got a riddle in reply. That's only acceptable if you're a dragon or a hobbit in my opinion.

Instead, I'd like to see a short an concise summary of his ideas of where we are, what we're doing wrong, where we could improve...etc.

It would certainly be interesting to see a future where hardware is built to run a Smalltalk os natively and you have full control all the way down, but he would probably say that I'm missing the point.

Yes, both are expensive outside the student licenses, but Mathematica is significantly cheaper and has a lot more built into the language, so you don't have to turn around and buy expensive "toolboxes" for all the functionality missing in Matlab.

Notebooks have been in Mathematica for ages and are really powerful and difficult to describe to those who haven't used them. To give an example, I was building a tool and embedded images as variables in a way reminiscent of being an engineer on the USS Enterprise. You can point to a file in Python as a variable, but you can't just copy-paste an image in as a variable last I checked (don't think Jupyter is there yet).

Thanks for putting this together Michael! I always find your blog posts and magazines to be very interesting (lisp, forth, Clojure)...etc.

Perl 11 8 years ago

It's viable, but certainly not designed for that sort of thing like Perl, Python, Powershell, Awk, & Bash. Many of those languages have built in niceties for scripting such as Perl's myriad of command line switches and well, everything about Powershell. They're optimized for shorter programs where Haskell is optimized for helping you write higher quality code.

Perl 11 8 years ago

I'm with you here. It's not that Haskell isn't a good language, but that scripting languages are really good at scripting :)

Haskell does have a good REPL and being able to distribute a binary when finished is really nice.