Impl0x

I believe so, yes.

Buddy wait til you hear about oil companies

Tinder no longer requires Facebook, I believe.

The link posted jumps straight down to the "Exercises for the reader" section. Is that intentional?

I got started with functional programming with F#. I agree that there were times when I used its hybrid nature as a crutch, but I think there's a value in using a hybrid language if your goal is to learn. F# let me write out code in an imperative style that did what I wanted it to do, and then from there I could refine the code and take advantage of the functional features as I learned them. It's a nice way to learn which features from the different paradigms are equivalent, and it really lets you appreciate what you gain from using FP.

There are a few "easy" answers for ease of adoption, some of which I think have been mentioned by other replies. A phonetic alphabet with only one possible sound per letter, the ability to identify a word's part of speech given only the word, and an exception-free verb conjugation scheme are all common approaches for making a language easy to learn. Some constructed languages have a simple rule for determining which syllable in a word gets emphasis.

Also worth considering is making the language as "familiar" as possible to a new learner. You could decide what phonemes your language uses by looking at the most frequently used phonemes in the most popular languages. You might decide to go a level higher and base your language's word for universal concepts (food, day, sleep) based on roots that are common across many languages.

Another way to make a language easy is to reduce the number of words a person needs to know in order to use it in the real world. I'm personally a big fan of Esperanto's word-building system, which uses around 30 affixes (in addition to the suffixes that define each word's part of speech) that can be attached to a root word to modify or enhance its meaning. There's not a limit to how many affixes you can have, the word just has to make sense. Every time you learn a new root word, you get a huge number of new words for free by knowing affixes. A language that has such a system can get by with a reduced number of root words. For example: "laboro" is the word for the word "work" or "job" in Esperanto. By adding only one affix you can arrive at words like "labor-ej-o" (workplace), "labor-ist-o" (a laborer by trade), "labor-ant-o" (a person performing labor), and "labor-ind-o" (a job worth doing).

However, it's not really enough to just make a language easy. I'm glad you brought up virality; drawing people in is almost certainly the more difficult part. Once you have your ideal language, you need to build a culture around it. This is the same thing as when people judge the quality/utility of a programming language by its "ecosystem". Unfortunately this is largely out of the language creator's control. There's just too much work involved for a single person, or even a small group of people. There needs to be an abundance of learning material, lots of translated works and a growing body of original works (across as many genres/media/levels of proficiency as possible), and networks for speakers/learners to communicate and collaborate.

Indeed, the issue of DDT is much much more nuanced than people make it out to be. At the time, it was a miracle chemical that was going to let us eradicate (rather than simply control or minimize) all manner of diseases, so the scale at which it was used was pretty incredible. In some cases we were effectively carpet-bombing whole islands with the stuff. No wonder we were killing birds and fish.

There's a book [1] about the history of DDT that does a great job of establishing a historical context for its use. I agree that we can't simply un-ban it, but our approach to disease prevention/control has come such a long way since prohibiting it that I can't help but wonder if we could deploy it safely now.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/DDT-American-Century-Environmental-En...

This is a difficult question because there are multiple motivations for making a new constructed language. For instance, Esperanto is designed to be a universal second language. It emphasizes ease of learning through very regular grammar, deriving most of its words from pre-existing roots, and a simple-but-powerful word construction. A language like Lojban, on the other hand, tries to eliminate linguistic ambiguity by basing its grammar on predicate logic.

So to clarify, are you asking how we'd go about designing a language that's optimized for universality? Or some other metric?

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Presidential pardons don't apply to impeachments, I believe.

What have been your impressions with Elm so far? I started playing with it recently since I enjoy Haskell but I'm coming from it with no prior web experience so it's hard for me to gauge it in most aspects.

Of course there's always uncertainty involved, but uncertainty of outcome doesn't really lend any more purpose to an armed conflict.

I have a morbid fascination with the idea of all-robot wars between countries with rough parity to each other (both countries have robot armies/navies/air forces). War always seemed sorta pointless to me but it becomes so much more so when you can quantify all the elements of what should make a military successful. If you know all the aspects of a robot force (power efficiency, sensor suite, decision-making, etc) and have a rough idea of the production capabilities of the warring countries then it seems like you could just crunch some numbers and have an idea of who would win in a war of attrition. Strategic objectives and planning might still be relegated to human generals, of course, but at that point the generals are practically just playing a real-time strategy game set in real life rather than in a computer.

One of my favorite things I've learned during my time studying Esperanto is the word "volapukaĵo", which is constructed from "volapuk" as the root and means "nonsense".

"Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me!"

computers of the future will not be able to implement any of our ideas without creating time-travelling algorithms that borrow processing power from other computers that are further into the future.

This sounds difficult, but in lisp it isn't difficult at all.

in haskell this is a built-in feature

The creepiest part is that it's almost true: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tardis-0.4.1.0/docs/Cont...

I enjoy math, but I'm nowhere near experienced enough to follow that paper. There wouldn't happen to be an annotated version or some kind of summary of it, would there? I've always wanted to know what it was about.

This might be off topic, but there are a few comments on here (mostly) joking about why we even should bother designing planes like the F-35 to be operated locally by humans. I'm curious, does anyone have any info on the state of drone fighter planes, either remotely piloted or completely autonomous? Does such a project even merit consideration when we could innovate missile systems instead?

Half-swording can and was performed bare-handed as well.

I don't want to sound fussy, but sword guards aren't designed to protect the user from the sword, they're for protecting the user from other swords. That they make using a sword safer is a side-effect. I agree with the point you're making though.

MC tree search isn't specific to Go, no. It's been used for other games including imperfect information ones like poker. I believe that the main reasons for using MC search is that it does not require an evaluation function, and it acts as an anytime algorithm so you can get a "good enough" answer within arbitrary time constraints.

The journal article referenced in the OP actually seems to use more than just Markov chains. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.03313v2.pdf

You'd be happy, then, to note the modernized version also included in the article.

The paragraph where the author describes losing interest after the "interesting part" describes how most of my free time projects go to the letter. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has that problem.

This was the textbook for the AI class I took last year at my university! I found it very well written.

This sounds similar to RosettaCode (http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code).

That's basically how the stock market works already