adeelk

Sure, but verroq was talking about vector spaces and linear maps, not matrices. The theory of vector spaces over a field is more general and can be applied to much more than systems of equations.

> Someone who has never seen the type of problem that would make a given abstraction useful would not be able to understand it easily.

Whether or not someone is sufficiently motivated to study something should not affect their ability to understand it. Vector spaces and linear maps are actually much easier to understand, and I think that at some point in mathematics (probably your first analysis course) your motivation has to come from the beauty of the theory itself rather than some real-world application.

As is often the case, the way to get the intuition here is to just work out the computation. Once you do that, it should all "click".

What in Clojure is biased towards web programming (or any other domain)?

> About one in four adults suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.  That means if you think about your 10 favorite people in the whole world two of them could be at risk of suicide.

No, that means on average, an arbitrary set of eight adults contains two with a mental disorder. (Presumably this refers to adults in the U.S.)

> That's like saying, "If we start putting people in jail for using illegal drugs, people will eventually stop using illegal drugs." Unfortunately that's just not how it works

If you believe this, then what is the purpose of putting illegal drug users in jail?

> The issue isn't that people are voting up comments or submissions that don't fit with what HN is supposed to be, the problem is that those submissions and comments are being made.

If people stop voting up such comments, people will eventually stop making them.

> Mostly, when I come across complex equations in CS papers, I tend to skip over them and only go back to look at them if there are parts of the paper I can't make sense of without them - it is very rare to find that they are necessary at all.

Obviously any equation can be expressed in words, but those who are familiar with the notation are able to read the equations and understand the ideas in a paper in a fraction of the time. This is important for those who read papers regularly.

Dear kristianc,

You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.

Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.

The funny thing is that most of these APIs wind up with what's essentially a "this" pointer at the front of every argument list so you're really doing OO anyway.

Do you have much experience with non-OO programming? Or even OOP, for that matter? How can one honestly believe that every instance of passing data into functions is automatically OOP? Did you even consider the fact that this has nothing to do with objects?

Time objects are a really bad example because time calculations are exactly the kind of hairy mess you want to hide behind some kind of abstract API.

You miss his point here. Time not being an object would not imply that it can't be abstracted into an API. Just see Clojure's clj-time library for an example.

You really find IO more interesting than problem solving?

I’m not the OP.

Any reason for the personal attack (based on unfounded assumptions)?...

https://github.com/facebook/javelin/issues/9

https://github.com/facebook/javelin/issues/10

> Every other language I've learned either has as many warts as JavaScript or isn't practical.

Time to learn some more languages.

I don’t see an interpretation that makes sense. In fact, I don’t think there is one. I guess you define a “statement” to be a complete sentence, judging by “its title alone isn’t a proper statement”, but titles are rarely statements anyway and the actual contents of the novel, I am sure, are full sentences. We need to use more precise language, instead of hiding behind vague terms like “statements”, if we hope to evaluate the argument.

I am not nitpicking. I honestly don’t think any sense can be made from leot’s statement. If I am wrong, I invite you to refine it in a way that makes sense. Your earlier refinement (text is not the best medium for every message) makes sense, but the point is that art is not defined as “mediums other than text”, and therefore it isn’t relevant to the previous discussion about art.

This is a more precise statement, but you have replaced “art” with “other mediums than text”. Is literature not art?

This statement is meaningless as is and I think if you were to make it precise you would find it ridiculous.

“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”

Not sure I understand your point. Gauss is credited for the term “complex number” as well.

A programming language designer shouldn’t have to make accommodations for users of whatever other languages are popular at the moment. If “return” is the natural name for a keyword, then regardless of its semantics in other languages, that is the best choice in the long term.

Technical note: even in languages where every expression has a value, it is possible to have an `if` form that doesn’t require an `else` value: just return nil. See, for example, Clojure: http://clojure.org/special_forms#if

What is “computer syntax”?!

> Intelligence/coding go hand in hand.

Are you joking? There are tons of very intelligent people who know nothing about coding.

I don’t think so. When does “programming” ever mean technical literacy?

What Atwood is arguing against is the idea that “everyone needs to learn programming”. Because of the title he chose for his first post (which didn’t actually represent his point correctly), now many other groups of people, with a lot of varying views, are arguing with him on points he wasn’t even making. You individually are arguing that everyone should be technically literate, but that’s not what he was arguing against anyway.

Wow. Please look past the title of his first post to see what he's actually saying: not everyone needs to know programming (which is distinct from “computer literacy”).

> why is mathematical and logical thinking, common to programmers, so rare?

What evidence is there that programmers have better mathematical and logical thinking?

> I've tried teaching many people the difference between "8" and (the literal value) 8...it never seems to stick until you write and run a simple piece of code to test it out.

This is unrelated to both mathematics and logic.

> I cannot recommend it to hackers since the functionalities are quite limited.

Come on, iA Writer is not competing with Emacs.

> I think the 'most people can't...' is off slightly because good vs bad is purely a personal, instinctive thing.

Typography is not subjective. That non-experts are unable to distinguish between good and bad typography is simply a consequence of the fact that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people” [1].

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-fl...

This seems like a reasonable definition. Does CoffeeScript not have its own idioms, though? I’ve never used it myself, but a search turned up this chapter on idioms in “The Little Book on CoffeeScript”: http://arcturo.github.com/library/coffeescript/04_idioms.htm...

A programming language is independent of its implementation. If web browsers supported CoffeeScript natively, would that make it more of a language?