paul_reiners

I don't think it is, but I saw a test case here claiming it is:

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/academics/courses/325/program...

A watched kettle never boils.

They concentrate on algorithms. Good for them. That is how it should be taught.

* Sherlock Holmes: Because he was the coolest guy ever, even if he was fictional.

* Bobby Fischer: The world had never seen such monomania before and probably never will again. (Of course, he went mad in the end.)

* Lennon and McCartney: The greatest popular music composers since the Gershwins.

* Kurt Gödel: The greatest logician of all time.

* Bach and Chopin: The greatest composers for the keyboard of all time.

Read "Smart & Gets Things Done" by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html

That's exactly it. Saying that learning a new language is just a matter of learning a new syntax is like saying that an English-speaking, non-German speaker could translate a German text to English by taking a German-English dictionary and going through and translating the words one-by-one. It's not quite as simple as that.

I've noticed that the most effective way to get a programming project finished is to just let everything else slide for a few weeks: paying bills, exercising, being social. Probably not a very healthy way to live in the long run, though.

That's a compliment, right?

People always like talking about what they're working on.

I can't get any speed-up by using declarations. If anyone does, please let me know.

Right now I'm in the middle of a study group that I started here at work. We're studying Graham's book "ANSI Common Lisp" and studying inference in particular, so we're also covering some of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming".

After that's done, I'm going to either spend some time working on the Netflix Prize (just to learn more, not in a real attempt to win) or doing some music programming in either Lisp, using the Common Music API, or Mathematica.

Sarosh,

Thanks!

I know about Csound, but I've never actually used it. Lately I've been playing around with Common Music, which is written in Lisp and has a Lisp API.

Now that Mathematica supports MIDI, I want to do some music programming in Mathematica also.

Here's a site I maintain on music programming, by the way:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/algomusic

Paul

Here's an article I wrote on the same topic:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-camusic/

They did an excellent job with WolframTones. Mathematica is a powerful language.

Eric Raymond is an excellent writer and you can't go wrong reading this article.

Also, learn how to do mathematical proofs. I don't know what the best way to do this is. I learned from 10th-grade Euclidean geometry class. Maybe you can pick up a good book on Euclidean geometry that has a lot of exercises in it.

Finally, pick up a good book on Lisp that has a lot of exercises in it and do all the exercises in it. Winston and Horn is good. "The Little Lisper" is also good.

Actually, I take back my statement that this is not set-theoretic union.

If I'm willing to accept '(a a) as representing the set '(a) when I use it as an input to union, I should be just as willing to accept '(a a b) as representing the set '(a b) when I receive it back from union.

Yes, you're right. The fact that they leave the behavior of union in this case undefined in the standard is surprising to me. The fact that SBCL and GNU CLISP implement it the way they do is just bizarre to me.

Thanks, I figured it out now.

I'm not sure, but I think you need to use labels, rather than flet, in this case, since local functions defined using flet cannot be recursive. At least that's how I interpret what it says on page 319.

At any rate, this solution works using labels:

  (defmacro ntimes (n &rest body)
      (let ((h (gensym))
            (g (gensym)))
        `(let ((,h ,n))
           (labels ((ntimes-local (,g) 
                    (if (> ,g 0) 
                        ,@body)
                    (if (zerop ,g)
                        nil
                        (ntimes-local (1- ,g)))))
             (ntimes-local ,h)))))

I guess I'm not understanding the problem then, because I thought we were not supposed to expand into a do, since the problem states:

"Define ntimes (page 167) to expand into a (local) recursive function instead of a do."

Isn't the problem asking you to write this without expanding into a do, or am I missing something here? What would be a correct solution to the problem?

Sorry about the non-pretty printing. It was nicely formatted, when I entered it (I swear). Is there something like a <code> tag I could use?

Also, not all of the error message printed. What's up with that?

It got "Hey Jude". At least, that was the 2nd of the possibilities it mentioned.

I think that's kind of amazing.

I took that class from Kunen at Wisconsin in the late 80s. But I'll be damned if I can find my copy of that yellow book or remember enough to be of any help.

I have to admit that I never really did understand forcing.

It seemed like all the logic professors at UW at that time, including Kunen, were getting interested in computer science.

Kleene was still around at that time, too.

The book has chapters on mathematicians such as Kurt Gödel and Paul Erdős among others. I'll have to get it. Why no musicians, though? I would have added Glenn Gould to the list.

That 'campus' sounds scary. Like Hitler Youth but with nicer shirts.

I'm about half-way through it. I put it down for awhile and just started reading it again. There are nice sections on Lisp and Gödel in it. It's a good book.

I haven't read Leavitt’s book on Turing, so I can't comment on it.

I have read "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges, which was excellent, both in the biographical details and the mathematical details.

I agree with you that it does draw a lot of attention to the personal, emotional relationships of Hardy, Ramanujan, Littlewood, and so on. But, for someone who has already read and loved "A Mathematician's Apology" and studied math in college, reading about these personalities can be quite fascinating. Of course, since this is a novel, it's hard to say what is surmise, what is fact, and what is invented. I never was able to find much biographical material on Hardy (I was only able to find 2 pictures of him (this was in the 80s before Google)).

I need to read the book on Ramanujan you mentioned, though.

So, religiosity = c / wealth for some constant c, with the U.S. (and Kuwait) as an outlier. Why am I not surprised, yet somehow disappointed?

This book has been out for awhile, but I just started reading it and am having a hard time putting it down. If you're interested in G.H. Hardy or Ramanujan, you should definitely read it. Of course, it's a novel, but the portrait of Hardy is fascinating.

I would ask for a lot more money to finish the job (a lot more) and say "take it or leave it". If he isn't willing to pay the extra money, I would just walk away.

There's nothing to be gained from debating with a troublesome manager who doesn't understand programming. You would just be wasting your time.