skenney26

Learning to program now is easier than ever before.

Last week my partner was in Spanish class and the teacher told her that the most important languages to know in the future will be English, Spanish, and a programming language. Programming is the new literacy. She decided she wanted to learn to program. We opened up Terminal on her Mac laptop, typed "python", and used Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python as a guide. Done.

With a PC you at least have access to JavaScript (and Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript tutorial) which is more than suitable for a first language.

The first lecture in this series mentions that the discussion groups are also available via video. Has anyone found these?

The issue isn't about math. The opinion of anyone who's maintaining a profitable business should be given extra attention.

Perhaps it would be simpler to pass the interval modifiers as functional arguments:

  (def mapr (f x y . fs)
    (let r (range x y)
      (map f r
             (apply map + (map [map _ r] fs)))))

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [+ _ 10])
  1 11
  2 12
  3 13
  (1 2 3)

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [expt _ 2])
  1 1
  2 4
  3 9
  (1 2 3)

  arc> (mapr (fn (x y) (prn x " " y)) 1 3 [+ _ 10] [expt _ 2])
  1 12
  2 16
  3 22
 (1 2 3)

Pretty amusing experiment. The site doesn't seem to like pg's informal writing style.

Very cool website though. I need to use this on my blog posts.

Nice post. The author's list at http://www.usnews.com/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2008/6/24... is great. I wish my workplace understood this, especially #3. Few businesses are ambitious enough to tackle #7.

As a hacker who's always been fascinated with multimedia applications I thought it was a perfect fit.

> "...they all screwed up lexical scoping."

I have read a number of comments like this recently. I am very curious about what this implies but the person making the statement never gives an explanation.

I can't wait to see the mascot/logo for SearchMonkey.

I seriously can't understand why two companies, Yahoo and Microsoft, with such a fetish for pointless pseudo-3D characters couldn't manage to come together as one.

Pics:

http://www.biancolo.com/jim/search_dog.jpg

https://login.yahoo.com/config/mail?.intl=us

In "Being Popular" you mention that the Dream Language has a "thin" manual with "lots of good examples to learn from." Can we look forward to a book on Arc?

I guess the title "Arc could use more libraries" isn't as attention-getting as "Why Arc is bad for exploratory programming."

Trying to wrap my mind around Arc by building an ecommerce app.

If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.

Why does the phrase 'my science' make me uneasy?

Actually, Facebook has a very sophisticated infrustructure. Take a look at Thrift, http://developers.facebook.com/thrift/, the open-source project for cross-language development they released earlier this year. Even Google is trapped using about four programming languages (C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript). The latest version of Thrift has interfaces for 10 languages (Cocoa, C++, Erlang, Haskell, Java, OCaml, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby).