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smosher

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The point was simply that what you wrote is how a very bad argument starts. I took care to point out I wasn't accusing you of that but you have reacted defensively anyway.

It's my fault for trying to engage an HN-er in a form of discourse other than debate.

I live ok without pattern matching and I build compilers/runtimes for a living; is that blub conceit?

No, I would have quoted it the first time if it was. But if you want to repeat that again you will certainly sound conceited.

The important bit is:

    As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power 
    continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub 
    are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used 
    to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, 
    up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are 
    merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power 
    to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good 
    enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
From PG's Beating the Averages (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

I couldn't help but notice this phrase:

[X] is nice but [Y] will get you most of the way and [dealing with the difference] is simple.

reads a lot like the Blub conceit. I'm not accusing you of that, but I do disagree that OO can give you what pattern matching typically does.

Lets pick one as a community and stick with it.

And when our assumptions turn out to be wrong, should we continue working on it even though we know it can never work? The problem is every new term is forged with assumptions because the very idea of what intelligence is the subject of ongoing debate. (I don't even like the one presented here, even though it's pretty good as far as these things go.)

I sympathize though, the nomenclature is polluted with the corpses of would-be giants and makes it hard to talk about what we can all easily recognize as the same broad-strokes effort.

Dogescript 13 years ago

He did a better job of aping doge than you did, and not everyone needs to love it.

I wasn't. I was making the point that it's important to realize that it is a question of freedom even if you don't regard it as one that should be had. There are those who don't believe Snowden is fighting for justified freedoms and that his alleged treachery is worse than facilitating drug trafficking.

Should we also have the freedom to hire a contract killer then?

It sounds an awful lot like you're trying to pick an argument that isn't on the table. I haven't endorsed any freedoms in particular, why are you asking me about this?

I don't think so, not as a discussion site participant. None of the sites I use allow it.

But the real point is people don't do it that often even when they can. Twitter is rarely a direct source of content. From what I've seen Vimeo and Soundcloud have a better shot at this than Twitter, even though YouTube has them both both beat on embedding frequency for their respective content.

I don't buy the logic. If embedding is such a big deal then why does nearly every discussion forum allow you to embed youtube videos but not tweets? It's got nothing to do with who the community thinks could make ad money on it, it's all about the particular medium. Further, while youtube is full of content, twitter has a much higher meta-content volume. Good for 'news' perhaps, not so much for discussion forums outside of gossip.

I disagree. Many people in this world lack the freedom to purchase cocaine. Whether they should have the freedom is up for debate. Whether it's a question of freedom is not.

That's my understanding as well, but the salient point is MAOIs work indirectly by increasing the effectiveness of some neurotransmitters—including dopamine, which nicotine increases the level of.

Right. I suppose I took it for granted that brains are big ol' drug factories and assumed everyone was on the same page. The point is the MAOI isn't a used as neurotransmitter, but to affect the metabolism of monoamine transmitters—now matter how they got there.

You're right, and my point wasn't to attack his character but to explain the nonsense coming out of his mouth. There is a clear and simple explanation, consistent with his history, that is (perhaps unfortunately) not flattering.

However, he has a history of being insulting towards people who want to use different paradigms. So if you're going to bring that line up with anyone, bring it up with Rob Pike himself.

I don't think it takes a C++ expert to point out that the more plausible explanation is simply that Rob Pike is a narcissist.

This is the same guy who said you don't need to know what I know (re: endianness) because you will never write a compiler. Consummate narcissism.

Do companies ever release linguistic guidelines?

Yes, sometimes, and people ignore them. So: rarely. And they shouldn't. New language isn't prescribed with any effectiveness. And what you were taught in school is based on analysis (a bad one at that.)

I wonder whether you're responding to the the journalist or the person they're quoting.

If you read the rest of the article, that idea does become more compelling since the creature loses those gears at its final stage in life.