On Mon, 2 Jan 2012, dwight elvey wrote: Damn good points. I consider BASIC to be an excellent beginner's introduction to "what is a program?", etc., so long as they are exposed to other languages immediately after grasping the basic principles. C, for wxample, is the Systems Programming "language of choice", but as somebody's very first exposure to programming, it will teach them more about what their frustration tolerance level is than about programming. Once PAST that initial exposure stage, C is excellent. Although I don't speak a word of Forth, other than once having read Brodie's book ("Starting Forth"), it seems ideal for working with mastering the issues of getting a software structure to connect with the hardware. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 01/02/2012 06:51 PM, David Riley wrote: Seconded! I tend to put Forth on pretty much everything I build, which have mostly been Z80-based SBCs. Forth is amazing in so many ways. I suspect so many people fear it because it isn't "just another language that looks sorta like C"...most of "those" languages someone with enough experience can get the general gist of by being exposed to some source code. Not so with Forth; one must actually learn a little bit about the language first. ...which is why people dislike it. It seems extreme laziness and the need for INSTANT (as opposed to "fifteen minutes from now") ruins even awesome stuff like this for some people. That's ok, people like you and I will still reap the massive benefits of Forth. =) Dave, FYI, my GA144 chip arrived the other day. Massive wood! -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

I'm not convinced that's a problem. The same thing that was wrong with the New Math: you don't dump the full load of theory on a beginner, not unless you want a very confused beginner, or you have the incredible luck to get a Ramanujan or Knuth as a student (and if so, honestly, the best thing anyone can do is to get the hell out of the way). Just as it takes a certain amount of mathematical sophistication to grasp, say, the difference between base ten and other bases, or the difference between a number and its representation in some base, it takes a certain amount of programming sophistication to grasp what, say, lexical scoping is and why it's important - and it helps to have some experience with non-lexically-scoped languages. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On 3 January 2012 04:16, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: O_o So speaketh a *highly* intelligent, perhaps near-genius-level, natural programmer. I have only read a tiny little bit about Scheme but it is virtually impenetrable to me - and I have years of programming experiences, albeit poor quality programming, and have been competent in 4 or 5 languages: umpteen BASICs, Pascal, Fortran, C shell, and arguably rudimentary C. I have yet to find an explanation of the lambda calculus that is remotely comprehensible to me, as a smart, educated man with extremely rich and deep IT experience. Seriously, most people are not very smart. BASIC has a fairly low entry level - the learning curve is modest. The reason that most of the other "teaching languages" designed to replace it haven't worked out on anything like the same scale. (E.g. Logo, Scheme) Concepts such as local versus global variables, scope, recursion and so on are complex, difficult stuff unless someone is both very very smart and deeply embedded in computational and mathematical "culture". Any language which puts these front and centre is quite simply /too hard/ for mere mortals to learn. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 3 January 2012 13:57, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: Even worse. There is a core question here which you seem to be skipping over. Do you want to teach people to write code, to be able to make a computer perform new tasks? *Or* do you want to train professional software engineers? These are not at /all/ the same thing. Indeed I'd submit that they are barely related. If you want the latter, then sure, yes, Scheme or Lisp or something clever and rather arcane. Start 'em on the hard stuff so they learn right, in the same way that I learned swordfighting with a foil, the feeblest weapon but the one controlled by the strictest rules. If you can fight foil, then you can move to the less-demanding sabre easily, and the relatively undemanding ep?e is straightforward; but start with ep?e and learning the formalities of foil will be much harder. Oh come off it! Line numbers went out in 1985, man! Don't judge BASIC by the crappy implementations of the early 1980s when 8K of RAM was a lot! No, not at all. I would expect at least integers, floats, variable length strings, multidimensional arrays of any other type, and quite possibly different lengths of integer and possibly signed and unsigned forms. Possibly booleans and things as well; maybe a complex type. But to be a programmer does not mandate being a mathematician. I have taught programming to people who did not know what a percentage was, who did not know how to multiply or divide by fractions and so on. Many people do not need fancy types. Again, a limitation only of very primitive, early BASICs, although I have to say, I never found it a limitation. Have user-defined structured data types if you want, though. Again, a limitation of the early 1980s. Not true of any decent BASIC See above. Have you actually *seen* /any/ even 1990s BASIC, FFS? You'll have to explain what that means. But is incomprehensible and uses bizarre postfix notation. Straw man. If you can grasp the basics, pardon the pun, which I doubt most could. You have no real experience of actual high-school students, then, I can see that. Oh bollocks! Q.v. Dylan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_%28programming_language%29#Syntax Q.v. Lisp 2 and Elephant, discussed here /passim./ Even John McCarthy himself later conceded that Lisp's syntax was a major hindrance in teaching it. That is not even remotely /like/ the conclusion that I came to. You are putting words in my mouth and I *object*, strenuously. I did not say it was not relevant. I did not say it was a bad thing to start with. I said it was /too hard/ for the average person, and I stand by that. You have no idea of what any BASIC from even 20y ago is like, as you have demonstrated, and you also seem to be very unfamiliar with the limitations of actual ordinary people. For nonspecialists, concepts such as loops are quite hard at first. Iterative thinking has to be learned. Starting off utter newbies with prefix notation, CAR and CADR, lists versus atoms, quoting and lambda calculus is like taking the play-blocks off a kindergarten class and asking them to build the cathedral of Notre Dame instead. Actually, I am sure you're right. But this misses the strength of the old BASICs of the late 1980s and 1990s: that they brought programming to the common man. Sure, we need better developers, but we /also/ need easy, friendly, fun tools to reintroduce the ordinary Joe to writing programs at all. Python and so on are far too big and complex for this. So in fact BASIC did /not/ give you brain damage and stop you learning? You have shown that you don't actually understand how much BASIC moved on from the crappy MS BASIC 4 days of 1980. It isn't. I've written recursive programs. In BASIC. In a good BASIC: in BBC BASIC V, a very fast, 32-bit BASIC with full support for named procedures, local variables, passing by reference and value and so on. I don't, because I am not a programmer and I don't aim to be. They deserve something better than a 1970s BASIC, sure... But even a late 1980s BASIC would, I submit, be more use than Python or Ruby, which are too big, too complex and too abstract. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: Interestingly, the book "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Abelson and Sussman is often cited as a book that actually conveys precisely what programming IS, and even more interestingly, how programs WORK. After writing a good number of programs, you begin to write programs to manipulate programs (Chapter 4), and programs to transform and execute programs (Chapter 5). And the book uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp of course. And I can't think of a better choice for the task at hand. No syntactic baggage. Exceptionally clean semantics, even to the starter. The Scheme standard (dubbed "R5RS") is short enough to be read in an afternoon. Around 50-80 pages. See here: http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/HTML/r5rs-Z-H-2.html#%_toc… The book, SICP, is even free! See here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

On 03/01/12 10:09 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Exactly the reverse. Professional software engineers I've seen around wouldn't touch Lisp with a barge pole. While, for people who want to get stuff done elegantly and simply, without irrelevancies, Scheme is ideal. It's not hard stuff (q.v) Line numbers are not the issue. Can I make a list? Functions are a fundamental abstracting/factoring tool. So they better work well. -> Closures, too. To you... Not Schemes I'm familiar with. Not true; I know some who are learning Scheme and Haskell with no trouble. Oh, yes, people have been trained to be terrified of it. It's a phantom fear. Yes, that's true; but it is 2011. And we are preparing kids whose careers will peak in 2030. C moreso. I should have picked up something I could learn more from. I'm very very familiar with BBC BASIC. It can't by any stretch be compared to a Lisp or ML family language, for example. And after that, where will they fill in the missing pieces in their education? --Toby

On 1/5/12 7:52 AM, "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: And that statement goes to the heart of this conversation: once one has been 'indoctrinated' into one paradigm it can be devilishly hard to wrap one's head around another. My first language was FORTRAN IV (on Hollerith cards), my second was BASIC (again, on Hollerith cards, then an ASR33). When I learned C (from the K&R book) I had the usual struggle with pointers until the 'moment of enlightenment' after which I used them with no more thought than any other construct. Later I was exposed to Prolog, again having a struggle to set aside almost everything I'd learned to that point and being rewarded with a new way to look at applying information technology to solve problems. Lisp/Scheme was a similar personal evolution, and was enabled by exposure to functional programming. FP seems to spawn a religious fervor, but frankly so did OOP in the early days of C++ ("this will fix EVERYthing!"), and fortunately I was able to (eventually) grasp the value of a new paradigm without drinking the Kool-Aid. And I learned my first language in the mid-1970s, but only 'got' Lisp/Scheme in the last couple of years. These things don't necessarily happen overnight, but YMMV. So I empathize with your discomfort with Scheme, but I disagree that your experience validates the belief you hold that because you are not grokking it, 'normal folks' can't/won't grok it. You are already part of a distinct cohort: experienced users of information technology. How can you map your experience onto the broader population? And while your knowledge born of long tenure grants you many positive attributes in this field, there are down sides - such as this one, that you look at Scheme through the lens of your own experience and say, "that's just so wrong." It would certainly make for bad [BASIC | FORTRAN | C/C++ | etc.] but once you have the 'moment of enlightenment' it seems very consistent and elegant. For example, I far prefer prefix or postfix notation to messy infix notation that requires a table of operator precedence a page long! My first Lisp text that made sense to me was one published by DEC, aimed at experienced programmers. I switched to Scheme because, as I've said before, I felt it was not as bloated and bowdlerized as so-called Common Lisp. When I later picked up "Little Schemer" I found it interesting, but a bit tedious at points, probably because of the challenge of overcoming 'normal' thinking about programming. :-) But I agree it's a good book and can help one achieve literacy in the ways of Scheme. So I think you or anyone else *can* learn to program in a Lisp-like language and come to appreciate its value. Your addendum about that person having "neither interest [n]or aptitude" is another matter entirely. And I don't mean that unkindly: my daughter wants me to learn to ice-skate?. -- Ian

On Jan 5, 2012, at 12:09 PM, Liam Proven wrote: I can take that one, though I fully expect someone to correct me if I get something wrong. Closures are a way of encapsulating data in a particular function instance, not unlike the member data associated with an object's method. For example, in Python I could write the following function: # foo is expected to be a list here def function_generator(foo): def _f(x): foo.append(x) return _f And I would generate a callable function that would append x to the list foo. For example: bar = [] append_func = function_generator(bar) append_func("abc") print bar Would print "['abc']". It's a toy example, for sure, but they're great for things like callbacks (it's similar to a callback with a context pointer, which is a pretty popular idiom in C; a closure just encapsulates the context pointer much like a C++ object does for its methods). I use this all the time in Python; great for generating tiny local functions to thunk a string into the right format, too. - Dave

On 5 January 2012 18:22, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote: Thanks for the example, but I am afraid I can't follow a line of it. Sorry. I have tried to cram some Python into my head several times, but it won't stick. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 26 January 2012 05:06, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Sorry - I only replied yesterday, as I guess you saw after writing this, as you're replied to my reply. Apologies for both my sluggishness - I have a lot of other stuff to do, as well - and not realising it was a private email rather than to the list. Would you prefer that I revert to directly mailing you? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 26 January 2012 16:08, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: :?) I'm half-way through a reply. I thought that leaving it public might help if others wanted to leap in and try to explain stuff that this dumbass here, yours truly, is missing, you see... -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 5 January 2012 19:03, Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> wrote: The Little Lisper The Little Schemer Lisp by Winston and Horn Top tips - especially the PDF. Many thanks! Sadly, I don't think they did. :?/ Roger wilco OK, fair call. All right, I will take that on board. It is just that, AFAICS, when people speak of the superiority of Lisp over other programming languages, or of its core strengths and why it is worth looking at or learning, they tend to cite these things. However, nobody appears to be able to explain /what they are./ It is troubling. OK, I can't argue with that. Hmmm. Interesting. All right. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 1/5/2012 9:26 PM, Toby Thain wrote: * Types and Programming Languages by Pierce This book explains type theory and the theory of programming languages. You write several little interpreters, like an interpreter for the core, untyped lambda calculus. You learn about the relevance of lambda calculus as a fundamental computer science concept, and how one builds upon that. As said, it explains type theory too. * Purely Functional Data Structure by Okasaki Talks about data structures which are immutable and efficient, suitable for purely functional languages. This is more about functional programming than the lambda calculus. * Introduction to Functional Programming using Haskell by Bird This is a book, *not* about Haskell, but rather about functional programming. That is, it's relatively language unspecific, but uses Haskell as a vehicle for examples. * Learn You A Haskell For Great Good by Lipovaca Okay, now if you want to be spoonfed Haskell and functional programming, read this. You'll start with syntax, recursion, and types; and it'll carry you to monads, zippers, applicative functors, randomness, etc. It does not talk about really serious stuff like unsafe IO, some of the finer points of lazy evaluation, monad transformers SICP should explain closures just fine. I mean, not only are closures (and lexical scope as a prerequisite) explained, but you also use closures in a practical way. And there is no way SICP is poor. * Let Over Lambda by Hoyte Chapter 1 of this book dives into a pragmatic explanation of what a closure is by describing it as a "Let Over Lambda". For example (define closure (let ((x 2)) (lambda () (display x))) This is an extremely simple example. CLOSURE is bound to a lambda expression. But not just some pure lambda, it has extra information about its environment. So it's a lambda (code) + environment (data). If we proceed to call CLOSURE, we get: 2 We can be more fancy: (define counter (let ((count 0)) (lambda () (set! count (+ 1 count)) count))) Here the lambda captures COUNT. Now we call COUNTER a few times: 1 2 3 Look ma! Encapsulation! COUNT is not accessible from the outside. C++ers might call this a ~private variable~, but really it's just a variable closed inside some execution context. Anyway, that's what Chapter 1 of said book talks about. * Lisp In Small Pieces by Quiennec This talks about compiling Lisp if you're interested in how closures might be compiled. It also talks about formal semantics and other mathy stuff. No, these are not necessarily poor nor complex just because *you* don't understand it. The best way to go about it is to actually write some programs in Scheme or Standard ML or Haskell or whatever. Then you actually internalize what things mean, instead of these abstract definitions like what the semantics of lambda is. You'll find the easy-to-understand books typically do the programming for you by showing you code examples. Remember, programming isn't like history, where you can just read a book and understand what's going on. It's more like medicine and being a doctor, where both book reading *and* practice are important, the latter being almost surely more important. --Robert P.S., The moral of the story is, sit down, open a Scheme, and read SICP often the first book a compsci major gets to read. READ SICP DAMMIT.

On 6 January 2012 16:45, Robert Smith <quadricode at gmail.com> wrote: Um. Thanks for the suggestions, but I have to point out that I can't really buy and read half a dozen textbooks in order to finish a 2 or 3 thousand word article. I mean, ideally, I'd be knocking out a couple of such pieces a day if I were a staffer and at least a few a week as a freelancer. This simply does not permit such a depth of research! I am amused that you don't even explain what that ETLA stands for. I've added it to my Bookmooch wishlist, anyway, although I doubt I'll get it in time to be much help. Er. It may be, but it is not simple enough for me to follow, I'm afraid. This is why I marked these messages as read & have come back to them to reread them once a week or so all this month. I am not getting any closer to enlightenment. Er... I'm sorry, but I don't follow at all. Code examples in a language I don't understand - and references to another one I don't know - do not really help, I'm afraid. Sorry for my inadequate understanding. This is /way/ too much for me, I fear. Pretty much every source I have found says /the Little Schemer/ is a classic. Have you ever actually /seen/ it? It's in Greek, I swear it! The first page starts: ? *The First Commandment* When recurring on a list of atoms, /lat/, ask two questions about it: (null? lat() and *else*. ? That's _before the Foreword._ The text itself starts: ? Is it true that this is an atom? atom Yes, because *atom* is a string of characters beginning with the letter *a*. ? I mean, really, WTF? An instructional text that starts by asking questions about undefined terms? /Really?/ That's worth knowing, but it overall, your answer seems strange to me. Apart from the incomprehensible examples, that is. Are the concepts of "closure" and "lambda calculus" really /so/ recondite that they cannot be understood except by reading entire book-length exegeses and learning a whole new skill? I find this implausible. I do not *understand* the Poincar? conjecture, but a mathematician friend of mine, over the course of a 45min talk, gave me enough of the shape of thing to get the gist of it, and to understand the general thrust of Grigori Perelman's essentially topological proof of it - the one that won him the Fields Medal, which he declined to accept. These are decidedly NOT simple subjects, but they /can/ be explained to non-technical people. I simply cannot accept that two basic elements of a programming language (or family thereof), which several here are maintaining is the best one for beginners to learn, is more complex than this. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 25 January 2012 23:35, <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote: I know. I was using the term "ETLA", facetiously, to refer to the use of "SICP" in the message that I was replying to, when SCIP was never explained or expanded. I had to Google it. Because "SICP" is an ETLA, you see. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 26 January 2012 01:20, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: I was not saying the concepts are hard. I was saying that I'd not previously found any explanations of them that were comprehensible to me. I suggested 2 possible interpretations for this & have been offered a third: [1] the concepts are really really hard or [2] the explanations are all rubbish or [3] I'm really stupid & ignorant. It appears that maybe there is a #4: They are moderately hard concepts but the key thing is that they require a fair amount of prior knowledge to build upon; so if the reader *has* that knowledge, they can be conveyed by a relatively simple, step-by-step explanation. But if they don't have it, then the concepts are probably too complex to get across. They're only really meaningful to someone with at least some moderate level of programming knowledge. (E.g. named functions, local versus global variables, and the passing of named parameters - not necessarily a comprehensive list!) The problem with the explanations is that either they assume lots of expert programming knowledge, so aim too high, or that they assume none but only mathematical knowledge and use an entirely different, separate vocabulary, impenetrable if the reader does not know maths. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: Hmm... I've _used_ code written in Haskell (an Infocom de-compiler) but never been able to wrap my head around the tool I was handed. This quote might help explain why... http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/why-functional-programming-why-haskel… "Along with not modifying data, our Haskell functions usually don't talk to the external world; we call these functions pure. We make a strong distinction between pure code and the parts of our programs that read or write files, communicate over network connections, or make robot arms move" Since I spend a lot of time reading and writing files and communicating over networks and making robots move, I think Haskell is *not* for me. Its "pure functions" are boring to me. I like to write code that interacts with the real world. And this quote really puts me off Haskell (and functional programming)... "In Haskell, we de-emphasise code that modifies data. Instead, we focus on functions that take immutable values as input and produce new values as output. Given the same inputs, these functions always return the same results. This is a core idea behind functional programming." This, to me, sounds like the model of connecting processes with pipes via a shell (a 40-year-old technique, FWIW). I already do that, dozens of times a day. I don't need to do that at the code-block level inside the same process. I enjoyed the emergence of OOP into the world of FORTRAN and vanilla C. I have found many, many things that make sense when represented as objects (and plenty that were severely beaten into that mold, but that's another thing). I have yet to be won over by the "benefits" of functional programming as I'm hearing it evangelized. Perhaps that makes me a curmudgeon, but I'm an employed and successful one, if so. -ethan

Liam, I think it is possible to have simple explanations. But it depends on having a good idea of what the listner already knows. This isn't my case with you, but as I did see that you didn't like Lisp nor Python examples I will make up my own notation here and see if that helps. A lambda expression just associates a list of names with some computation using those names. Here is one that given two numbers will return the sum of the squares of those numbers: (x,y)==>(x*x+y*y) This is supposed to be a big right arrow. Now lambda calculus is a whole area of math which has lots to say about lambda expressions. For example, it says that the actual names aren't important so that this new lambda expression is entirely equivalent to the first one: (a,b)==>(a*a+b*b) I mentioned computation, but so far we haven't had any. We can apply a lambda expression to a list of values and that will allow us to get a result. I will use a colon to indicate that the expression on the left is being applied to the values on the right: (a,b)==>(a*a+b*b) : (3,4) This is exactly the same thing as (3*3+4*4) which happens to be (9+16) which can be simply written as 25 So how is this different from a function call in C? Except for the fact that I didn't give it some name like squaresum() or something like that it seems like the same thing. There are lots of interesting details in lambda calculus (specially the focus on recursive functions), but let's ignore all that and move on the closures. What would happen if we try to find the value of the following expression? (a,b)==>(a*a+b*b+c*c) : (3,4) The best we can do is get down to (25+c*c) We can say that variables "a" and "b" were bound to some values, but "c" remains unbound. It is a free variable in this expression. Here is a way to fix that: [ (c)==>( (a,b)==>(a*a+b*b+c*c) ) : (5) ] : (3,4) I just used the square brackets to make things a little less confusing, but they are the same thing as parenthesis. This complicated expression is the same as (a,b)==>(a*a+b*b+125) : (3,4) Here "c" is no longer a free variable (also known as an unbound variable or an open variable). It has been bound to a specific value. We can say it has been closed. If we have a way to refer to the thing in the square brackets and save it and later manipulate it, we can do some interesting stuff. Given that this thing has closed over a variable in a lambda expression that would otherwise be free/open/unbound we can call it a closure. You can think of a lambda expression as an anonymous function, and of a closure as a lambda expression that is not loose in the world but exists in a context (or environment) where its free variables have been associated with values. What is the big deal? You can store lambdas and closures in variables, you can return them from functions and manipulate them in several ways. In languages which don't present these concepts to the programmers they are still there, but now hidden in the implementation and out of reach. So these things are rather advanced and won't help at all children take their first steps into programming. But they allow you to tell an interesting story about how things work inside to an advanced learner without having to drop down to the level of assembly language. -- Jecel

On 01/25/2012 08:36 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: [fantastic explanation snipped] Nicely done! -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Liam, I hope it does, but if not there are more ways to explain this stuff. Thanks to everyone who has said kind words about this little text. I would like to stress something that I said the first time. Lambda expressions, closures, continuations (another interesting idea, but let's not go there now) and macros are nice features that make Scheme a kind of language construction set. None of this is interesting to the novice programmer. Where it starts to become interesting is when you have covered "normal" programming in Scheme and are interested in digging deeper. Then you first find that some things you have been using are actually built out of this stuff and you can create your own variations. Later you can use this to add stuff to understand it. For example: Ada has an interesting concurrency model while Occam and Erlang have different ones. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see all three side by side in the same language? Using Scheme's building blocks, you can! It is great in physics that we can understand thousands of different materials in terms of combinations of a few hundred kinds of atoms, then understand all these atoms in terms of combinations of electrons, protons and neutrons and later unify them all in terms of combinations of quarks. But it is best to learn them in this order, even though in theory the quarks are the simplest. Anyone who gets really excited about finally "getting" the building blocks of Scheme and want to rush out and point them out to those who are starting out is making a big mistake. -- Jecel

On 26 January 2012 20:02, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: There are many different kinds of tech journalism. For starters, there are the basic formal categories: news, news analysis, previews, reviews, comparative reviews, features & columns. Then there is the medium: daily/weekly/monthly. Then there is the audience: nonspecialist/specialist/trade/domain experts. It's not all just one thing. As an outsider, or as a reader, I would not expect people to know or understand this, but it's as different as building a packing crate compared to a Chippendale chair. I have done a bit of all of them. These days, I write general features for the Register. I occasionally do news and news analysis - taking a story and explaining it, in brief, or dissecting it in great detail over 2-3 pages. Those are 2 totally different things. But mostly, I try to come up with ideas about stuff that the main IT press isn't writing about but which I know about - such as historical pieces, or how-to features. So, for instance, they are interested in a piece on Lisp Machines. Now, I am aiming this piece at someone who has never heard of Lisp Machines and has probably never seen a line of Lisp. They are, in the modern PC industry, forgotten prehistoric monsters: bear in mind that in the 2012 PC industry, Windows XP is an ancient legacy OS; Pentium 4s are slow elderly CPUs; 2GB of RAM is a small, constrained machine. Business tends to write off kit in 3 years; hands-on tech staff typically have 2-3y of experience after which they move onwards and upwards. Management and architects don't know or care what OS clients are running. I am not saying any of this is right or good or proper - it's just how it is. If I can write a 3000 word brief history of Lisp Machines, explaining in overview what they were, how they worked, their strengths and weaknesses, in such a way that anyone who has ever actually /used/ one does not go "oh FFS this idiot knows *nothing*", then I will have succeeded. I am not writing a textbook entry; I am not writing a how-to guide on booting one or restoring one. I am describing their interesting features that are different from contemporary computers. No, I have never seen one or used one. I would *LOVE* to but I don't know anyone who has one. I don't know anyone who's even running an emulator. (If anyone is, in the London area, do please let me know! I can only offer gratitude and beer, but I would cherish some hands-on time.) I've asked Stephane Tsacas if he can run up an emulator for me, as my closest friend off the list, but I don't think he is really interested. It runs on Linux and he is not a fan of Linux, to say the least. You might well condemn me for this. But consider this: there are many thousands of books, magazines, TV shows, films and educational posters, models and toys about dinosaurs out there, and not *one* of those authors has ever seen a dinosaur in the wild. I am not writing an article for anyone who knows anything about Lisp Machines. I am writing one for people who have never /heard/ of Lisp Machines, to try to tell them, in a 5-10 minute read, what was interesting about them. I am not going to attempt to defend myself and say that I aim to produce the sort of in-depth technical piece you would want. I am not. I probably never will. But there is a need for things that are at a less formidable technical level than that. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 27 January 2012 21:50, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote: Accurate, yes, for technical stuff, although I'm not sure it applies to things like comment columns. Well, true. Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. O_o Well, sure. Is this a specific example? I've not heard of a language called "Uni" myself. Ah, well, that is a common problem. If you're curious: http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Liam%20Proven (Yes, you will need web access.) I spent Yule Day at a friend's house in Edinburgh. He collects old phones and phone equipment. The house - quite big and rambling with a bunch of guys living there - has an internal switchboard and extensions in every room, including the bathroom, just for fun. There is a live, active Strowger exchange in the hall cupboard, and another in bits in the hall. I tried to persuade him to join ClassicCmp - I think he'd fit in well. :?) Me, obviously, I'm a fake. I had to whip out my smartphone and look up what a "strowger exchange" /was./ -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 05/01/12 12:09 PM, Liam Proven wrote: Another approachable, practical discussion of closures, with applications, is in Douglas Crockford's "JavaScript - The Good Parts". In fact it's hard to do anything half interesting in JavaScript *without* using closures. Many people including Crockford say this is the #1 thing JavaScript got right (and if Eich had had more time and leeway, he'd have incorporated more of Scheme's power). From Coders at Work* (Siebel): Peter Seibel: ------------- Let's go back to those ten days when you implemented the original JavaScript. I know that at some point someone had turned you on to Abelson and Sussman and your original idea was to put Scheme in the browser. Brendan Eich: ------------- The immediate concern at Netscape was that it must look like Java. People have done Algol-like syntaxes for Lisp but I didn't have time to take a Scheme core so I ended up doing it all directly and that meant I could make the same mistakes that others made. I didn't have total dynamic scope, like Stallman insisted was somehow important for Emacs and infested Elisp with. JavaScript has mostly lexical scope [like Scheme and Common Lisp] with some oddness to it---there are a few loopholes that are pretty much dynamic: the global object, the with statement, eval. But it's not like dollar variables in Perl before my or upvar, uplevel in Tcl. The '90s was full of that---it was trendy. But I didn't stick to Scheme and it was because of the rushing. ... Seibel: ------- So basically now people make a top-level function to get a namespace. Eich: ----- Yeah. You see people have a function and they call it right away. It gives them a safe environment to bind in, private variables. Doug's a big champion of this. It was not totally unknown to the Schemers and Lispers but a log of JavaScript people had to learn it and Doug and others have done a valuable service by teaching them. It's not like you're getting everybody to be high-quality Scheme programmers, unfortunately, but to some extent they've succeeded, so people now do understand more functional idioms at some patterny level, not necessarily at a deep level. ... Seibel: ------- In some of the discussions about ES4, you cited Guy Steele's paper, "Growing a Language". Speaking as a Lisper, to me the take-away from that was, step one, put a macro system in your language. Then all of this special sugar goes away. Eich: ----- There are two big problems, obviously. C syntax means you have a much harder time than with S-expressions, so you have to define your ASTs and were going to have to standardise them and that's going to be a pain. ... * http://www.codersatwork.com/brendan-eich.html

In article <CB2B0E3E.AAFB%iank at vulcan.com>, Ian King <IanK at vulcan.com> writes: This sounds interesting. What was the book? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On 1/5/12 11:54 AM, "Al Kossow" <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: This one is "A Programmer's Guide to Common Lisp" by Deborah G. Tatar, 1987, Digital Press (and copyright by DEC).

From: Richard Sent: Friday, January 06, 2012 1:02 PM In intent and content??? Steele is a codification of Common Lisp, as defined by the Quinquivirate. Tatar is a textbook for teaching to professional programmers the variant of the Lisp language created by the Gang of Five and laid out by Steele in his book. (If you don't think this is the purpose of Steele, look at the second edition, which reverses some decisions based on later experience with the language as described in the first. This is encoded into the use of "CLtLv1" and CLtLv2" as descriptives for versions of Common Lisp prior to ANSI X3J13.) Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Vulcan, Inc. 505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900 Seattle, WA 98104 mailto:RichA at vulcan.com mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

In article <4F05FFFD.1070409 at bitsavers.org>, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> writes: Ah, OK. Got that one. We used it for the LISP class I took. I like the bit in the back about "apply hermeneutics". -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: That is a gross exaggeration. For 2006, the stats I could find without spending all morning, it looks like this: US Civilian Population - 230M US Civilian Labor Force - 150M Estimated number of "Computer Programmers" (Seried ID EEU80737101) - 700K So as of a few years ago, in the US, it's more like one in 200 active workers was classified as a programmer, not one in a million. One can debate how many of those are "career programmers", but I think the order of magnitude is close enough. I also think that there is a significant difference between teaching elementary/middle-school children (6-12) and college students (18-23) specifically in reference to abstractness. Young adults pursuing a technical education are going to be able to handle abstract concepts better than someone half their age or younger (or they are going to be finding a new field of study ;-). Having learned these concepts before age 12 and having taught workshops (as an amateur, not certified, teacher), my experience tells me that if you want to teach programming concepts to the age 6-12 crowd, it's important to start with very concrete examples and build on those to abstraction, much like teaching arithmetic is easier by putting items on a table and having a child count and group real objects before moving on to mathematical notation (numbers, symbols, etc). To that end, I don't see how teaching BASIC, even 1980s BASIC with its limitations and line numbers and all, is a terrible way to introduce simple concepts like assignment, input and output, branching and control flow. You can do a lot with LET (optional typically, I know, but useful educationally), PRINT, INPUT, GOTO, and uncomplicated IF/THEN/GOTO statements. FOR loops, subroutines, arrays, etc., are easy to add in later, and may be easier if the students have encountered sets and arrays in their math classes. I would posit that trying to teach recursion as a programming concept is likely to be frustrating unless the students have encountered factorials in math as well. It's a hard enough concept to teach when it's just trying to explain what 5! is, let alone asking a student to abstract the concept to general recursion (and besides, unless you are doing certain kinds of tree walking or string searches, how often _have_ you written recursive routines? I don't do it as often as once in five years with the kind of code I write). Five-ish years ago, I got involved with a thread on the author/futurist David Brin's blog because he was looking for a contemporary way to provide a BASIC environment for his, IIRC, 13-year-old son to learn on. There were examples of BASIC code in his son's math book, but it took extra (and not well known by the general public) steps to get BASIC onto a Mac or PC of the day. Since he was looking for a small computer that would be used specifically for this purpose, not a toolset to load onto a "modern" machine, I pointed out several kit computers (like the MicroKIM and Spare Time Gizmos Elf 2000) that could run Tiny BASIC. I would be curious to learn what ever developed from that inquiry. It's only one datapoint, but it's via someone who took an active interest in furthering their own child's education, so IMO, one worth examining. For those that might want to dabble lightly with 1980s Commodore BASIC on a modern machine, let me shamelessly plug http://sourceforge.net/projects/cbmbasic/ -ethan -- References: http://pw1.netcom.com/~rdavis2/employ08.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/43888.html

On 01/05/2012 12:20 PM, Liam Proven wrote: [raises hand] Oooh! I know this one! Because it was hands-down THE most popular, widely-deployed one from the 1980s, at least in the US. (or maybe because he wanted to!) Of course a statement like that is sure to draw people out of the woodwork screaming "NO! <xyz> was the most popular!" No, I was never a "commie" by any stretch, but of all the people I knew who had computers at home in the 1980s when I was in high school, the breakdown went something like this: 90%: Commodore 64 or VIC-20 5%: Atari 400 or 800 1%: Apple (rich kids) 1%: COCO 1%: Non-COCO TRS-80 (kids with parents who ran their own businesses) 1%: CP/M 1%: RSTS/E =) (only 1...betcha can't guess who that was!) -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Well-put. Programming on the Apple II, as clever as the design was, is generally an exercise in trying to figure out what Woz was thinking at the time. I rarely, if ever, had that kind of frustration with the Commodore 64. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Watch your mouth, kid, or you'll find yourself floating home. -- Han Solo --

On 5 January 2012 17:55, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Must be an American thing. It changed year-on-year and my memories are not that chronologically detailed, but here, from 1982 or so, it was something like: Sinclair, Oric, Commodore, Dragon, Acorn, and later Amstrad. Outliers - no significant numbers, probably in your 1% bracket - were weird stuff like Memotech, Camputers Lynx, Jupiter Ace, Video Genie, Atari, Mattel Aquarius, Sord M5, TI 99/4a, Newbrain, Apple. But in the main group, it was Sinclair at first, then later, as prices fell & people realised it was really all about games & almost nobody programmed the things, the superior hardware of the Commodore 64 trounced everything else. Later, Amstrad won out, because it had better hardware: bundled monitor and tape drive or a good fast disk drive, with lots of storage - DS/DD - although a weird 3" size. And the thing is, all of those had at least rudimentary BASICs with graphics and sound commands. And the Beeb with its proper procedural, structured BASIC. Except Commodore, which was just as sh*t on the C64 as it was on the VIC20, which was just as sh*t as it was on the Commodore PET. Now on the PET, it wasn't a problem. It didn't /have/ graphics or sound. But on the VIC20 it was an embarrassment, but then, with 5K of RAM or something, there wasn't /room/ to write anything much in BASIC. But on the C64, it was just a sick twisted evil joke to play on buyers of a ?300-?400 computer with market-leading graphics, best-of-breed sound, a decent keyboard and lots of RAM. It was like selling someone a full-priced 4X4 off road vehicle and putting Medi?val solid wooden carriage wheels on it. It was utterly crippled by its pathetic, 5-years-out-of-date language taken directly from a machine some 3 hardware generations earlier, outclassed by /every other product on the market/ in its segment. Which is why I am genuinely amazed to discover that someone's reimplemented it today! I am stunned. It is, for my money, THE single worst example of its type, the horrendous shameful guilty embarrassment of its generation, the twisted crippled mutant that people didn't talk about and kept locked in the attic. The deformed puppy that should have been stillborn. And anyway, Dave, if your justification is that it was the clear market leader, then by that argument, we should all be using x86 PCs - as they are 95% or more of the general-purpose computer market and have been for 20 years now - and on them we should be running MS Windows, because that's the utterly dominant market leading OS. And you wouldn't like that, would you? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

My folks actually looked at one, and I used one in school in southern California, but it was the teacher's unit and it was replaced by a C64 the next year, and then the school got Apple IIes after that. I don't know if this is true per se. Development costs might have been a concern, but Commodore did BASIC 3.5 (+4/16) and 7.0 (128) and even 10.0 (65) and I don't think Microsoft ever saw a cent. My bet is that Tramiel didn't want to delay the machines to market developing the software, nor did he want to "waste" R&D costs on building a better BASIC, but I'm quite sure his terms with Microsoft didn't require him to give Gates a penny even if he did muck with it. Tramiel knew he had Gates over the barrel back then and I doubt very much Jack would have left such a loophole. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- require "std_disclaimer.pl"; -----------------------------------------------

Yes, they were just evolutions of the original code. Commodore did twist the knife a bit by putting a (C)1977 MICROSOFT into the 128's banner, though. I'm sure there was quite a lot of cussing in the Microsoft executive washroom in 1985. -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- "And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being."

On 1/10/2012 4:30 PM, Dave McGuire wrote: Well, aside from the part where you likened Windows (and their users) to a ghetto (though you did follow that with an emoticon... I guess that negates it?), you did totally manage to avoid saying a single negative thing. "A" for effort? :) - Josh

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Since I just re-read the Salon.com article, even though he himself used an Apple II in past years, he ended up buying an inexpensive C-64 and 1541 for his son. For one, I didn't start the project, I joined it after the first release; and for another, I am *deeply* familiar with that version of BASIC because it's what I learned at age 11 and explored down to unpublished entry points and code hacking on my own hardware at age 13 (by porting Mark Zimmerman's FLOPTRAN from BASIC1 to BASIC2 on the PET), then used daily at my first job at age 15. I readily admit that professional BASIC experience is uncommon, but there you have it. Apple Integer BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, TRS-80 Level 1 BASIC, Atari BASIC, or TI 99/4a BASIC - I put all of those below CBM BASIC2 (not BASIC1 from 1977), though I doubt someone looking into that pool from the outside would make much differentiation among any of them. In terms of string manipulation, complex expressions, control flow, and variable and array type/quantity/amount/management, I'd put TRS-80 Level 1 BASIC, Tiny BASIC, and Atari BASIC at the bottom of that pile, in that order (and if you don't know why I put Atari BASIC down there, you haven't ever filled up your VTOC). -ethan

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 1:33 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: I completely understand the limitations of Federal job designations, but this is what I was able to pull up, and at least shows that "one in a million" is a vast undercount. I was not trying to suggest it is an all-inclusive/properly-exclusive statistic. I'm certainly willing to stand behind "less than 1%" of the workforce programs computers for a living, but how many slivers of a percent is it really? A few, probably. The definition given where I got the stat does mention that "programmer" _might_ build websites, so it likely covers folks who wear many hats but may or may not include workers who only build web sites. It's unclear. Yes... I've heard that. I try not to react in an antagonistically offensive manner (but I often fail trying). The first time in my life I ever applied for unemployment, the best IT definition for my former job would have been "VMS System Administrator" (called "System Manager" at the time, which happened to make the situation worse since I did not manage subordinate employees). There was nothing even remotely close to that in the Federal Job Register. I was declared a Mainframe Systems Programmer and was required to apply for 1-3 matching jobs per week to maintain my status to receive my weekly checks. I don't think it's a shock that I wasn't actually qualified to be employed as a Mainframe Systems Programmer, so 100% of the leads for State jobs that were funneled my way by the Job and Family Service folks were a bad fit. Eventually, I found gainful employment on my own with no assistance from the public safety net (and the benefits paid for by my previous employer meant I could keep my house and eat). I started my career as a contractor, paid on a 1099, and filing a Schedule C (talk about growing up fast)... I seem to recall the same paperwork dilemma you had, and my accountant picked something similar for that blank as well. -ethan

At 12:33 PM 1/5/2012, Fred Cisin wrote: I think even the most graphic-art-intensive web designer is acquainted with HTML, probably JavaScript, XML, and before you know it, they're picking up Unix concepts from web hosts, making small alterations to PHP or other scripting languages, maybe touching SQL. Does the average web designer routinely bump up against more programming languages per day than the average programmer? - John

On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Toby Thain wrote: WE do tend to be stubborn. "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a thumb." If we know a solution, we tend to be reluctant to do the work to look at alternatives.

On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote: Clancy/Harvey (UCB): "The very first course in our lower division undergraduate [first year of collefge] curricula is Abstraction, using SCHEME. It is a fantastic language, capable of many things THAT NO OTHER LANGUAGE CAN DO." [They then put a problem on the board that "cannot be done in any other language, becayse recursion is the only possible way to do it." (traversing a 2 dimensional array) While they typed in their solution, I wrote out solutions (WITHOUT recursion) on my notepad in C, BASIC, FORTRAN, and was halfway through COBOL! (I didn't get a chance to do APL, ASM, or Pascal) Their religious proselytizing got seriously in the way of their arguments of how good it is.] Q: I see that your SECOND course is "demystification" using C. Since that's a different language in non-trivial ways from the previous course, will the students be learning C in the second course, instead of the first one? A: NO! We expect them to already have a solid working knowledge of C before they come here. WHAT??? They repeated it. Any student entering their first year of college there as a CS major was assumed to already know C. Q: Won't some students have difficulty with that? A: Oh, it's "Social Darwinism". We have too many entering students, so we WANT 80% to drop out of the program in the first year. If we don't get at least 80% leaving the program, then we merely increase the workload until enough fail and leave. Sometimes we have to work them 20 hours a day, and assign 4:00 AM lab times, etc. to get the desired result. They won't be expelled, or anything, they can still become business majors. [I lost some respect for the UCB CS program] [Does their "Darwinism" select for CS ability, or STAMINA and tolerance for ABUSE?] [Sorry, Toby, but C/H prejudiced me against SCHEME. I do still intend some day to give it a fair try] Q: What's your timeframe for implementing this curricula? A: Oh, we've been doing it with wonderful success for over 5 years. Q: The current college catalog is nothing like that, it still has the traditional program. When do you expect the catalog changes to be made. A: Oh, that happened YEARS ago. This years catalog just has a glitch and must have reprinted an old version. [Doe Library [reference desk] has current and older catalogs. NO prior catalog had their sequence!] I don't think that UC Berkeley has THE ANSWER. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 01/05/2012 03:18 PM, Alexey Toptygin wrote: U.S. colleges seem to be *extremely* profitable businesses. Assuming you're talking about the University of Maryland at College Park, I've had some contact with that particular organization. Their shenanigans aren't new; they started in the mid-1990s. They very much fall into the "how the mighty have fallen" category. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On 6 January 2012 09:23, Tor Arntsen <kspt.tor at gmail.com> wrote: It's just an English figure of speech: "one in a million" is a common way of saying that something is very rare or unusual. Certainly, several comments have indicated that - as a pure random guess! - mine was a /very/ inaccurate estimate. I wonder what a more reasonable approximation would be, for the developed world? Perhaps one in a thousand? And also, what sort of programming the majority of them actually do. Whether it is scripting or relatively simple system automation, or macro programming in apps, or actual full-on application development, or what? Is there, I wonder, a line as to where simple tools and simple tuition for nonspecialists might be appropriate - e.g. BASIC for schoolkids - versus serious techniques and methods for those expected to be professional developers - e.g. Scheme for CS undergrads? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 07/01/12 11:38 AM, Liam Proven wrote: One doesn't need to get very far into "scripting", web front-ends, etc to benefit from *actually learning programming.* Even simple bash, PHP, or JavaScript, and certainly SQL, benefit from a proper education. And that means a good part of the curriculum of "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Sure, boil down the material into simpler texts. That's been done; many citations were posted recently. The idea that "oh, lots of people can get by doing this stuff without education" only goes so far. It is not a problem for the highly motivated, self-taught group who will eventually cover the same ground themselves. But it can't save the rest. This fantasy, "I don't need to learn more", seems to lead directly to the regrettable status quo. On the earlier question of teaching kids, Joshua Bloch has this to say in "Coders At Work": Joshua Bloch ------------ ... There's a certain precision of thinking that comes with doing math. I coached a Math Olympiad team for fourth and fifth graders. This is just the age at which some kids are starting to understand, at some level, the notion of a proof---that a proposition can be demonstrably, unequivocally true rather than just "I think it's true because here are a few examples were it seems to work." In order to understand the notion of an invariant, you have to understand the notion of a proof. Unfortunately, there are plenty of adults who don't. And it's a style of thinking that's typically taught in mathematics classes. Seibel ------ You almost wonder if maybe the better forum to teach that kind of thinking would be in programming. If you just taught programming as being about invariants--- Bloch ----- To a certain extent I agree, but you can go too far in that direction. Then we're back to Dijkstra. ... Dijkstra says you shouldn't even let students even touch a computer until they've manipulated symbols, stripped of their true meaning, for a semester. That's crazy! There's a joy in telling the computer to do something, and watching it do it. I would not deprive students of that joy. And furthermore, I wouldn't assume that I could---computers are everywhere. Ten-year-olds are programming. ... [ snip anecdote about a difficult bug in a C program where stack and thread local storage were being silently smashed ] This is an example of why you need safe languages. This is just not something that anyone should ever have to cope with. I was talking to someone recently at a university who asked me what I thought about the fact that his university wanted to teach C and C++ first and then Java, because they thought that programmers should understand the system "all the way down." I think the premise is right but the conclusion is wrong. Yes, students should learn low-level languages. In fact, they should learn assembly language, and even chip architecture. ... they'll be much better high-level language programmers if they understand what's going on in the lower layers of the system. So yes, I think it's important that you learn all this stuff. But do I think you should start with a low-level language like C? No! Students should not have to deal with buffer overruns, manual memory allocation, and the like in their first exposure to programming. --------- --Toby

On 07/01/12 1:50 PM, Dave Caroline wrote: This is all addressed by Bloch even in that short extract. This is actually very important ^^ Haskell can of course be "faster" than C, for the rare times when that actually matters. But you know that already from your research, I'm sure. It is a fallacy that programs written in assembler and C are "fast"[*]. It is a fallacy that programs written in dynamic/functional/other languages are "slow". It is a fallacy that "fast" and "slow" are always the primary consideration. It is not a fallacy that programmers expend too much effort in writing confused and unmaintainable code, sometimes chasing those false grails. --Toby * an illuminating anecdote: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-November/062240.html

On 01/05/2012 10:52 AM, Liam Proven wrote: [cited for reference below] "Mainstream business computing" is extremely low-tech stuff, done by people who regularly say "oh, it crashed, that's just how computers are, just do it again, and reinstall if it doesn't work". In architecture and engineering in particular, Lisp is used on a daily basis by probably 95% of the industry. The architect working on my building plans diddles with AutoLisp regularly, and until we discussed it, he didn't even realize he was doing any programming! Please forgive me for jumping in, but I have to speak up here. You keep going on and on about how you've got all this "IT experience" (you didn't specifically mention "IT" above, but you have before), and that should make you more able, not less able, to understand abstract "CS" (as distinct from "IT") concepts. You reinforce what I'm saying by also stating that you're not a software developer. Wrangling systems and networks, working with databases, etc etc and whatever else constitutes your day-to-day work life has jack-point-squat to do with advanced theoretical concepts (with practical implementations) such as, for example, closures. It is my opinion that you should not feel it's unusual that you don't "get" that stuff even though you are "a computer professional". That's like saying "I'm a podiatrist, so I work on the human body too...all that stuff about understanding how neurons work is just bunk, because I don't get it!" I'm down with Death Flu(tm), and I'm sure I could've illustrated my point a bit better above, but I think you get the general gist of what I'm trying to say. The only reason *I* see the difference is because I do both...otherwise I'd probably not get it either. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

This is something I know nothign about either, and it would certainly help _me_ if somebody could explain what lambda calculus and 'closures' are useful for. To me all such things are tools for solving particular types of problems, and knowing what those problems are is (at least to me) helpful, rather than startign with a formal defintion and/or an example. For example, the differential calculus (you know, dy/dx and all that) can be formally definied in terms od limits, but there's also the intuitive idea that it's to do with the rate of change of one quatity with repsect to another. Thaat intuitive idea is very helpful at the start. Or to put it another way. Would tuo ratehr undersntat what an oscilloscope does by being given the scheamtic of one, or by being told that bsaisclaly it dispalyes a grpahof hte voltage on the input socket agianst time, and is therefore useful for exampling AC voltages and other changing signals? -tony

On Thu, 26 Jan 2012, Mouse wrote: In other words, "static local variables"?

On 2012 Jan 26, at 4:58 PM, Mouse wrote: From the 3 explanations (Conner,Assumpcao,Mouse) I have seen so far in this discussion, a "closure" appears to be the functional- programming terminology/equivalent for what in OOP would be an "instance of an object". An instance of an object provides the code (methods) and configuration and state (private properties) accessed via a single reference (handle). The above problem would be solved in OOP with a simple object (make_adder) with a method (adder) and an internal/private property (n) assigned in the object instance constructor. The only difference I see is in the case of the closure the code/method does not have an external name to denote it as there is only one code-block/method for the closure. I am a functional-programming-illiterate, so the discussion and explanations have been interesting. So is this (closure vs. object-instance) just different worlds with different syntax and terminology? That is, leaving aside the functional-programming vs. procedural-programming world differences is there something else to significantly distinguish a closure from an object-instance?

In simple cases, yes. But things can get more complex. For example, it's entirely possible to have two closures and three bindings, with one binding appearing in both closures, with the value shared between them: (let ((c nil)) (list (let ((n 1)) #'(lambda (x) (princ "setter call #") (princ n) (terpri) (incf n) (setq c x) nil)) (let ((n 1)) #'(lambda (x) (princ "getter call #") (princ n) (terpri) (incf n) c)))) This returns (a list containing) a setter function and a getter function which set and get the value associated with c in the binding established by the outer let; there is one binding, which is shared between the two closures. Each closure also has its own private binding of n, which is used to provide the "number of times called" printouts. This could be done in an OO paradigm, of course, either as two methods on a single class (with different instance variables for the two call counters) or as a construct assembled from multiple classes. There is little-to-nothing that closures permit that can't be done otherwise; it's just a question of convenience - of how closely the code mirrors what's in the programmer's mind, if you will. Well, it does not necessarily have any name. In the Lisp examples I've been giving, the functions have been anonymous lambda expressions, but they do not have to be. I don't know many closure-supporting languages, but it's conceivable that there may even be some that _require_ the code in a closure to have a name. To some extent. I think the two paradigms emphasize different directions and thus are flexible in different ways; I'd say that thinking of an instance of an OO class as a closure is looking at it conversely, looking on a closure as an instance of an anonymous class is emphasizing the data rather than the code (again, this may or may not be a useful way to think of it). Well...maybe not if your class/instance mechanisms allow you to create anonymous object classes at run-time and instantiate them on the spot, though I'd have to think about it more to be sure that's fair. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I believe you are referring to the imminent road accident of a language formerly known as C++0x (now C++11): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C++11 -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- I see nothing! Nothing! -- Sgt. Schultz, "Hogan's Heroes" ------------------

On 01/25/2012 06:02 PM, Liam Proven wrote: I do not dispute this. And I can certainly see how this would be the case. Indeed I felt the same way. (I still feel the same way about the book!) It took some time, but then it clicked. I think it has to do with training the brain in certain ways, and it's later difficult to do something any other way. It was HARD to wrap my brain around the concepts of functional programming (to the limited extent that I have!), and I have probably a dozen languages under my belt. It's NOT "just another language" in that they're all fundamentally similar except for little pieces of syntax...it really is a whole different way of thinking and visualizing a problem. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On 6 January 2012 04:51, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: The objections are not trivial and are not idiosyncratic to me. I don't see why you wish to completely ignore the peculiarities, weirdnesses and just-plain-hard-work bits of /your/ chosen teaching language while damning mine out of hand because of its limitations. This is, perhaps, a little like the previous argument about Unix shells versus, well, every-other-type-of-shell-but-exemplified-by-Windows' shell. I have absolutely no argument that the Windows shell is less capable and less powerful than sh/csh/bash/zsh/$OTHER_UNIX_SHELL. My point was that the Windows one is actually better at the mundane everyday stuff I need - i.e. things like mass file renames/moves/copies - than the Unix type. The Unix ones make this stuff harder - more work, more syntax, writing mini one-line scripts and loops - so that whereas they can do far more, I don't /need/ the extra facilities whereas the missing simple stuff is a major drawback. Late-period BASICs are structured, procedural, support user-defined types and data structures and so on. No, they don't support lambda calculus, closures and so on - but nor do lots of other extremely widely-used languages. This does not mean that they are useless or indeed crippled or limited. A good BASIC makes it easy to put together simple programs to do simple things. It would not be my choice for writing a compiler or an OS kernel, no; it has limitations that make it poorer for this than other languages. But that's not reason to dismiss it. Simplicity and easiness are powerful virtues. I am trying to learn about Lisp-like languages, because I am intrigued by them. However, the learning curve is formidably steep and asking around I have met many many programmers who have either never met them, or tried and failed, or didn't "get it", and Lisp syntax is an industry joke. I knew "legions of irritatingly-stacked parentheses" before I'd ever seen a line of code or knew who invented it, why, or when. There has been one well-documented attempt to create a Lisp-like language that uses the notation of, well, virtually every other mainstream programming language *ever*. (Except, arguably, Forth and Postscript, neither of which are particularly mainstream. Yes, millions of machines contain interpreters for both, but few humans write code in them. Hundreds of millions of machines contain operating systems in the TRON family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project) but few have ever heard of it, seen it or interacted directly with it.) The Lisp-like language I'm talking about is Dylan, and it has almost died and lies ignored and moldering. I think that's tragic - the snippets of Dylan source code I've seen are the most readable of any of the Lisp family by a country mile and also outdo Smalltalk for comprehensibility. Compare and contrast these code snippets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)#Syntax One is impenetrable unless you already know Lisp and its notation. The other is readable by pretty much anyone who knows any form of programming language of any form ever. If you do not think that is a powerful and compelling advantage, then the maxim "there are none so blind as those who will not see" has seldom if ever applied more strongly. Whereas I am willing to concede that the language has limitations, I submit that [a] this is acceptable in a language for beginners - and let us not forget what the B of BASIC stands for - and [b] that many users might never hit those limits in their working lives. I have never used or implemented a list in my life. I've never needed one. I /once/ wrote a bit of code to /follow/ a list. But if the language is Turing-complete, then you can implement one if you need to. Me, I'd probably do it with an array with a dimension for the contents of an entry and dimensions for links to the preceding and following entries or something like that. Not all BASICs do it, but I've used some that permit flexible-sized arrays, that can be enlarged or shrunk on demand. Very handy that, sometimes. [Shrug] I'm sure you're right, in which case, should someone want to, they could be retrofitted to a BASIC as well, no? It's the best freely-available general-contents source I am aware of. If there are better, do please tell me! The alphabet, yes. The language, no. Science degree - you need to know the alphabet. The thing that you seem unwilling to address is this. For one language - or one family - to use a non-algebraic notation, one that is therefore unfamiliar to most of the literate, numerate human race, i.e. most programmers, is a very major issue. The advantages of that notation would have to be pretty damned stunning to make it worth the while, because even Lisp textbooks, of which I have several, all tend to devote a chapter or two to teaching the notation, complete with exercises and notes to the effect that "we know this seems weird, but it gets easier with practice, believe us". Example: http://nostoc.stanford.edu/Docs/livetutorials/lispintro.html Quote: "This seems complex (or at least verbose!), but when you get used to it you'll find that it's actually very easy to follow, and incredibly convenient in many ways. Here are some others to try out. See if you can figure out what they evaluate to before trying them::" Why should programmers *have* to get used to it? The existing notation that everything else uses is not broken. People do not need pages of exercises to get used to it. They do not have to do exercises in order to work out what an expression means. The *job* of a high-level language is to make life easier for human beings, or we'd all write everything in machine code. A language which needs people to learn new, difficult patterns and practices because they are more convenient for the interpreter or compiler, or are easier for the program itself to manipulate, is a language which is biased in favour of the computer and the implementer and against the user, and that is a very profoundly dangerous direction to take. I might go so far as to say it is a serious flaw. That in itself is an admission of failure. McCarthy admitted this inasmuch as he eliminated it from Lisp 2, AIUI. What higher authority do you need? That is /ex cathedra./ I think all are pretty horrible, yes, actually. :?) No, I do see them, and I have carefully worked through the exercises and tutorials to get the hang of it. (More or less.) After this and after due consideration I do not think that the advantages outweigh the costs. I freely admit I don't know enough about it to confidently say this, but others agree and I think that the argument needs to be heard. It is not that. I submit, though, that as someone who has taught for a living and who still writes technical documentation for a living, it is so very common as to be almost a general rule that technically-minded people fail to truly grasp how /non/ technically-minded ordinary people are... and also, I am afraid, just how relatively dim ordinary people are compared to techies. Ubuntu, to pick an example, while it is busily alienating Linux techies, has set out to be "Linux for human beings" - a superbly /easy/ Linux which non-techie non-computery people can just pick up and use. Result: it is the world's most widespread Linux by a country mile and it achieved this within a few years, after 15y or so of almost no general penetration of Linux at all beyond hackers and geeks. There is a big important need for simple tools for the rest of us. The complex, difficult, hard-to-learn tools are great for expert, competent people, but most people are not competent or expert. Linux is brilliant, powerful and free. But there are at least 5x as many Apple Mac OS X users - and probably 10x as many iOS users as them. Not because it's more powerful - it isn't. Not because it's cheaper or runs on more kit - it doesn't; it's commercial and only runs on one make of computer. Why? Because it's /easier/. I might do, but I have an article to write all the same! Are you deliberately misinterpreting me? I am not for a moment saying it's hopeless, or impossible, or pointless. That is absurd. I am saying it's hard. That is not controversial or contentious, but you appear utterly unwilling to even concede it for the sake of argument. No. Why? I was way out in my guesstimate. It is still a tiny minority of people. Agreed? And it would be better if more people understood it. Agreed? You seem to fail to consider a far larger cognitive load for beginners: that without line numbers and the simple, interactive mode that they supply, then suddenly a whole ton of other complex abstractions must be mastered: the notions of "editors" and "files" and loading a file into an editor to modify it, then "saving" it into a "filesystem", then quitting the editor and running arcane specialist tools with no real-world equivalent, that is, a "compiler" or an "interpreter", against your "saved file" and examing the "output". This is a /much/ bigger "cognitive load" on a complete newbie. For someone computer literate, it's trivial, but you have to /become/ computer literate /first./ And you think starting beginners on something harder would /help/ this?! Agreed. But you need to try to provide a gentle learning curve for children or they won't bother trying to climb it at all. Perhaps Logo is a better answer than BASIC; I don't know! But I am pretty sure that Scheme is *not.* Definitely - agreed. Good line. But before it can be valid, one has to think about programming at all. And that means there must be an initial learning-to-program stage, before one /has/ thinking that can be changed. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On 01/09/2012 12:05 PM, Richard wrote: Never wanting to disappoint, I'll just say your almost-robotic "Microsoft's <xyz> is better!" statements about damn near EVERYTHING crossed the line from "irritating" to "entertaining" a long time ago. My blood pressure has found benefit in my new-found ability to simply laugh at fanboys rather than try to help them out. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Dave McGuire flamed to my trashcan: Dave, you realize you're in my KILL file since a while ago, right? So I don't see your mindless rants unless they're quoted by someone else. I find the above characterization of my posts to this lists highly laughable. While *you* CAN be guaranteed to make endless flames against Microsoft and/or Windows, and this is readily backed up by searching the archives, you CAN'T find anything in the archives to back up your characterization of me. Feel free to go digging if you wish, but if you have any capacity for self-reflection you may find the disturbing facts that your irrational hatred of MS/Windows/etc. causes you to project your own mouth-foaming irrational craziness onto anyone who doesn't immediately agree with you 100%. I now return you to my KILL file. Having automagically ignored you for some time now, I find my cctalk experience lifted into pleasantness and not because you have an opinion different than mine, but because your opinion reads like a rabid dog devoid of meaningful content. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

Ha! Typical Microsoft fanboy. Anyone who even says something as innocuous as "maybe this isn't so nice" is "mouth-foaming", etc. It's not my fault that you have no taste, value of uptime, desire for performance, appreciation of efficiency, or knowledge of OS design. *I* don't care what you run. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA On Jan 9, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:

On Jan 9, 2012, at 3:46 PM, "Peter C. Wallace" <pcw at mesanet.com> wrote: This is me keeping it down. :) -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Please not that crap. Where I work we have circa 250 windows servers. If we had to re-boot a significant number of them every day I would never get any time to "play" computers. My trouble with Windows servers and commodity computing in general is that MANAGERS think it absolves them from any of the hard stuff (Capacity Management, Security, Change Control, Checking Log Files etc. etc). My Manager still isn't happy that we have some RAID-10 storage in the SAN because it "wastes space". Yesterday I had a bunch of developers asking to create a Business Objects database on the same box that has SharePoint (if you don't know, don't ask, I think of it as Facebook for Businesses) and which already has i/o service times that are heading towards the 1 second mark, goodness even the mainframe we had 35 years ago managed 25 i/o a second! Building a solid infrastructure is about proper design and architecture across the board. Run a UNIX shop in the same sloppy way folks run Windows shops and you would be up your neck in Poo Poo just as quickly. I know I have been there. Its been a while but I once spent a less than happy Sunday afternoon removing core dump files from a Solaris box. A disk partition was full where some one had rolled out a dodgy version of Mozilla that crashed on an Intranet page. The temp space had filled with core dump files and the whole production line had stopped because the apps that ran it wouldn't start. (yes it was a UK factory owned by a big US Corp. I won't name on here as they might sue but every one on here would know them) More recently having to work late because one of our Solaris boxes which has a hardened console had crashed (I can't remember why, possibly extended power outage) and fsck wouldn't complete with human input. I couldn't get any input in through the attached USB keyboard. Turns out the USB was disabled to prevent tampering! I ended up using Hyperterm on a Windows box above as the keyboard and watching the display on KVM monitor ... Now that is fun, needing a windows box to fix a Solaris one.... (No Solaris ones near by to patch the cable across) The above don't mean Solaris is bad, just it needs a little loving care and a bunch of flowers once in a while. Any computing system will crash if it is care is neglected and it runs out of resources. If a large number of users increase their resources a little bit its easy to kill any thing. I always hate the first day back after Christmas. In the UK many folks take the time between Christmas Eve and New Years day off. Judging by our car park yesterday it was the first day back for many. The result is that the load on the mail servers was up as folks read two weeks of back mail. Love to all, even Cobol programmers Dave Doing things virtually for over 30 years...

On 11/01/12 12:10 AM, Geoffrey Reed wrote: This "tyranny of low expectations", and the attendant "if reboot doesn't fix it, then it can't be fixed" legacy, are two of the substantial contributions of Microsoft to computer users. --T

I'm glad it came across clearly, though I wish you guys could've been spared it. ;) I've had enough of the fanboy's tendency of throwing rocks at me and then saying I'm "foaming" when I respond, especially when he's the only blind, knee-jerk, unconditionally-devoted advocate (long form of "fanboy") involved in the conversation. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA On Jan 9, 2012, at 4:51 PM, Gary Sparkes <mokuba at gmail.com> wrote:

On Jan 9, 2012, at 4:52 PM, Gary Sparkes <mokuba at gmail.com> wrote: I think uptime has been de-emphasized in order to breath life into the market for one particularly unstable OS. ;) Personally, I demand both, as I have work to do. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On 01/09/2012 05:36 PM, Gary Sparkes wrote: Solaris is my primary server OS here. I use NetBSD for some network infrastructure roles (NAT, etc). Indeed. I do have quite a bit of redundancy here (and at work(s)), but I prefer *NO* failures ideally. I come pretty close to that. That's the root of my impatience with Windows. (not related to my impatience with Windows fanboys) -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Dave McGuire Sent: Tuesday, 10 January 2012 7:33 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: The redundancy of Dave McGuire (was: Truce, compromise reached? - was: teaching programming to kids - was: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC) innocuous as "maybe this isn't so nice" is "mouth-foaming", etc. performance, appreciation of efficiency, or knowledge of OS design. Then perhaps Dave you should keep out of the conversation - your above comment shows you are still stuck in the 90's and have no comprehension of current technology whatsoever. As a manager of various Solaris, Linux and Windows servers for one of Australia's largest banks, I find very, very little difference in the reliability, performance and uptime of any of them. Indeed our OS failure rate is higher for the Solaris hosts - the Windows hosts are actually more reliable. Drag yourself out of the digital stone age and actually have a look at what is out there these days - I suspect you won't as you've time and again demonstrated your distaste to adapt and see others points of view. Lance

If you are unable to distinguish between not reflexively bashing Windows based on out-of-date perceptions of it and being a Windows fanboy...well, then, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but in that case you deserve at least some of the epithets thrown your way. Not that I like Windows. I don't. It's a horrible, horrible OS in multiple respects for almost every purpose I care about. (Indeed, the only exception I can think of is the purely pragmatic one of being popular as a game loader, and for my use even that is far outweighed by other considerations.) Without more data than Lance gave - indeed, without data that Lance probably should not give - we are not in a position to tell _why_ Linux, Solaris, and Windows exhibit comparable reliability, whether this indicates an improvement in Windows or a deterioration in the other two (or perhaps some of each), to what extent it is due to idiosyncracies of the workload in question, what level of sysadmin attention is required to achieve those levels of reliability, how much work (for whatever measure) gets done per capex dollar and/or recurring dollar, etc, etc - the list is long and mostly pretty boring. Since it is unlikely to change anyone's mind much, it'd also be pretty pointless even were the data available. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Jan 10, 2012, at 2:12 AM, Josh Dersch <derschjo at mail.msu.edu> wrote: I like this idea! -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On Jan 10, 2012, at 6:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote: I'll second that; for all its warts, modern Windows does tend to be reliable for me. Third-party drivers, of course, are a mixed bag and have been the cause of 100% of the bluescreens I've gotten since moving to Windows 7 on my PC (that's still only 2, for the record, about 1 per year). It's also come a long way under the hood; having written a PCI device driver somewhat recently, I can say with confidence that the driver frameworks are pretty evolved and relatively easy to work with. Of course, I don't like pretty much anything that comes with the Windows user experience. - It's ridiculous that I have to write a .ini file for a driver just to install and find the magical incantations somewhere in Microsoft's mountain of poor documentation while I try to worm out what the obtuse error messages mean. - It's patently absurd that Windows 7 64-bit won't let me develop my own drivers without having to put the system in a special mode that disables some media playback because I just might be loading a driver to capture DVD output. - The registry is just abuse. Yes, we could debate endlessly about how bad text files are in comparison. No, it's not going to change my mind. - Whoever decided that Windows Update should forcibly restart the machine, no matter what is going on, after silently installing an update and giving you 2 minutes to respond should be shot (thankfully, that feature is gone now). But none of these things reflect on the reliability of the system itself, and I'll at least throw a bone Redmond's way on that one. Now, of course, if you want to talk security, they've still got things to answer for. But the security threats for other major systems are beginning to approach those for Windows these days, and I'm not certain that a lot of the remaining difference can't be explained by the larger installed base and thus target value of Windows. - Dave

On Jan 10, 2012, at 10:15 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Well, yes, NetInfo (on the Mac and I guess NeXT?) was possibly worse than the registry. Thankfully, it's gone away now. I guess I don't end up being as worried about privileges as I am about exploitable code. Privileges are a good second barrier to further damage, but minimizing the surface area for attacks is still the most important thing. After all, anyone exploiting a remote hole on a program running on any operating system of note (that has a networking stack) could easily open up a listen port and start acting as an SMTP relay; that doesn't require privileges (and in fact, the built-in mini-firewall on Win7 will pop up a warning that your program has suddenly started sending packets and did you want those walled off?). But yes, the privilege model is too permissive. I found it amusing that they finally caught up with the rest of the world in requiring programs which wanted administrative rights to basically sudo (something that Unix has had forever and OS X has done from its public release), but had to back it off in the face of overwhelming user complaints due to sloppily-written software that assumed too much. In short, I think the problems with Windows can be laid much more often at the feet of third-party developers than at those of Microsoft (at least these days, anyway). - Dave

On 01/10/2012 08:13 PM, Richard wrote: Wouldn't that describe your ( and mine ) computer collections ? maybe not... Jos

On Jan 10, 2012, at 3:07 PM, Ian King wrote: It's the most worthless computer until you plug it back in. Then it changes state. Typical engineering tradeoff. :-) - Dave

On 01/10/2012 02:13 PM, Richard wrote: ...and they don't seem to understand that this is the WORST possible thing that they could do. Their customers are (typically) the least computer-literate computer users out there. They don't necessarily understand that asking for "less security stuff getting in the way" makes things less secure. Now, granted, they should learn about this stuff before ever sitting down in front of a computer. But they don't, and likely won't. IMO Microsoft should take the high road and give them what they NEED rather than what they ask for. They'd have a far higher-quality product as a result. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On 01/16/2012 09:46 PM, Liam Proven wrote: *thud* (<-- Dave faints) ;) -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On Jan 10, 2012, at 1:07 PM, Jason McBrien wrote: If the application in question actually uses them instead of just assuming either somewhere off of C: (I'm looking at you, FPGA and simulation vendors) or worse, "C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\My Documents\<arbitrary subdirectory which wrecks my organization scheme>", which I've noticed they had to backfill with shortcuts now that they've removed spaces from the path (which also tended to confuse a lot of programs). - Dave

I don't know what windows are you using, but my Windows XP downloads the patches (because I configured it to do so) and tells me they are avaiable, to be installed whenever I want. And when I shutdown the system, it asks if I want to shutdown installing patches or just shutdown. Well, I still uses Win2000 in a very old P3, and many friends do that. My XP ran into a p4 machine (now an IBM T-60 dual core), and I still do things I was able to do ten years ago without the NEED to upgrade the machine. BTW, I know friends with P233 (yep!) notebooks running Win2000, reading e-mail on outlook, using firefox and office. And they work with that. It is a bit slow, but works. Of course, none of my 5 PCs run anything beyond XP. I used office 97 with the 2010 (or whatever) compatibility pack for ages. Now I use Office XP because I got a copy for free...And it always worked :o)

On Jan 10, 2012, at 4:47 PM, John Foust wrote: My complaint was actually about pre-SP3 XP, something which up until a year or two ago I still had to use for work on a semi-regular basis. The settings could be changed, of course, but the default was to auto-install and force a restart, often while I was on a bathroom break and still connected to a few servers over SSH. Every time I came upon a new machine, I got bitten by it again. It's solved by default now, yes, but I am still quite angry about it many years later. It was rightly pointed out to me off-list that this kept most average home users well-patched despite their best (or worst efforts), which is true, but I found it offensively poorly-planned. I'm a member of the "save early and often" school, but many others aren't (yes, it's their own damn fault for not saving before they got up). I think the default was changed in SP3, but I wouldn't swear to it. I still have to use XP a lot because curiously, companies in the tech sector are slow to approve an update, so yes, the failings of a nearly decade-old operating system are a real and pressing concern to me now. I think, if nothing else, it speaks well of XP's overall design relative to its predecessors that it's still very much preferred by a great many people. - Dave

It depends on how much money you like to burn for nothing. I have a core duo notebook, 2GB Ram, some 500-odd GB in the HD and use it as my main computer, for designing embbedded hardware. I use ALL programs you can think about (even Altium Designer) and have no troubles with that. If you like to use office 1*10^128 and Windows 1384, it is up to you, I use what works for me and I don't need to fork tons of money to have "the newest crop" to show my friends. It is a matter of usability x price. I'll buy a new computer (and hard disk, and OS, etc) when and IF I feel the need, not because it is new.

On 10/01/12 6:33 PM, Gary Sparkes wrote: The first hit is free, eh? If only the problems with Microsoft were merely /technical/. Y'all realise they stand behind SOPA, right? --T

On 10/01/12 8:30 PM, Gary Sparkes wrote: Free of charge? And some people say /open source/ business models are confusing... --T (scratching head)

On 10/01/12 11:04 PM, Gary Sparkes wrote: So free if you don't succeed? But otherwise they've got you by the balls? Hm... attractive. --T

On 01/10/2012 06:13 PM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: BRAVO!! -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

Guys, I'm someone who is not a programmer, not working in the IT industry but does dabble with vintage computers and has enough knowledge of an OS to tinker with settings if need be. I've used Windows XP since about 2002. I'm still using it. I've used Windows 7 (on one of my office machines) and that seems fine too. I can't comment on Windows XP and 7 from a programmers point of view but as far as a general user is concerned they are fine! Windows XP is very stable, and I can't remember having any issues with it. Getting drivers, software and support is usually easy for a Windows machine as the knowledge base is huge. Yes, I have used (and do use) OS X on my wife's iMac. That's fine too. I'm amazed how worked up people get about Windows. Sure, I used it in the late 80s and 90s and stability was questionable (mind you, I suspect often Os'es of the time (System 6 and 7 etc.) I would agree they were miles ahead of Win 3.1,' 95 and '98 in the user experience. But hey...times move on. The Windows of today is not the Windows of the 1990s. For the majority of desktop users, it's a stable, very usable platform. Terry (Tez)

On Tue, 10 Jan 2012, Christian Liendo wrote: +1 Alexey

+2 On Jan 10, 2012, at 5:49 PM, Alexey Toptygin wrote: David Barnes davebarnes AT roadrunner DOT com OpenVMS , Tru64 , Solaris , Linux , OS X , SGI Irix 'Making a movie is like asking a question, and when you finish, the movie itself is the answer.' - Francis Ford Coppola

On 01/10/2012 06:19 AM, Liam Proven wrote: Yes but you poo-poo any statement that is anti-Windows or anti-Microsoft, regardless of the facts. You're wrong on two counts. My experience is varied, but the areas in which I'm paid for my advice and skills are high-performance scientific computing, supercomputers, large-scale and high-reliability servers, and (the opposite end of the spectrum) embedded systems development. I am Just Not Into suitly desktop computing with spreadsheets and word processors. I use both on occasion, yes, but that's not my area of work. I don't work in the not-very-demanding, not-very-technical world of office desktop computing or home desktop computing. The other is the more important (to me) point that has me particularly hot under the collar. You, like most Microsoft people (regardless of how loudly you state that you don't like or use Windows, you still tout it at every turn) automatically label ANY anti-Windows statement as somehow not being based on facts or experience, and automatically entirely emotionally-based. That is insane, insulting, and more importantly, just plain wrong. I use the best tool for the job, regardless of the job. The day that Windows becomes a good tool for a job that I need to have done, I will use Windows. That day hasn't come yet. If you feel otherwise, I'm sorry, I disagree. Either way, though, I will not permit you to simply dismiss every word out my keyboard as automatically subject to some sort of emotional bias just because you don't like it and don't want it to be true. Personally I don't give a rat's ass what you think, as you've proven time and time again that you really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to certain major categories of stuff. I offer your repeated assertions that "95% of all computers run Windows" and "computer programmers number one in a million" up as examples. This is why I don't even listen to your arguments that actually seem plausible anymore, because I have no idea if you've actually looked at the facts. Further, you're a guy who loudly proclaims that you're not a programmer, yet you'll try to ram your opinions regarding programming languages down anyone's throat who happens to pass by! What kind of crap is that? So drop it, forget it, stop with your Microsoft touting, and get the hell out of my face. For once again, you've ruined my day, because I made the mistake of trying really hard yet again to develop some professional respect for you. I didn't even start this particular fight, Richard did, and you decided to just join in! Go find a hobby. Some of us have work to do, and some of us are actually interested in classic computing. -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

C'mon, this type of diatribe just isn't necessary, productive, useful, nor informative. People can express their opinions without others feeling some innate need to "prove them wrong". Just let it go. .... all snipped as it's junk.....

On 19 January 2012 00:14, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote: OK. Sorry - I will shut up about this from now on. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012, Richard wrote: NOBODY here is in my KILL file. The most rabid dogmatic fanatical insistent fanboys still provide a lot of useful, or at least interesting and/or entertaining, information. Did this NOT go to KILL file for anybody? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 10 January 2012 09:06, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: I tend to throw anybody who thinks the contents of their kill file is even remotely interesting to other people into my kill file. Oops?. -- "Perhaps people don't believe this, but throughout all of the discussions of entering China our focus has really been what's best for the Chinese people. It's not been about our revenue or profit or whatnot." --Sergey Brin, demonstrating the emptiness of the "don't be evil" mantra.

Ditto. However.could I please remind the children here that this is the classic computers list. Not the OS-advocacy list, the modern-computing list, or anything else. So discussions of modifying (or not) Cromemco disk controllers are on-topic. Machines that use the 4040 are on-topic. the SNAP programaing language (whether the older one like English, or the toekn-threaded think in the Panasoic/Quasar machine) is on-topic. But surely the modern Windows .vs. modern linux war is off-topic. -tony

On Jan 10, 2012, at 8:00 PM, Cameron Kaiser wrote: That's actually a pretty good idea, mostly because I think it blocks the actual problem (hot-headed comments) instead of the symptom (reading hot-headed comments). - Dave

On 01/09/2012 02:02 PM, Gene Buckle wrote: Nope. I rail against blind, adoring devotion to one company's products. I don't really care if you *don't* like something, and I likely won't say anything about it as long as you provide defensible reasons when stating it in public. :) Besides, I know damn well you're not a fanboy. ;) Except that they're *nix. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire New Kensington, PA

On Mon, 9 Jan 2012, Gene Buckle wrote: Always use the best tool for the job. Games: I don't know from games. SURELY not Windoze??? work: needs further subdivision. non-platform specific computer work: *nix digital sweatshop, Outhouse, management-controlled: Windows graphic arts books, serious works: TeX digital photo: PhotoShop party-invites, flyers: Mac door-propping: surely nothing can compete with the Times/Sinclair door wedge. barricades: PCs, lots of them piled up (price!)

Damned expensive door stop see ebay item 230725428053 sold for ?1,979.49 I still have the one I bought new, yes it did little useful work though the keypad was terrible, I made an external keyboard for mine.

On 1/9/2012 9:10 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: Just the latest gimmick for your phone. A Sinclair(sp) emulator. :) Ben.

On Jan 9, 2012, at 10:33 PM, Jules Richardson wrote: Perhaps, but it really comes down to economics; the majority of computer users use Windows, so the big-budget titles tend to be developed primarily for it. Mac OS is beginning to approach parity, but it still has a long way to go. Linux had a brief period where major games were ported to it, but since Loki Games (the major porting house) collapsed, not so much. Most games these days run at a sufficiently high level (and processors are sufficiently powerful) that the OS itself doesn't play as much of a factor as far as performance. Almost all of the graphics are being executed through powerful dedicated hardware, and background tasks tend not to take up more than about 1% of the processor, so the major obstacles tend to be hardware support (including driver quality and performance, which is a major performance driver) and decent software interfaces to the hardware (OpenGL vs. DirectX, various audio libraries, input processing, etc). Direct3D, since it is not managed by a large cabal intent on preserving compatibility amongst several (often warring) factions, tends to advance a little faster (for better or for worse). Depending on what you're trying to do with it and how early you consider portability issues, it can be relatively simple or devilishly complex to translate Direct3D operations to OpenGL; lots of developers with cutting-edge engines just don't find it worth it to try to support OpenGL as a "second-tier" solution, which necessarily ties the games to Windows or XBox 360 (which, as I understand it, runs a very modified NT kernel). Interestingly enough, lots and lots of indie games are cross-platform and run on all three platforms. It's sort of a bathtub curve; there's enough development effort to support the abstraction necessary to run on multiple platforms, and the engines aren't so overwrought that they become difficult to port between platforms. - Dave

On Jan 10, 2012, at 12:39 AM, Richard wrote: Indeed; I've certainly written code that ports between both. It's a lot harder to port *existing* code which was exclusively designed for one or the other; a lot of assumptions (like the ordering of matrices) have to be undone or worked around. If you start from the ground up assuming you need to make allowances, it's not so bad. Shaders are a little harder, but obviously there are options. I think Trinity uses Cg and compiles that to native shaders, which isn't *terrible*, but I haven't worked with it in a while, so I may not be remembering clearly. Well, yes. Which is why most PC games still exist at a D3D9 level of graphics. :-) (notable exceptions are becoming more abundant, of course) It does, and I know folks who have done that directly (before their PS3s dropped the "other OS" feature, UMBC used to use them for a Cell programming class, and some people took it a bit further). They came to appreciate what the drivers did a great deal more after that. I have no idea what the official SDK looks like, but it must not be that different from DX9 or we'd see a lot fewer titles bridging the gap. No idea what the Wii SDK looks like, either, but I've definitely seen way more of its machine code than I care to have done. The existing homebrew efforts have produced some interesting OGL-lite stuff that works pretty OK. - Dave

On 1/9/12 10:22 PM, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Reason? How did *that* sneak in here? Out, damn'd spot!