This gives me an idea for an interesting experiment. Buy the whole library, and give it to read to a young programmer, and see if we can turn him a Naggum v.2.0?
> If I had money enough to buy the whole library...
> This gives me an idea for an interesting experiment. Buy the whole > library, and give it to read to a young programmer, and see if we can > turn him a Naggum v.2.0?
>> If I had money enough to buy the whole library...
>> This gives me an idea for an interesting experiment. Buy the whole >> library, and give it to read to a young programmer, and see if we can >> turn him a Naggum v.2.0?
> That seems to me to mix up cause and effect.
That's the question! Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both. If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?
-- * Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/> - It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true. -- Bertrand Russell
Harald Hanche-Olsen <han...@math.ntnu.no> writes: > + p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):
>> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
> I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both. > If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?
but reading is not sufficient in an dof itself. You have to be 'active' in your reading to comprehend the content. However, there is something even more fundamental and difficult to define. I believe each person responds in different ways to different writing styles. For example, I always found Knuth's books very good, but I know others who don't and who prefer authors that I find less accessible. I found the same thing with other areas of study as well - after a time you would find certain authors who presented things in such a way that the concepts and ideas they are writing about fit well with your own cognitive models and you tend to 'get it' from what they have written much faster than you would from someone else. .
I learnt a long time ago that sometimes, when trying to understand something new and unfamiliar, it wasn't necessarily just because I was being a bit 'thick' that I was having trouble understanding it, particularly the more subtle aspects. Since others seemed to be getting it, it isn't just that the author is a poor writer. Rather, it is due to a disconnection between the authr and reader's cognitive models. continuing with that author is unlikely to change matters. A better result is usually found by finding another author. Sometimes, this can be difficult - especially when dealing with new topics that have not been dealt with by many writers.
Btw, I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and I noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language had the standard update recently (2005). I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors (verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI". So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada more or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning (for a lone european lisper such I am)?
Giovanni Gigante <g...@cidoc.iuav.it> writes: > Btw, > I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days > ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and > I noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language > had the standard update recently (2005). > I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors > (verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are > probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI". > So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada > more or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning > (for a lone european lisper such I am)?
It is put to some use in embedded systems. It's not a bad Algol-like programming language. (It beats C and C++, but what language doesn't?)
One thing of interest is that it includes at the language level (therefore portably) threads and inter-thread communication primitives.
Now, whether there are more Ada jobs than Lisp jobs, I'm not even sure it's the case...
On 3 June, 09:42, Giovanni Gigante <g...@cidoc.iuav.it> wrote:
> I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days > ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and I > noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language had > the standard update recently (2005). > I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors > (verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are > probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI". > So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada more > or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning (for a > lone european lisper such I am)?
-- "High Integrity Software: The SPARK Approach to Safety and Security" Customers interested in this title may also be interested in: "Windows XP Home" (Amazon)
On 3 Jun., 10:42, Giovanni Gigante <g...@cidoc.iuav.it> wrote:
> Btw, > I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days > ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and I > noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language had > the standard update recently (2005). > I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors > (verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are > probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI". > So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada more > or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning (for a > lone european lisper such I am)?
Luckily a prominent Lisp expert explains the real background of Ada and its design:
> Funny :) > Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was > (apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in Ayn Rand too.
ObAda: the AACS (attitude and articulation control system) on the Cassini spacecraft is programmed in Ada, and it actually has a lot of pretty sophisticated autonomy built in to handle hardware failures. It's actually some of the most advanced flight software ever on an unmanned spacecraft. Ironically, none of its advanced capabilities have ever been exercised (as far as I know) because, remarkably, none of the hardware on Cassini has ever failed.
RG <rNOSPA...@flownet.com> wrote on Thu, 03 Jun 2010:
> In article <4c07a7dd$0$31378$4fafb...@reader1.news.tin.it>, >> Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was >> (apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
> That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in Ayn Rand too.
Rand went too far, and was blind about her own failures, it's true.
On the other hand, she had a lot of good, important, things to say, which were (and often still are) very unpopular.
I think it would be an impoverished student who managed to get through college with no exposure to Ayn Rand. ___________________________________________________________________________ ____ Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ d...@geddis.org At a book burning, don't leave too soon, or you might miss the dictionaries. -- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey [1999]
In article <4c07a7dd$0$31378$4fafb...@reader1.news.tin.it>, Giovanni Gigante <g...@cidoc.iuav.it> wrote:
Funny :) Still, my heuristic was very simple: if the archlisper Erik Naggum was (apparently) interested in Ada, perhaps I should, too?
That's not a very good heuristic. He was interested in Ayn Rand too.
Wow, an attempted cheap shot at three people at once, two of them dead. Impressive.
In any case, A) owning the complete works of Plato doesn't make me a Platonist, B) the heuristic is perfectly reasonable as long as it remains merely a heuristic, and C) Naggum certainly was no Objectivist.
I hadn't. There are some interesting bits. To launch into a discussion of how profoundly anti-Randian it is would be off topic and pointless. Suffice to say that most people who read Rand read her very casually and typically what they remember are some out-of-context bits about society, politics and capitalism; the crucial ideas they sort of gloss over and forget. It is clear that Naggum was never an Objectivist in a very meaningful sense of the term, but as I say he makes some interesting observations.
