I have - tried to - read some posts by doublec where the topic is programming in the ATS lang. But he apparently also likes to dip his feet in simpler languages like Rust. (:P)

Haha, yes I'm a big fan of ATS and I use it in projects. What motivates the dabbling in Rust is that it'll be possible at some point to use Rust in Gecko, and Servo is an interesting project to contribute to.

I'm currently reading all your old posts on factor. It's so sad that it seems almost dead, it's incredibly good and mind bending. Have you lost interest for this language ?

Factor is still maintained and there is activity in the mailing list. I still use it. Recently I restored from backup an old project of mine that is written in factor, http://tinyvid.tv. It was fun hacking on it again - reminded me of what a great language it is.

The problem is Just-so stories[1] that have no basis in evidence, but can be moulded to sound plausible given any kind of phenomena. So imagine there are two mutually exclusive phenomena - chances are that you could come up with a plausible-sounding, "evolutionary psychology"-story for both scenarios. And how good is a framework if it can plausibly explain any and all phenomena? Useless.

This might have more to do with how "evolutionary psychology"-sounding theories are presented on Web fora than how they are used in a more academic setting. You can easily run across participants on Web fora who almost admit to just making up shit on the spot that fit with the phenomena that they are presented with, based on their expert knowledge of Stone Age humans.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

> , but my CS professors made it clear that iteration is basically just a special case of recursion.

That seems a bit disingenuous, since iteration and general recursion are fundamentally equivalent. So you could say that "recursion is just a special case of iteration".

Unless we're talking about specific iterations like iterating over a list, I guess.

I feel that it is a bit disingenuous to claim they are equivalent if the solution to maintaining a call stack is to explicitly maintain a stack structure.

Iterating over lists, or integers in a range is pretty straightforward. Iterating over a tree? What does that even mean? I suppose we could take "iterate" to mean a catamorphism. Under that interpretation, structural recursion and "iteration" seem pretty equivalent.

Just feels like quite an extension of what "iteration" usually refers to in a language like C.

But with TCO it is no longer needed to maintain a stack structure, so it would probably be a better stated as a tail-call recursive function is equivalent to iteration (assuming TCO)

> I feel that it is a bit disingenuous to claim they are equivalent if the solution to maintaining a call stack is to explicitly maintain a stack structure.

You're funny.

Equivalent in a computational sense.

But by that standard ruby is python is C is assembler.

Turing-completeness is a not very interesting standard.

You forgot to put your † somewhere.

thx

More C => more Good. Balance has been restored.

> Hi, could you solve this thing called "n queens problem" for me within 3 hours? Thanks.

Hmm.

You could also run Emacs as a server.

I've actually looked into this, but it seemed like far too much overhead to simply open, edit and save a file; especially remotely.

Remotely, sure (though I usually use joe for that), but for local edits, I start emacs --daemon as part of my regular login procedure (along with creating multiple terminal windows) and thereafter use emacsclient (aliased to 'e') for almost all file editing.

Only annoying thing is the way it retains buffers for modified files when you exit, even if you choose not to save them.

emacs -q (or faster, -Q) could be used in a pinch, but I find default emacs almost unusable.

You can edit remote files directly in Emacs or simply use sshfs.

C++ is well-understood? I don't get that impression from people who know it.

C++ is well-understood to not be well-understood.

Indeed, the language is well understood but code often isn't because its easy to write UB.

It's fascinating. Corporations and rich owners of industry already have bargaining power by... being big and having money. There's a lot of wiggle room for abuse of power and influence while staying within the confines of the law. And if they don't want to stay within the confines of the law, they have more resources and means to evade it.

But suggest that common workers should have some collective bargaining power and people are all afraid of them going too far and abusing their power. I guess they're afraid that they will have to pay 10 cents more for their coffee at Starbucks because of some greedy barrista union. The common worker banding together like that, that's too dangerous! Better have everyman and woman to themselves, and trust corporations, rich people and politicians to do the right thing.

There have been some fairly monstrous cases of unions crippling their industries (printers, watersiders). I think that might have put some people off the idea. Not to say all unions are that broken but it seems that sometimes they grow too big.

It's one thing to negotiate for more pay, but when you actively seek to prevent technological improvements which might make your job redundant, that makes you a burden on the rest of society.

Unions crippled print manufacturing?

Not amazing technological progress (from photographic plates thru composite color), long term decline of high margin markets (books, mags, news), and costs of production approaching zero?

Where exactly do you think print manufacturing would be today, minus unions?

Ok, but it's not like companies don't do the exact same thing. What do you call Microsoft's Windows and Office monopolies if not ways of holding society back so a firm can collect monopoly rents and avoid obsolescence?