@Gilles yeah, I don't have huge expectations, but I'll have a poke at it.
More interesting to me is the possibility of reaching 10K on meta so I can see deleted stuff there. But I don't really want to get involved to that degree in the current ruckus, even though there are obviously a lot of votes and eyes to be had....
@derobert Well, the Supreme Court, after agreeing to hear the bank petition, then refused to hear it. Just in the news, like 15 minutes ago.
It seems to be it would have been more sensible to refuse to hear it in the first place, but perhaps this is how judges like to entertain themselves here.
There's a difference between studying something because it's interesting and having to study something because you need to learn it to do something boring.
This summer I went from Haskell->Scheme->a little SML -> Smalltalk -> relearn some Python, and then end up with two books: TAPL and PFPL (now struggling to finish asap)
Also EOPL
I am not good at any of them, but just trying to get some picture
to ease the learning curve for new languages
I admire polylinguists, with or without having to go that route.
Hope one day, when I have some time, I will revisit Bash, with a new perspective.
@Tim Do you know javascript? IMO if you know javascript you already know nodejs, you just need to watch a short 15 minute youtube video about how to use npm and you should be good to go
I have to admit I haven't followed that one too closely. But it doesn't sound like a no-brainer. Nothing regarding the traffic here does.
the traffic in the inner city and to the ports is a mess. Some politicians have been throwing around a frickking 1,4 billion euro tunnel plan to help with that. It just got rejected by what's basically a majority of the parties in the city council, but the mayor just decided to push it anyway. Regardless of the fact that all calculations say it wouldn't pay.
The real issue of course is that they put the city in the wrong place in the 1950's ;) It's basically a peninsula, surrounded by water on three sides. There are bridges to the East and West, of course, but that doesn't really make it too easy.
Oh and half the time it seems all plans on traffic are based more on stereotypical political stances (i.e. the righties wanting roads for cars, the lefties less of those), instead of looking at the whole.
@Wildcard Probably. I think the title alone deserves a downvote though. I am more concerned with why my comment got no love, are they not valid questions? :(
The "we don't do homework" crowd is unpredictable, it seems. Some questions get piled on with answers, other questions just get piled on. That one definitely needs a better title, and some words explaining what the transformation is.
(don't make every reader come up with their interpretation of the question)
I used to have a video game where you were defending a castle (I think) and words would fly across the screen towards your castle. You had to type the word out to destroy it before it got to you. That game is the sole reason I can type 120+ wpm
@Jesse_b yeah, that sounds good. Mavis Beacon is surprisingly good, but more recently they seem to have changed things that didn't need changing. Happily, I have probably the last version from before all the unnecessary changes.
@ilkkachu Somehow I think of the Finns as having a carefree life. Except for not freezing to death. And having to worry about the occasional Russian invasion. :-)
Fair point and I made that "overwhelming majority" part up, obviously, however if you think about how much software (specifically free software) is written and then literally never once used by anyone but it's original author, I bet that alone can be classified as "the overwhelming majority"
@Jesse_b Well, yes, I'm sure most free software projects don't go anywhere. Like most of anything. Mine certainly didn't, but I never had my heart in any of them.
They were mostly "work for hire" projects.
But, regardless, there are plenty of exceptions.
The free software ecosystem is actually a very rich one.
I'm looking for example of governments giving financial support to free software development. Examples would be grants or contracts, perhaps.
I can think of one example off the top of my head, which is that the German govt gave a grant for GPG development. But I am sure there must be others.
@FaheemMitha probably. It's asking for a list, and those are pretty universally off topic across SE. You might want to rephrase as "Has any government provided financial support to free software development" so it isn't so open ended (asking for examples).
@FaheemMitha it's a rich ecosystem when you are doing things with computers and programs. Try to do something like teach a group of 7 year olds, and it's much less so, even though there are great educational software products out there. Just very very few good libre ones.
An educational programming language is a programming language that is designed mostly as an instrument for learning, and less as a tool for writing programs to perform work.
== Learning paths ==
Many educational programming languages position themselves inside a learning path, that is, a sequence of languages each designed to build on the others moving a student from easy to understand and entertaining environments to full professional environments. Some of the better known are presented below.
=== Assembly language ===
Originally, machine code was the first and only way to program comp...
When I learned Smalltalk, I heard Squeak is designed for education
It also lists Logo, which I had never knew was a language
@Tim yeah, that's cool. What's nice is that Python's turtle module is almost as easy to use as Logo itself. Probably less so because of the parentheses required, but still pretty simple.
I never used Logo myself, but the turtle module seems to replicate those features pretty well.
I am looking in a /etc/hosts file for hosts that should contain servers that look at least like this:
mobile.example.com
more.mobile.example.com
and NOT example.com
I want to search with a wildcard like this:
sed/awk/find/grep/ word.word.word < path/to/inputfile > path/to/outputfile where wo...
> Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), BIND was first released with Berkeley Software Distribution 4.3BSD.
@derobert I would heed your advice since I don't really use that site but that wasn't quite a recipe request and more of a "I'm not sure if watermelon would taste good in chili, would it?" type of question
In my head I'm imagining a world where the govt of Iceland gives the GIMP developers money because they're doing such a good job. Pays them to add new features, perhaps.
That sort of thing doesn't seem to happen much, if at all.
@derobert Yeah that's not what I meant though. I was thinking more along the lines of "I have this recipe for chili but I want to include even more ingredients. I'm worried that something I add may not fit into the classic taste of chili so can you please give me a list of examples of things that are okay to go in chili, and possibly a list of things I should avoid?"
@FaheemMitha Even inside the DoD, ARPA/DARPA funds a lot of generally useful things. Outside the DoD, there are several other agencies that fund generally useful things like NSF.
@Jesse_b I... err... doubt that. Though it would be a funny thing to do to someone on Cutthroat Kitchen.
I suppose foundations are more flexible, but I never had the impression they funded work, at least not directly. I think some foundation did give Stallman money once, I think.
@Jesse_b there was a great answer I read some time ago, I think on Quora, about how to explain why programming is hard (to someone who doesn't see why it's hard). I can't seem to find it now. It was along the lines of, ask them for instructions on how to make a cup of coffee. Then start asking all the questions about the instructions.
Like, where did you get the water? Where did you get the cup?
And things aren't wrapping as they normally would? Long time since I've used the ipmi serial console. Maybe it only worked for me because I was running it in an xterm
@Wildcard Programming hard, because it's building stuff, which is always hard. And it's harder than some things. Once you've built a wall, it generally doesn't come crashing down because someone pokes it in the wrong place.
@Wildcard Yeah, I told my wife that initially you look at a problem like that and think of a handful of solutions right away. As you get more experienced, instead of thinking "x would solve that", you start thinking "Alright what are the caveats of trying x for this"
@FaheemMitha honestly, if you spend a few years training people of any age, you'll come to realize that capabilities vary wildly and that all the theories that "7 year olds are only capable of ___" are all uniformly nonsensical over-generalizations.
@Wildcard Well, not all juvenile delinquents are misunderstood geniuses, but I take your point.
As a child I was very bored and depressed, I remember. I cheered up when I left school, a bit, but I'd already been there a long time, and my spirit was broken.
I remember when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a child, I really related to it. Because I too felt I lived in an insane and cruel world I didn't want to be a part of.
@Wildcard Interesting perspective.
But I do remember being a child, and it was incredibly frustrating.
@FaheemMitha yep. I finished high school when I was 13. And I was fortunate enough to have parents who supported me, and DID allow me to contribute. I was working from an early age.
Not that it wasn't frustrating. It took me years to get over the defensive mechanism that everybody is just dumb, and learn to treat other people with respect.
@FaheemMitha yeah, when I was about 12 (and nearing the end of high school) my mom met someone at a Farmer's Market who worked at Dreamworks or Pixar; he wrote the code that allowed for the realistic simulation of fire, water, breaking ceramic, that sort of thing. And they chatted and then I got to meet him.
@FaheemMitha My mom later reminded me of me comment after chatting with him for over an hour. I said, "Mom, that was SO refreshing! I didn't have to explain anything!" :D
We chatted about fourth dimensional geometry, lots of things.