Oh, please. What hogwash. You're making an assumption that not liking enforced whitespace means not having consistent style and respecting whitespace norms for all published programs. Anyone who does serious programming is capable of instantly figuring out whitespacing, even when it's inconsistent. If it's code that's been incorrectly formatted, it's dreadfully easy to fix it. Matlab, for instance, will automatically apply correct indents to an entire file, so I imagine that that's a feature available on many other editors.

What's hard to figure out on your own is uncommented code. Should Python mandate comments, then? (Maybe just!)

You do realize there's no dynamic typing in F#, right? It's very rigidly typed, in fact, more so than C/C#/Java - it won't let you use an int where a float is expected! (it's the price you have to pay for type inference - it doesn't play well with ambiguity)

I do. They're not quite the same beast, but since I've programed a lot in C the question of dynamic typing or not is not so important.

On the whole, it looks like what you're looking for is actually called Ruby.

Really? I had always thought of Ruby as a web language. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into it.

I'm going to say something anathema to the /. crowd, but I'm looking into it with interest for replacing Python. I first teethed on FORTRAN, moved to Matlab 10 years lates, and have been using C extensively for the past 2 years. I'm starting into Python as a quick and dirty replacement for Matlab, and am quickly falling into a love-hate relationship with it.

The love comes from all the cool things that Python can do, for free. Dynamic typing, .append() functionality, etc. It's just awesome.

The hate comes from the sheer lunacy that is Python syntax. Forced whitespacing doesn't suit my debugging style (why not just have the compiler recognize either whitespace or accolades?); functions names like len() are just, frankly, idiotic (length() is much more readable to beginners, and takes only a few extra milliseconds to type for experienced users); and the way of working with indices is just weird (2:5 means the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th elements, but not the fifth; range(2 5) gives you 2 3 4, but not 5.).

Python reminds me of many of these incredibly powerful scientific projects that never got used by a non-scientist until it was far too late to make changes. range() is a good example of this, as while it perfectly emulates "for i=2; i < 5; i++", it is NOT what you expect to get when you say, outloud, "I want a range of numbers from 2 to 5". Having contributed to Scilab, I should know as I'm equally guilty of this kind of thing.

If F# can fill this void, by giving functional programming with functional syntax, I'll probably stop my Python experiments and move directly to F#.

Although to be honest, I'd love to find a python front end that uses non-insane syntax and then simply precompiles it into python syntax at run-time. Then you don't have the MS, Windows, and .Net ickiness.

P.S. I'm not looking to start a flame war about force whitespacing. There are really good reasons to like it. All my programs have consistent whitespacing, except when I debug (I like to put debug programming all the way against the margin, that way there's no possibility of ever forgetting it in the code)). However, you can't have it both ways on readability vis-à-vis function names and indices.

Wow, way to overgeneralize. Having spent 8 years in the EU, I can guarantee that that's not what I lived. France, for instance, required none of that.

Maybe next time you'd like to say the countries you were in, instead of just the blanket "EU"?

I'm in the last hectic months of writing before finishing my PhD. Months where I need absolute peace and quiet and a full withdrawl from the world.

Easiest. Challenge. Ever.

I lived in France for four years, using checks. Now I live in Luxembourg and use bank transfers. I much prefer bank transfers. It's easier, faster, less prone to fraud, etc...

However, a couple things bank transfers don't do that checks do:

1) Security deposits: recently my fiancée and I reserved a monastery in France. We had to make a deposit of, what is for us, a significant amount of cash. With checks this is easy. He has a check, which is only valid if we don't show up, and we have a year to pull together the money. If he has hard cash, first of we lose access to that cash for a year. Second, if he doesn't deliver the goods, he has the cash, and all we could do about it is sue him!

2) Large amounts between individuals: we're selling our car and aren't quite sure what to do. Obviously cash is a little inconvenient, but a wire transfer happens at a bank or online. So neither of these work as nicely as a check either. Of course, I'm certain there's some way around it, but until an online bank transfer happens immediately, it won't be as nice and secure as a check.

You're kidding right? This is the epitome of a free market. Charge the price that the market will bear. The supply-demand curve is the most basic of tools that economists use to express their ideas to laymen. In fact, economists would like to see every person be charged exactly the price they think the item is worth. This reduces prices for some and raises for others.

Secondly, prices ARE widely available, it's just that the prices you see won't be the ones I see. I admit this will cause macro-economisists analyst a certain amount of headache, but you as a consumer will still be able to find 100 sites that sell your item. And you will choose the one that is cheapest. And then you will decide if this price is the right price for you.

I call this "spreadsheet economics". With the advent of very sophisticated control and observation models, businesses can now gage the effect of each individual action against their bottom line. This leads them to do things that would normally seem insane from a customer-service standpoint. Witness RyanAir implementing plans to charge for bathroom usage on aircraft, Apple refusing to repair all smokers computers because of tar build-up, or Best Buy firing customers. They already know how much the bad press will cost them vs. how much they will save/earn based on a new policy.

With spreadsheet economics, one can now see which markets will bear which prices, and don't be surprised if you turn out to be a market unto yourself.

'The first thing we need to do is educate customers about what represents a megabyte of data...

Excuse me, but aren't you the people who charge me for 1MB if I download 1byte?

I'm not sure I care that much about healthcare to drag it into /. What I *do* care about, though, is intentionally misleading advertising that is designed to pollute and discourage any sort of reasonable discourse. I hope you are, too. And that was only obvious on this one story. Not any other. So putting it into a /. journal entry becomes less than apropos.

According to the above /. definition, "troll" is completely wrong. I might give you "Flamebait" (although my intention is not to enrage others, as you say it's a charged issue and we all read these things in different ways), but not trolling. And labeling it as such, when you've got the "Offtopic" button at hand, is, quite honestly, trying to prove an agenda. And that's as lame as making the original graphic in the first place.

Although one wonders is it offtopic if the referenced image can only be seen in this topic? (That's making a big assumption, of course, that you see what I see. Which is not as unlikely as you think, as if this showed up in Europe, it's pretty obvious it's not regional based.)

(By the way, you seem to misunderstand the journal entry. I'd be far more interested if you could have explained, in 2005, what comments had inspired people to list me as their "friend".)

Sadly, not the case. I regularly run across pdfs that I cannot access because they're behind a paywall. Even if I tell google "filetype:pdf", it still finds them for me. Which, quite frankly, pollutes the results to an extent that I sometimes cannot find the signal (actual readable scientific articles) amidst all the noise (IEEE, JSTOR, etc...).

Right, Mr. Get-your-government-hands-off-my-medicare moderator, pointing out that there is an amazingly biased and misleading political attack ad on /. is somehow trolling? I'll need that one explained to me. Offtopic, why not, but "troll" makes it look as if you want to disagree, but aren't brave enough to do it with words.

Did anyone notice that the ad on /. is an anti-Obama ad, that then links to a newsmax "poll"?

photo

Well, of COURSE if you have that pic, with that message, the only people who will participate will be rabidly anti-Obama. Kind of makes for a nice poll, Newsmax, right? Of course, that *couldn't* be the purpose, now could it?

LAME.

Having read the article, this seems like a reasonable plan. Not only does it push those who read lots to pay, it also leaves some pretty good options for those who want to read lots, but don't want to/can't pay. That's all you can really ask for. These people need to earn a living somehow, and I'd rather they did it writing news articles than working on a factory line.

Alright, so some American newspapers put up walled gardens. No problem, I'll just read the foreign press. BBC does a good job, and so do many others.

Yeah, and if you look at the demographics who like newspapers they are almost overwhelmingly older. Talk to a 20 something and ask them if they read the newspaper, most will just laugh at you.

If you asked someone that 10 years ago, it was the same response. And they, for sure, weren't getting their news online.

Not saying you're wrong, just that your example could be better chosen.