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Comment Re:I'm excited about hiring Minecraft programmers (Score 2) 51

Before having creators that understand the technology behind the technology wee need to find these who can actually express an idea whatever that idea is simple or not to a computer. before running you need to walk.
Learning to program through writing programs that sort numbers in an array or making a character in a 3D world digging a tunnel and gathering the resources use the same concepts. Now once you have identified the kids who can from the kids who can't have the logical oriented mindset to do so, you can go deeper with them and make them understand the technology behind the technology.
Minecraft can really be nice little bedtest of nice discreet algorithms like drawing lines or circles with only integers to build structures, or more complex algorithms like A* pathfinding to have chickens going through a maze...
What I say is that it is not because the development environment is 'fun', that the quality of the teaching is crap. You don't need a boring lesson on a blackboard to learn algorithms, you can do the same by implementing a 100 skeletons Vs 100 zombies roshambo battle.

Comment Re:No sure about EU demand. (Score 1) 129

I did already have the opportunity to test drive a Tesla here in Belgium and liked it even if it was too short to my liking (couln't test lane keeping feature).
But at 58.800 Euros (chepeast in Belgium), I will pass :( At 35.000 Euros I could think about it and compare with what other automakers will have at that time (ie: If they get their 35.000 version before the other automakers get their fingers out of their collective arses, Tesla will have my money !)

Comment Re:Can we quit with the myth that Python is slow ? (Score 2) 103

What could be that unicorn real work number crunching application that couldn't be written in 1/10 of lines of code of python in some numpy with a pinch of DAAL or tensorflow? Why most AI research who is not know to be low on the number crunching departement is done in Python?
There is even Games developped in Python (Sims 4, Eve Online, Civilisation IV, Pirates of the Caribbean Online...).

In my career, I have written my share of Assembly and C code for performance reasons when a 486 DX 400 was the must have of the shinny machines. But now, compilers and 'interpreters' can do a better work than I due to the complexity of the processors and their different caches sizes. Right now you can write some highly optimized assembly code that work at nearly the theorical speed limit of a processor with a specific cache size, but who will work like a molasse on a similar architecture with double the cache size. An interpreter could adapt its realtime compilation to the architecture it run on and even for the same algorithm to the type of data you process.

Now, if your Python program is still too slow, you can update your slowest function into cython and compile it to have a speed boost that C can get you without losing the time needed to develop everything in C and by that saving a lot of time to go to the next project.

In the beginning of my carreer, I would have used the best language for the job from a toolbelt composed of Assembly, C/C++, Fortran, Delphi, Lisp and Prolog. Now, I use most exclusively Python for my projects.

Comment Well, nice but bulky (Score 1) 76

As long as it take more space and more weight than an IC performing an equivalent task, this will stay a nice research subject.
We replaced hardware radio receptor by software ones, I don't see why we would replace software neural network by hardware ones... Plus, they miss the 'plasticity' of software ones and a scratch would make it 'dead' :(

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