Comment Re:There is nothing special about programming (Score 1) 767
The authors have not been able to repeat their results: http://www.gwern.net/Notes#the-camel-has-two-humps
Comment Re:Some indications that it's not "Fully Free" ... (Score 3, Informative) 327
Comment Re:GPL (Score 2) 304
They don't "own your code" in any sense. If you violate the license, you're committing copyright infringement, but it has no effect on the copyright status of your own work.
Submission + - When Was Slashdot's Heyday? 5
An anonymous reader writes: In the past few years, Slashdot editors have introduced a multitude of changes to our site that have been met with mostly negative comments. Yesterday, SlashdotBI was introduced. A few weeks ago, Slashdot editors announced plans for their SlashdotTV. Slashdot's last overhaul occurred on January 25th 2011, which revamped the existing HTML and CSS code. In all of these announcements and many more, a multitude of Slashdot users have expressed concern that the site simply is not good enough as it was in the past. This concern goes back all the way to a 2000 Geeks in Space episode, where Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda asked the GIS panel: "When did Slashdot start sucking?" A lot of people reminisce about "the good old days" and how things were inherently "better" back then. My question to Slashdot users everywhere is: Is Slashdot's best years gone? When was Slashdot's heyday in terms of popularity, enjoyment, information, and intelligent discussions? How can Slashdot return back to what many users regard as their former glory?
Comment Re:Has anyone embedded Guile? (Score 1) 46
Guile 2.0 is a huge improvement over earlier releases. Scheme programs are now compiled for a custom VM with an optimizing compiler (not simply interpreted, and AOT or JIT native compilation are now much more practical goals), and Guile now supports hygienic macros, delimited continuations, Unicode, dynamic FFI, R6RS and more SRFIs, and comes with a new debugger and REPL, SXML, and a Web server, among other new standard modules. There's also a SLIME-like Emacs interface: http://www.nongnu.org/geiser/
It's definitely worth a second look if you previously evaluated Guile in the 1.x days.
Comment Re:Bloody really?!?! Another one? (Score 3, Interesting) 233
I just wasted three minutes and forty-one seconds of my life that I will never get back
Comment Re:update (Score 2) 933
Correction: they may or may not have been tear-gassed; some people are claiming fire extinguishers were used (there is obviously some kind of gas being used in the video coming from the kitchen)
Comment Re:update (Score 2) 933
The people in the kitchen locked themselves to fixed structures; they were tear-gassed and are being arrested.
Comment update (Score 2) 933
According to the Livestream, at least 200 people remain and they are being arrested.
Comment Re:I'm coining a new term: (Score 1) 425
It's actually quite useful to support user-extensible control flow. For example, because Guile supports macros and delimited continuations, you can implement Emacs's buffer-local variables as a library, whereas implementing the same feature in a language like Python would require either rewriting user programs or adding an ad-hoc language extension that wouldn't necessarily compose well with other language extensions. Guile's "CS Prof" features can be a considerable advantage for some applications.
Comment Why I'm giving credence to what 2 guys have to say (Score 2, Interesting) 211
"Ron" is Ron Garrett, nee Erann Gat. He used to work at JPL, where he created an autonomous spacecraft control system which was named NASA Software of the Year. His homepage has a list of his publications, and you can find his Usenet postings with Google Groups, if you like (he used to post quite frequently in comp.lang.lisp).
His Blogger profile even links to his homepage. Xooglers is not some anonymous blog; it's written by people using their real names and at least one of them has a decent track record as a software developer. I haven't even seen any particularly negative remarks in Xooglers posts, except for self-deprecating remarks by the authors! Why don't you actually try reading TFB instead of spewing bile?
His Blogger profile even links to his homepage. Xooglers is not some anonymous blog; it's written by people using their real names and at least one of them has a decent track record as a software developer. I haven't even seen any particularly negative remarks in Xooglers posts, except for self-deprecating remarks by the authors! Why don't you actually try reading TFB instead of spewing bile?
