Scheme doesn't have unreadable syntax; that's a category error. Scheme does not have syntax. That's the difference. What you're editing is the raw parse tree; and that's a significant part of what makes Scheme (and other homoiconic languages) so powerful.

From the article:

From that they got 100 million lines of Java code and tossed out simple methods (those with less than 50 tokens).

Good coding style is to decompose your problem thoroughly, so your methods will be very small. Indeed, using this methodology, the more you refactor the greater proportion of so called 'chaff' you'll get.

I'm not arguing with the general propositions that

• Java is an extraordinarily prolix language, and
• These days, most Java is exceedingly poorly written

But this study doesn't show it, because it arbitrarily tossed away the better-written code and then analysed the remainder.

My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.

Tail Call Optimisation is not implemented in Clojure, and the reason given in the documentation is precisely that interoperability with Java prevents this. Instead there's a recur special form, which, in my opinion, is a bit of an ugly hack.

(apply str (take 7 (range)))

This is kind of nonsense.

In most current compilers for ALGOL derived imperative programming languages (such as C, Java, C#, Pascal...), it's true, because, TRADITION! But it's not true of the underlying hardware, and it's not true of any compiler which implements its stack as a linked list. In principle there is no reason at all why you should not allocate all your available store to stack. There's also no reason why you cannot dynamically implement your stack in your heap.

These are all language (and run-time) design choices, and just because the people who specified ALGOL in 1958 - when I was three, goddammit - were working on machines which were (by modern standards) desperately poor of both mill and store, doesn't mean that we need to continue to copy the design choices they made then.

That's a particularly stupid response, even for Slashdot. Since all iteration can be implemented as recursion, why ever use iteration?

Because some problems are more clearly expressed as iteration and some as recursion.

Try, for example, to describe in normal everyday language a route planning algorithm using iteration. Here it is using recursion:

1. Go from here to a junction.
2. Am I at my destination? If so, then stop.
3. Am I closer to my destination than I was at the previous junction? If so, then recurse.
4. Otherwise backtrack to the previous junction and choose the next branch from there.

When you consider that the i386 on which I first ran Linux back in 93 could manage about 15 BogoMIPS, that's ridiculously powerful!

The point of a Raspberry Pi isn't to replace an Intel i7 clocked at 3GHz, it's to replace a 6502 clocked at 2MHz: to provide kids with a system to hack on. You don't need shedloads of performance to develop great software, and, indeed, the less resource you have, the more inclined you are to code tightly and efficiently. As a learning tool, less really can be more.

So download the sources and compile it yourself!

The Washington Post has journalists working in Russia. They might reasonably be concerned about reprisals.

... and now at fifty nine I'm back cutting code. I prefer it, and I'm better at it.

Management suits some people, but the problem with our business culture is that if someone is really good in a technical area they get promoted into management, which means you lose your best technical people and gain a lot of second-rate managers.

I was one of the original Kickstarter funders.

I threw my money into the pot because I got so much fun and game play out of the original Elite. Basically I thought David Braben and his team had already earned it. Am I disappointed that there's no single player offline? Yes, I am. My home internet connection has a long ping time (it's via satellite) so multiplayer combat was never going to work for me. It may be, for that reason, the game won't work at all - FOR ME. But I'm not making a fuss.

Basically if you back a kickstarter you're taking a risk. This kickstarter has enabled an amazing game to be built, and lots of people will get a huge amount of fun out of it; as far as I'm concerned, my money's well spent.

I have an 8 core i7 on my home-brewed home machine, and I have to say this: neither the Windows nor the Linux scheduler efficiently load balances across eight cores, and furthermore writing my own custom software which efficiently load balances across eight cores isn't easy. I can load up all eight cores, sure, by spawning huge numbers of threads, and have computations complete faster than they would on a single core - but of the order of three times faster, not of the order or eight times faster. Spawning just eight threads just causes them to run in series on one core, taking longer than one thread, which kind of spoils the point.

So, even for your fantasy gaming rig, with present-generation operating systems you're not going to get a useful return on your investment from the extra cores. Sorry.

Already exists. Goods sold in the UK have to be of 'Satisfactory Quality' and 'Fit for Purpose'. A car you cannot insure for us on the public road is unlikely to be deemed by the courts to be of 'fit for purpose', so the sale of such a car is likely to be void.

IANAL.