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Comment Re:What happened to Scheme? (Score 1) 415

Just because most of the people graduating with a degree in physics never actually use quantum physics in their jobs does not mean it's pointless to teach quantum physics to students.

Actually, it does. That's exactly what it means. If your "degree in X" doesn't mean you'll be using Y in your work, it's pointless to include Y in said degree, as long as said degree is mainly a qualification for work.

Comment Re:another language shoved down your throat (Score 1) 415

While I do think that it is of extreme value to know what problems something (in this case, a paradigm) tries to solve, I do not think that you need to know procedural programming to know object oriented programming.

The problem with procedural programming is that every piece of code can touch every piece of data. The problem is combinatory explosion. If you've never run into that problem, how can you understand the need for a solution?

It might, in most cases, also be beneficial to most people. But as I saw my college classmates go through this (we did procedural Python, then C, then Java), I noticed that many of them had quite a lot of trouble getting rid of the "procedural way" of doing things, and often made more errors than I did when I first learned OOP. Maybe I'm an exception. But, oh well...

I've never been to college, so I wouldn't know. But this is how it worked for me: line-number Basic, C, Object-oriented, functional. I don't know any of these well, but I know what problem each rose to solve - except functional, since it didn't rise to solve problems in programming, but is simply an alternative way of describing algorithms. However, I'm developing a love/hate relationship with Haskell.

Comment Re:Python for learning? Good choice. (Score 1) 415

I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?

Because our visual cortext deals with geometric structure, while the compiler deals with logical structure. It's simply more efficient to tell the compiler the latter, and let the IDE to format the code for easy consumption by the former.

Computers should conform to the needs of humans. Full. Stop.

I agree. And in my experience, it's much easier to have explicit block start/end markers and let the IDE format things than wonder if your bugs are caused by mixed tabs and spaces.

Python eliminates that source of bugs and redundancy by having the compiler's view of the significance of what space match a human's view of significance of white space.

No, it doesn't, and that's precisely the problem. My eye can't tell the difference between 8 spaces and a tab, but the compiler can. And I often find myself refactoring the code in ways that causes space-based alignment to get inconsistent. In languages like Java I just insert braces and tell the compiler to reformat, and all is well; in languages like Python, I'll have a fun time re-indenting hundreds of lines and hoping I get everything right.

"Indentation is logical structure" sounds like a good idea, but it's not. It's a horrible one.

Comment Re:another language shoved down your throat (Score 1) 415

C is very beginner friendly in my opinion. It was my first non-BASIC language. Learning C you learn how those bits and bytes work and how shit gets done. The paradigm is old but not obsolete.

C is not beginner friendly. The reason is that it's not a managed language, so a mistake will have unpredictable consequences, rather than firing an exception like in Java. Yes, you can still do it; I learned C by reverse engineering Nethack sources in pre-Internet days and debugging all errors with printfs ("got here!") and logic, and perhaps that should be the criteria for serious programmers, but that's hardly "beginner friendly".

Personally, I think programmers should start with with line-number Basic, then move to procedural programming, then to object-oriented. You can't really understand a paradigm unless you know the problem it was designed as a response for.

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 1) 530

That's not the correct use of the word "coercion", and it's a misuse that indicates a bias regarding economic policy. Coercion indicates the use of force or threat of force by one against another. A person in the wilderness must work or die, and no other person is there to coerce him to work.

You do realize that the entire point of civilization is to make things different from being alone in the wilderness, right? So if they aren't, then the civilization has failed miserably. Also, the conditions in wilderness are not under anyone's control, while the conditions in civilization are.

And I absolutely have a "bias" regarding economic policty: I believe economy exists to serve human needs and as such must address not just efficiency, but also fairness and security. Our current economy fails with all three.

Comment Re: If everyone loses their jobs... (Score 1) 530

Right, because automation causes poverty.

Not automation, but automation combined with free market fundamentalism. The former causes disturbances in economy and the latter prevents efficient safety nets to ensure proper maintenance of human resources who's primary supply of income gets cut by them. This combination makes the economy extremely fragile, both because the resulting lack of flexibility but also because people compensate by overreacting to any negative signal.

That is why countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Somalia, that wisely avoided the "productivity catastrophe", are doing well, while countries adopting automation, like America, Europe, and Japan, are starving.

United States is starving. Europe makes do with filthy socialism and Japan with the remnants of feudalism. But don't worry, you've succesfully propagandized about the wonders of austerity, so it's unlikely that Europe will rise from depression any time soon.

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 2) 530

Sounds awfully like feminism or progressivism to me.

They can become religions, certainly. Progressivism has a built-in sense of destiny - a divine plan - and feminism began as a demand for more just world and developed a weird cult-like fringe later.

Ideologies are generally counterproductive my friend, except Buddhism, and that only because its first and last instructions are to reject ideologies, including this one.

Go ahead and reject ideologies, then. Now how will you get food? You can't just buy it, after all, without interacting with the local economic system in ways acceptable to that system - and if you do, you're not rejecting its values in any meaningful way.

This is what I meant when I said people aren't really in control of their destiny: believe what you will, but you'll still obey the overlords or die.

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 1) 530

What I do know is that as long as there are people there will be something person A wants from person B and vice versa, and with that basis for trade there will be an economy, and something akin to jobs.

There is, however, an important difference between working to get food and working to get concert tickets. Current economy is ultimately based on coercion: work or die, or at least be extremely miserable. A society where all basic production is automated could guarantee an unconditional middle-class income to its members, so working would be strictly a matter of personal ambition.

Then again, we could already have an unconditional minimum income - and likely end up with a more efficient economy, since it's the coercion-based hierarchy that's the main source of inefficiency in corporations - yet don't do that for ideological reasons. So that suggests we'll see the nightmare scenario of ever-increasing wealth concentration and worsening dystopia instead.

Comment Re:Misused? Murder is intrinsic in communism. (Score 1) 530

Ayn Rand may have been batshit crazy about some things, but she also was accurate on some of her observations of human nature.

Batshit crazy or just a cynical and calculating con(wo)man. Either would be consistent with flattering the powerful and letting them pretend to be the victims rather than the victimizers...

Comment Re:more leisure time for humans! (Score 5, Interesting) 530

Wow, quite a distortion you came up with there. Granted, Marx did say some interesting things but the question should be why communism would allow companies to build machines that remove income from humans? For that matter, why is a "capitalist Republic" allowing it now?

Because a system, once build, is more than just a sum of its parts. It has independent existence and motives. What that means is that neither communism, nor capitalism, nor USA nor China, are under human control, so why would they serve human interests, except incidentally? Yes, these systems have human actors making decisions, but these humans can only make decisions within parameters given by the system itself - a Foxconn CEO must do whatever it takes to keep Foxconn "competitive", and if he won't, he'll be replaced by someone who will, and likely severely punished. An American politician must accept a system-approved role - a set of political positions - if he wants to be elected. A dictator, while seemingly free, faces the same situation, except the punishment for disobedience is death rather than merely dropping out. Human beings, even those seemingly in control, are little more than agent-slaves of the Lovecraftian monstrosity they've conjured.

No one wanted World War I, yet it still happened. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans wanted the world to end, yet they came within hair's width of blowing it all up during the Cuban crisis. Chinese don't want to breath a poisonous fume, yet Peking's air is just that. People regularly refer to "the market" like it was a living thing that needs to be appeased and soothed and definitely not something anyone can control - because, in some ways, it is.

Human beings aren't in control of their own nor the destiny of the world, and haven't been since civilization began. I suspect this is the real reason religions keep popping up: beneath the bizarre cruft all traditions tend to accumulate, they present a perfectly accurate picture of the everyday experience of living in a world ruled by utterly inhuman and mostly invisible forces. For example, "Free Market" is, for all intents and purposes, the god of capitalism, gets treated that way by everyone, has sacrifices performed to it, has temples and priests trying to predict its capricious whims, is the object of fundamentalist faith - I've had people define a human's very right to live in terms of body ownership - and doctrinal conflicts, etc. Someone who wasn't indoctrinated to the system from birth could hardly avoid classifying this all as a typical religion.

Comment Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score 1) 702

Take away the security and you don't even need "smart" or "poised".

No one is saying that there should not be any security.

Keep security static and you don't need smart people - just enough attempts from dullards until they chance upon a workaround, the way penicillin eventually adapts to an antibiotic.

You might want to review that. And the "dullards" still need a basic level of competence. And that basic level of competence is what is extremely rare.

But not non-existent, as history has shown.

And it will never be "non-existent". Ever. As long as airplanes are still used. So putting "non-existent" as a criteria means that you will always fail.

And you will never know if the money being spent is not being wasted because there incidents are so rare already.

So your point about "reducing risk" is meaningless.

Comment Re:Christmas is coming early this year (Score 1) 702

Think in terms of Venn diagrams: start with "people who want to blow up an airplane".

I'd change that to "people anywhere in the world who want to blow up a plane in the USofA". Which is a large number of people.

But then:

Now add "operatives smart and poised enough to carry out the attack but willing to kill themselves in the process".

Another slight change. "Operatives smart and poised enough to carry out the attack in the USofA but willing to ...". This is a very, very, very small number.

You don't need any of the other qualifiers because with just those two criteria you've reduced the number to almost non-existence.

So the problem would be to find someone who fit the "smart and poised" category. Once that person is found, you can teach him/her whatever is needed from a technical standpoint.

It's not insanity - it's all about reducing risk.

I disagree. The risk is already almost non-existent. Causing more difficulties for non-threat people will not reduce the risk any further.

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