Speakers of 19th century English?

Death: "I've come for you."

Townes: "No thanks, I'll pass... Oh, wait!"

Death: "Muhehehehe!" [snatches him]

Unless Ganymede gets there first, that is. :-p

I'd give a slight exception for Haskell code, though. That might take a week to some people.

It's fortunate for us, then, that Common Lisp isn't a functional language.

Orbitz...

That's ambiguous. Do a lot of academics like to think that they are solving real-world problems in Lisp, or do a lot of academics like to think that outside of academia, people solve real-world problems using Lisp?

And do such devices actually use glibc anymore? I thought that stuff like uClibc or musl has become common in that area. Plus like a few other people here, I'm surprised that gethostbyname is still being used. I concluded that its use was dangerous even in principle something like seven years ago.

Well, what I had in mind was a flyby of an object of a roughly comparable size, and I'm pretty sure that ~0.5-1km sized objects have been mapped pretty exhaustively. So, yeah, there will be a lot of flybys before 2027, but the flybys of things we don't know about yet are bound to be somewhat less significant.

The interesting thing here is the somewhat skewed shape of the size distribution of known NEAs, which suggests to me that the skew due to detectability happens somewhere below the ~300m region. That's what makes me think that most of the ~1km sized stuff has been already discovered.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not much of a literacy either. :-p Otherwise people wouldn't be taking writing courses.

That's what I understand to be the aim of the HtDP project - to put a decent number of people into some reasonable place between the alphabet and Shakespeare.

I'm not quite convinced that your analogy is completely accurate. Do we need better programs? Of course we do. But we most definitely need good ways of connecting those good programs together, otherwise you'd have islands of good functionality connected by people cutting and pasting stuff for no good reason. Granted, that's largely what we do in the physical world: the warehouse "program" and the truck "program" aren't automatically connected either, people have to either manhandle stuff or at least operate forklifts, significantly decreasing the efficiency of the compound system relative to the ideal value. However, computers have this tremendous benefit of allowing people to automate these connections much faster than we'd be able to do in the physical world (you can write a pipeline in shell much faster than you can design and build a robo-forklift). This very technical possibility is perhaps why our expectations are a priori higher when it comes to computers. Unfortunately, this process of effecting computational processes by means of connecting primitive operations by means of composition operators and abstraction operators is called "programming". That applies even to those cases in which the "primitive operations" are whole independently-useful programs. And a lot of these scenarios can't be predicted in advance.

Ugh...if only we had something like this...we could call it "computer science" or something like that. We could even write textbooks about it! But that's just a pipe dream, right?

Will change name to Downsized Composites now.

It's once-in-a-lifetime thing for those who'll be dead by August 7, 2027.