Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 1) 330
i also love clojure. rich hickey is an amazing designer.
i also love clojure. rich hickey is an amazing designer.
i've used that name for a long time- Not sure who was first.
i think it's from the "jargon file".
It's a lot of work to write a book. I'm a big fan of Scheme, but this isn't in the cards at this very moment.
Actually, it looks like the mobi & epub just became available!
My understanding is you'll be able to download the mobi/epub versions for free when they become available if you buy the PDF now.
For some reason, mopi and epub files take a couple extra weeks to make. They should be appearing on nostarch.com and amazon in a couple of weeks.
I'd be glad to give you some pointers
Pay no attention to my user name- I promise to respectfully answer any questions you may have, about Lisp or the book!
One thing everyone seems to be missing here (including the author of the article) is that medical data is an odd duck that just doesn't fit easily into a digital record. (I'm an MD, a medical informatics guy and CTO at a medical software company)
If you're running a McDonalds you can easily computerize everything: You have a fixed menu your customers can choose from, and every purchase can easily be stuffed into a relational table. Medicine isn't like that.
Trying to enter a patient encounter into a contemporary medical record system is an extremely unsatisfying experience: Humans are just weird and idiosyncratic and every time you treat someone there will be parts of the patient visit you can't represent symbolically in a piece of software. This is still largely an unsolved problem- If you read the literature on Description Logics you'll see that even PhD logicians have a hard time symbolically storing this kind of abstract data into a piece of software, let alone a doc with little computer training.
Because of this, most current record systems use a lot of "free text" for storing medical info, which is a pretty ugly hack and everyone realizes this.
I think this is a major reason for the problems people have with digital records: They don't work very well right now for fully capturing a patient encounter in a rigorous, symbolic fashion.
Obama wasn't part of MLK's dream...
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