Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 1) 330
i also love clojure. rich hickey is an amazing designer.
Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 1) 330
i've used that name for a long time- Not sure who was first.
i think it's from the "jargon file".
Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 1) 330
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.
Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 1) 330
Actually, it looks like the mobi & epub just became available!
Comment Re:Thanks, was able to buy and read right now (Score 4, Informative) 330
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.
Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 3, Informative) 330
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.
Comment Re:Hi- I'm the Author (Score 4, Funny) 330
I'd be glad to give you some pointers
Comment Hi- I'm the Author (Score 5, Informative) 330
Pay no attention to my user name- I promise to respectfully answer any questions you may have, about Lisp or the book!
Submission + - Learn Lisp with games, comics, and a music video. (landoflisp.com) 1
smug_lisp_weenie writes: "Hi, I'm a longtime slashdot user and just finished my book "Land of Lisp", a graphical odyssey into Lisp programming. The recent interest in multicore chips is bringing functional programming and Lisp languages, such as Clojure and Common Lisp, back into vogue. But who wants to read all the dry, academic texts on these subjects? I hope my book and website (http://landoflisp.com) makes it easier for people to learn this stuff."
Comment IT and Medicine are a Bad Fit (Score 5, Informative) 294
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.
OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar 379
One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"
Comment Re:First thing I thought about... (Score 1) 3709
Obama wasn't part of MLK's dream...
Submission + - New Lisp and Functional Programming Comic Novella (lisperati.com)
smug_lisp_weenie writes: "In honor of April 1st, I've released a new Comic Book with many twists and turns I hope you will enjoy."
Submission + - A Comic Book Haskell Tutorial (lisperati.com)
smug_lisp_weenie writes: "Here's a little Haskell Tutorial Comic I whipped up in honor of ICFP 2007- It teaches Haskell with some quick fun graphics and covers a lot of ground, but I think it's still an easy read... Enjoy!"
Submission + - Do Administrations Dream of Electric Sheep? (lisperati.com)
smug_lisp_weenie writes: "Here's a little George Bush comic book I whipped up for you guys... I think he is really getting a bad rap these days... just imagine all the good he could do with a time machine!"
