I'm forced to reconsider this remark. Venture capitalists -- like all investors -- play an important role in bridging the gap between consumer demand and actual innovation. They are less risk averse than most investors, though -- and more able to drop a bunch of money all in one go -- so they tend to be more timely than other investors.
Deploy: Ruby things. GEMs work better than EGGs, in part because there are fewer of them. Ruby makes OO easier.
Maintain: Python things. There are so many EGGs! If you need a new package for something or other -- the JSON parser isn't fast enough or something -- someone has made an alternative already. Performance matters for maintenance -- scalable deployment is still not easy, or cheap -- and it helps that Python has a fast core and syntactic shortcuts to things like generators (memory efficient) and list comprehensions (CPU efficient).
One could also develop a separate kernel API for version control. Filesystems without version control would just have null operations in this API, while filesystems with version control would root around in their database for the change information.
It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.
The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it.
Well, if you don't place much weight on foreign language, that's okay -- my point still stands. U.S. performance in math and science is comparatively disappointing.
I can't really agree with your position on language learning, but I'm a little biased. I've studied Ancient Greek, German, Chinese and Middle English.
...is to allow the economy to function more efficiently, through pervasive literacy, use of numbers, &c. It's in the interest of the wealthy if they can off load some of the organizational details to a large class of literate servants, but that's not the same as giving everyone a shot at wealth and power.
If it were just Asian countries, I might agree; but the U.S. lags those wild and free Northern European countries in matters like math skills and foreign language training.
Maybe it would be better if people always used cat, always used wc, &c. Sure, performance is better the other way -- but multiplying the functionality of each command comes at a price, namely that only grognards can do things "the right way". If we instead emphasized the way of distinctly separate commands for distinctly separate things...
If I understand it correctly, the idea with Reddit is that the
community can decide what news it wants to see, by posting links
and then filtering them. If the community wants hate speach (or
more of those Ron Paul links) and Reddit serves up hate speach,
then isn't the algorithm working?
I suppose you could actively ban users who skew the community in
that direction -- though you'd have an endless calvacade of sock
puppets to deal with.
I hate to press you on this point -- the wreckage of many a
flame war has barely had time to grow moss -- but can you point
to a specific feature? I assume you mean OS level features --
system calls and such.
I would like to hear more about why you use it. I used to use FreeBSD for everything, but it's my understanding that the once significant differences in performance and stability between Linux and BSD no longer amount to anything. I switched to Gentoo (can not give up source builds!) two years ago.
The objection that, in the midst of a long document, telling what level of indentation one is at would be difficult is easily addressed by having the editor show space marks or using 'fold lines' in print -- neither of which is difficult.
In practice, though, I never have any problem with indentation based syntax, because change in indentation is easy enough to detect, and that's good enough for anything I've ever had to read.
In Zen, it is said that "aggregates" (things) have no "self nature", that all things arise in "codependent origination" -- you can't get a driver in a universe without cars, nor a car without drivers. One seeks not the "car-ness" in cars, but their context. The "seeing as" notion amounts to the same rejection of Platonic ideals.
It is a clash between classical logic and intuition, which is the point -- it indicates a difficulty with applying classical logic, and encourages us to take up other avenues.
The Raven paradox is a good example of why we need Bayesian inference. The paradox is not a real paradox -- it doesn't imply true and false at the same time -- but it makes a strong case for a system that integrates degree of confidence through and through, as opposed to merely assigning true and false.