gyim · HackerTrans

I'm always sad when I read something like this. If believing in God and protecting the planet or accepting basic science are contrasting ideas, then your wife's grandparents are believing in a caricature, not God.

But I think you can do better than just saying "these are fairy tales". I recently read a book from a former atheist (Jennifer Fulwiler) who came from a very loving and intellectually honest family. Her father said this when she was young: "Make sure you don't start believing things just because someone says it's true, even if it's coming from me. Question everything." I wish more people would be like that, atheist and religious alike.

gyim

10 anni fadiscuss

Except that if your conscience (and everything in you) is under the _laws_ of physics, it implies that you are a deterministic or randomized machine. But then it is not easy to explain free will, for example. You could say that if it exists, it is a physical phenomenon, but what laws does it conform to? So most naturalists say that free will is just an illusion, but I personally would not call this a "patently obvious" choice. (I think it is a "Very Large Mistake")

gyim

10 anni fadiscuss

I haven't used the LOOP macro in CL, but the for macro in Clojure is also very powerful and (imho) very readable.

My take on the 'versify' example in 4 lines:

    (for [book book-order
          chapter (range 1 1000) :when (get-in bible [book (str chapter)])
          verse (range 1 1000) :when (get-in bible [book (str chapter) (str verse)])]
      [book chapter verse (get-in bible [book (str chapter) (str verse)])])

Notice that a single "for" can iterate in a multi-level structure. You can also use :let if you don't want to call (get-in) multiple times (which makes the code shorter, but more redundant and less efficient)

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