> I can imagine that that would stimulate a huge influx of people who do that simply as an excuse to take a 4-year vacation (of sorts).
The current trend is to run universities and colleges "like a business." In this model, students (and their parents) are the paying customers. The mantra of good customer service is "the customer is always right." This is ultimately the source of much of the grade inflation[1]. If you tell your customers that they are "wrong" by not giving them the grades they prefer or by making them work harder than they would like for those grades, they will react in ways that ultimately hit your bottom line. Undergraduate education should not be like a vacation. Any student who treats it that way should be flunked out after their first term.
Having taxpayer funded "free" (or dirt cheap) higher ed wouldn't fix these problems over night, but it would help remove some of the weird incentives that are currently undermining the core mission of actually educating people.
I'd guess this is why they're sending message notifications only sporadically? I've been thinking of setting up a little service for myself to monitor the FB web interface messages and then forward their content by email so I never have to look at the damn thing.
I refuse to install Messenger, so I'm actually annoyed by FB's lack of notifications (by email) when I receive a FB message. It used to be the case that FB would email you the message text. They switched that to "you have a message, click here to see it," but now it seems to be completely random whether I'm ever notified. The immediate effect on my behavior is that I find myself logging in to FB frequently just in case I have a message, and then falling into the endless scroll of crap in my feed.
I don't think it's likely. The libraries are the real issue. It's not that they couldn't emerge, it's just that they're not likely to emerge out of the current situation.
I currently use Python much more than any other language and regularly advocate for its use as a learning language both for formal education and for self-teaching. That said, I don't think most of the below supports your assertion that "Clojure [could definitely never] steal the machine learning niche back from Python"
> Python is easier to learn.
I have not seen a learnability comparison between Python and Clojure as first languages. Python is definitely easier to learn as a second language if you're already a trained programmer coming from the C family.
> Python is more useful for data munging/cleaning (lower startup time, loads of input libraries).
Startup time is indisputable, but also barely matters for interactive programming. In Lisps and in Python, I usually just have a repl going for days at a time.
The availability of libraries is not a "never" thing -- it's a "we'll see" thing.
> Python has a repl and eval so code-as-data/data-as-code is not an advantage for Clojure as it is over C-alikes.
You're conflating two different things that people like about Lisps here. Homoiconicity is a separate benefit from having a repl. And though I use it daily, I think Python's repl kind of blows.
> Python FFI is almost free to call into C so end-to-end performance is better than Clojure. Python has the better libraries for ANN (TensorFlow, Theano) and ML (sklearn).
Clojure is free to call into Java. And I'm sure there's a route to C if that small performance boost really makes a difference for what you're doing. Again, availability of libraries is an obstacle, but not a "definitely never" obstacle.
Can you recommend a tutorial that uses idiomatic Emacs Lisp and covers both "why" and "how" of Emacs Lisp at a level appropriate for someone who's used CL and Emacs a lot but has never noticed that he needs ELisp?
The current trend is to run universities and colleges "like a business." In this model, students (and their parents) are the paying customers. The mantra of good customer service is "the customer is always right." This is ultimately the source of much of the grade inflation[1]. If you tell your customers that they are "wrong" by not giving them the grades they prefer or by making them work harder than they would like for those grades, they will react in ways that ultimately hit your bottom line. Undergraduate education should not be like a vacation. Any student who treats it that way should be flunked out after their first term.
Having taxpayer funded "free" (or dirt cheap) higher ed wouldn't fix these problems over night, but it would help remove some of the weird incentives that are currently undermining the core mission of actually educating people.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/29/survey-finds-...