On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their expensive 'requirements'. Support? Someone else's problem. Maintainability? How is that going to get me promoted? All of those things cost time and money, and therefore are risks to be avoided. Better to spend your time burying bad news and selling your failure as 'success' to those who really matter.
All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.
Although the lambda papers talk about Scheme, that's not what they're really about. They're really about... lambda. The takeaway is that many common features of languages can be thought of as disguised uses of the lambda operator. So lambda is actually the unifying abstraction behind many languages, even if they don't know it.
The original 'Lambda the Ultimate X' papers are very short, so no reason not to give them a try.
Zero-click info for error messages would be a great resource. There are already some sites that do this for specific kinds of error (e.g. ora-code.com for Oracle errors) but a general "put in this error and I´ll tell you what it means" site would be fantastic.
If I were to add up all the searches I do in a day, then searches for programming advice (e.g. how do I fix X, what's the syntax for Y) would outnumber all my other searches put together, so I definitely think there's a bit opportunity here.
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?
Several Lisp applications have config files that are just Lisp files run at start-up. Emacs is an example. You can (and people do) put absolutely any code in there. There's no need to restrict it to just setting variables.
So what's the difference between a config file and code? Config files aren't compiled (so no need to rebuild when you change them) and they are intended to be modified by the user, while other code isn't.
There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul.
Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!
Winston Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!
If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X?
If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented?
At the very most, object-orientation is a particular mechanism for achieving a particular kind of polymorphism (namely ad-hoc object-based polymorphism). At most. Given the vagueness of the term, it could not even be that.
These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:
1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights
1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator
1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels
Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.
I upvoted this because it's a wonderful example of mathematical crankiness. I've always wondered why cranks are attracted to the same things: Cantor's diagonalization proof, squaring the circle, 1=0.999.. Perhaps it's because the problems are easy to understand, but the proofs aren't.
This thought struck me when I observed the reverse process in some poor countries during the oil boom. Where people are poor and energy is expensive, there's an incentive to 'deindustrialize' by replacing expensive machines with cheap labour. Industries weren't just standing still or going bust, but innovating by eliminating mechanization and taking on workers. Presumably an industrial revolution is the same process in reverse.
But why do you need to offer them something when you could just take it? The answer is that they will shove a gun in your face if you do. Property rights are just as much based on force as any other law.
The FT called it the Great Unwinding, on the basis that the unsustainable debt/trade/current account imbalances would start to reverse their direction.
It seems the only thing anyone can agree on is that we're experiencing something really 'Great'.
You can't call something an illusion just because its true nature is misunderstood. An illusion is something that looks deceptively like something else. A hologram of a table is an illusion, but just misunderstanding the nature of a table (e.g. misunderstanding the fundamental particles from which it's constructed) does not make it an illusion.
Saying that time is an illusion is like saying that we appear to be living in a universe with time, but actually we don't. We are in fact experiencing something that looks like time, but isn't really time.
But obviously we do live in a universe with time, and the fact that time may turn out to be something strange or unexpected does not make it an illusion. It just means we misunderstood its true nature.
All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.