The racket/place library provides support for performance improvement through parallelism with the place form. The place form creates a place, which is effectively a new Racket instance that can run in parallel to other places, including the initial place. The full power of the Racket language is available at each place, but places can communicate only through message passing—using the place-channel-put and place-channel-get functions on a limited set of values—which helps ensure the safety and independence of parallel computations.
Compare to current Guile, where the documentation says sharing a hash table without using a mutex will not corrupt memory, but probably won't give you the results you desire.
WRT 3, assoc lists are just the simplest thing to store things like environments, they're traditional for "writing a Lisp in one week". If you modulerize your code, you can trivially use hash tables or whatever later. Ditto using lists for structures.
4: As I understand it, there are many macro systems available for Scheme. It's one of the languages in which "hygienic" macros has been explored, etc. So if you don't like the femtolisp bundled version, there might be another out there more to your taste.
As far as I know they're still in effect, those publishers have seen their ebook sales go down substantially, which is blamed on the enforced price increases due to agency pricing.
And you'd otherwise see Amazon's return to its old scheme where normal ebooks never cost the consumer more than $9.99, whereas, to take a random example I just looked up, Jim Butcher's latest novel published half a year ago goes for $13.99, ~$1.50 more than the paperback and only ~$2.50 less than the hardback: http://www.amazon.com/Cinder-Spires-Aeronauts-Windlass/dp/04...
You left out the little bit about Apple and the publishers, who, as Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations in 1776: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
It'll be another word, perhaps in a more ambigious context, next time. Which brings up another point: I just don't want to have to worry about what will become this politically incorrect in the future when I'm writing code and documentation.
tl;dr: Observed fact, GitHub disappeared a repo (this I personally know for a fact) and all its forks, the only reason we can surmise is that it described itself as "X for retards". I believe it's this one https://github.com/WebMBro/WebMConverter now described as "WebM for bakas." (Japanglish for idiots or fools).
I'd be more willing to extend some slack to GitHub if they hadn't precipitously turned off their service for these repos, that's worse than this example of their "tolerance", but who knows what it'll be next?
Who knows how this will play out in the long term; their trashing of their meritocracy rug suggests this is not a one off (ADDED: and erics32 reminded me of C+=). Why should I or anyone else concerned about long term stability invest in their particular value adds when they show such capriciousness?
The great point, in relation to this topic of their latest investment, is that companies that depend almost entirely on their "communities" can screw those up and destroy their value.
I'm not aware of Microsoft Word or any editor I've ever used or heard of forbidding me from using the word "retards" or any other. Heck, Gnu Emacs allows me to write proprietary software, a user freedom RMS is no doubt not entirely happy with.
I require that general freedom of expression in my tools and do no tolerate vendors who engage in these sorts of damaging stunts. I suspect I'm not alone, and I note GitHub has a further problem of not being all that sticky, e.g. I moved all my repos off it earlier today after we got confirmation of this.
I learned about this before it became front page news here, and personally confirmed the repo was made unavailable for a while. That and its return is entirely consistent with the supposed email.
I know that on the right, in the forums I follow, Mozilla has lost a lot of mind share and usage, pushing people to Chrome or Pale Moon (a Firefox respin that I was already using because stock Firefox became too slow on Debian wheezy). Firefox certainly isn't doing well in the browser market share reports I hear of.
And [1, 3], in reference to explicitly violent European "antifascists", in the context of a "sorely needed" but inchoate as of last October "tech antifa[scist]" movement, is "100% okay with that, personally."(https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/523497129772613632).
I assure you that people of the right like me feel "unsafe" about the presence of people like them in American society, and I wonder if they've thought about the consequences of that, of their programs in general, etc. I see no way for this to end well.
Back then being or becoming Christian didn't mean an end to your career; perhaps some of this current hardness is due to the much nastier consequences of going against the mainstream?
Thanks for that link to his criticism of institutional CS, it gets me firmly into territory where I can apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia principle. Upon which I find the thesis sorely lacking, if you accept the principle as discussed in the comments that it's OK for research to be "wasteful" as long as "1%" of it turns out to be useful, especially in the long term (e.g. I do not accept that all interesting computing is going to limited to the context of the current context of the cloud and supercomputers masquerading as smart phones ("mobile"; I started my computing career in 1977, when the 90 MHz Cray 1 was the pinnacle of number crunching, although I have to confess that I don't know the 64 bit floating point performance of typical smartphone ARM CPUs)).
More specifically, his criticism of Haskell seems to be misplaced by his criteria of developing useful software, if you accept that the seL4 microkernel is useful, which I gather it is, otherwise General Dynamics et. al. are wasting money. I can't tell, it's perhaps a bit early to get a list of hardware using it, but previous L4 versions have been used in billions of Qualcomm chips and apparently all iOS devices.
And the related academic Barrelfish OS researchers seem to me to be doing something useful, and the languages they are using are C, with various bits of that generated by Haskell (e.g. hardware descriptions -> C).
It's a pity that Urbit now has no chance of greater success, the SJWs of computing going so far as to say it "has neoreactionary politics hard-coded into the network layer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9675512), which is obviously worse than the "monarchy" of superuser vs. user.
As some "for instances", in the Soviet Union, Jews were labeled as such on their mandatory internal passports, not Russians or whatever, and their access to higher education was limited, and I'd hope I'd not need to point out how the Han Chinese who run the PRC treat their ethnic neighbors like the Tibetans and Uyghurs.
The racket/place library provides support for performance improvement through parallelism with the place form. The place form creates a place, which is effectively a new Racket instance that can run in parallel to other places, including the initial place. The full power of the Racket language is available at each place, but places can communicate only through message passing—using the place-channel-put and place-channel-get functions on a limited set of values—which helps ensure the safety and independence of parallel computations.
Compare to current Guile, where the documentation says sharing a hash table without using a mutex will not corrupt memory, but probably won't give you the results you desire.