BellsOnSunday's comments

I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.

You need this ominous sounding permission to intervene and pause an app when a call comes in.

A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumably modern day fantasy writers), but he made those artistic choices. It sounds like you consider writing fiction to be a technological domain, where advances are made that make old forms obsolete. Maybe fantasy writing is -- I don't read it, although I have read LOTR -- but that makes fantasy sound like an even more limited genre than I thought it was. I'm an avid reader BTW, but of literary fiction, for want of a better term.

I absolutely agree that no one can write sincerely in the style of a bygone age. But having been written in the past doesn't in itself make, say, Anthony Powell's books (to pick someone writing in a different style at a similar time) dated. It's not like we learned more about how to write novels since then, or novelists of today would be easily able to do better than Powell, which I don't think they are.

Your points about racism etc do make sense though, things like that can be jarring, and it's always a bit disappointing to me to remember that our favourite writers were subject to the reality tunnels of their time.

What's dated about it?

It's a humorous lament on the fragmented state of devops, not to be taken too seriously.

Ezra Pound's ~ABC of Reading~ changed the way I read poetry and literary fiction. When, much later, I started to be interested in technical things I don't think I found it too hard to adapt, but I still focus on style, allusion, irony and so on in the things I read. That's generally a recipe for disappointment of course but when you come across technical writers with a voice of their own it's a lovely surprise. Wilfrid Hodges, for instance, is a great writer who becomes a friend as you work through his books.

That doesn't seem like something a compiler should care about, I think it would be better to add it to something like hlint.

I think most people would need to write some code to really grok it, I would anyway. It's a simple enough idea in context, but there's no royal road to understanding.

The explanations I know of (all from the Haskell community) are either

1) formal, referring to ideas from category theory,

2) metaphorical, conveying the ideas by intuitions you may already have about burritos or whatever, or

3) pragmatic, focused on how and why you use them in code.

I think this last category, pioneered by byorgey's wonderful TypeClassopedia [1], is by far the most useful in teaching people about monads but it depends on observing them yourself. (Ditching the metaphors actually seemed quite radical to me at the time -- I presumed they were necessary because everyone else did.) It builds up from understanding what a Functor is, then the next abstraction up, and so on until Monads seem like an obvious idea. The same approach is used in Learn You a Haskell for Great Good [2] but you need to doing the exercises to follow the book. sigfpe's classic explanation [3] is also by example and goes into a bit more depth. It still contains exercises for the reader though :)

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Typeclassopedia

[2] http://learnyouahaskell.com/functors-applicative-functors-an...

[3] http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...

It's a name which is confusing and difficult to search - almost as bad as calling the (Haskell) build tool 'stack', but with added negative connotations.

> The UK is a net payer to the EU

This is true in all areas except research funding. That's because researchers can take part in EU-funded projects (e.g. Horizon 2020) where the funding was awarded to a multi-national project team and so doesn't form part of the UK entitlement.

It wasn't a general election and I didn't vote for either of the sides. If "Leave" (as if that were one organisation) said "it" was going to do something, how could that be guaranteed, unless they were able to form a government? If you believed them then it must be disappointing but welcome to UK politics.

I gave my answer to the question on the ballot slip, something I had a settled view on before the campaign began and I don't think I'm that unusual. I think that claims about the £350m etc made as much difference as claims that brexit would bring on the apocalypse by lunchtime.

> The native working class are subterfuged for the non native working class

Subterfuged isn't the right word there but I'm not sure what is -- "passed over"?

There has been so much snobbery about Leave voters. I find it almost as disturbing as the (media magnified) hate speech from the other side.

Yes, and there is an appendix on gdb in the Bartlett book which will get OP started.

Sounds like a great idea if you want to visit a war-torn area to make a protest about sexism and Sharia, not to mention risk getting mixed up in an international incident or worse. Not so much if you want to run a hackathon which actually improves the lives of those that took part.

> sild is herring in Norwegian

And in English!

Wariness and a generally circumspect attitude to what is revealed predominate in the relationships between workers and bosses in workplaces like that. At least, that's in my limited personal experience of working in factories, big post offices, that sort of place...it's more to do with capitalism than class I think.

When it comes to being examined there are also the prerequisites to advancing the state of the art, which include demonstrating you've learned how to do research and have deep critical knowledge of the field you're working in (so you know what needs to be done to move it forward).

    > Serve the time and irrespective of the results they give you a degree

I don't know what you are basing that on and maybe you've had a bad experience with this but it isn't true in my experience (which is of having a PhD from a UK university and now being an academic supervising doctoral students). Yes, there is a difference in the expectations of PhD students at a top UK university and somewhere like Reading or, for that matter, the university I work at but we still have standards I consider to be high and by no means a joke. PhDs are examined externally and the external examiner must be someone who has no ties with the supervisor, so it isn't possible for the university to give you a degree "irrespective of the results". My students publish at international events, in competition with US graduate students and whoever else, so a lot of people must be in on the "joke".

Given that, this does seem like a very weak project and I agree that a part-time PhD is, or should be, pretty much impossible really.

[EDIT] Also, bear in mind he hasn't been examined yet! It could well be knocked back at that stage, the possible outcomes usually being Accept, Minor Corrections (no need for another viva), Major Corrections and resubmit, Reject.

Most British people have never heard of those two but Attenborough is about as recognisable as the Queen and with far more positive associations. He has been on the telly since the 1950s and his broadcasting is part of the shared culture, like the footage of him hanging out with gorillas...Less of a thing nowadays of course, but if you are British and old enough to remember when there were only a couple of TV channels, Attenborough is the Don.

Why not just use AUCTeX?