Novash's comments

Can't seem to see this at work. Saving to see later at home.

Ditto. Code my own projects with little to no interruptions.

Obligatory joke. It was The Terminator.

Do not forget to post here when the book is released. I will be sure to buy it by then.

Isn't it a bit early for the 10.04 release? Like ... 6 months earlier? Where is 9.10?

I talk like that because one of my first assignment in College when learning C was exactly a program to calculate change. And the inherent floating point erro causes the said 0.01 difference. I was fresh into C, third, maybe fourth class. You can be sure that no one had the least idea why that happened. Obviously, we all took the easy way out, used integers multiplied by 100 to work around it, but you couldn't expect me to figure out by myself WHY that was happening. This error, and the explanation of why it happened was the introduction to floating point class that we had after we saw it happen. It is just one of those things that you have to see working to understand (like recursion and pointers).

I am always impressed to see how experienced people take a lot of knowledge for granted from others. It is not like you have never 'left shit behind' in your career. I would even daresay that if you pick the code you made six months ago, you will see that it could be improved in a lot of ways. Not because you wanted but because you didn't know better, mostly. This is pratically an axiom in the life of a coder.

Please don't use "experience" as an excuse to diss the hardships of others. We were all there one day.

He refers to the known floating point rounding error. You should not expect a 'new coder', as he put it, to trully understand floating point rounding errors because to understand it, you need to already be a coder with some experience.

Wonder if they will do anything similar with the War game. The last players certainly also suffer an unfair advantage there.

I am gonna dive in. You can be sure of that. But I disagree with you when you say that there isn't all that much noise.

The are currently hundreds of distros. All of them serve a purpose. There are ones meant for servers, meant for gaming, meant for low-level machines, meant for coding, ones that work only with strict F.O.S.S software, ones that work with software that is commercial, ones that are paid, that offer support, that don't offer support, but there is a community willing to help, others that let you on your own. There are even ones that mimic Windows XP. And NONE that are user-friendly.

Kurumin is a brazilian distro that gets CLOSE to it, but it is quite lacking. Ubuntu is the nearest possible choice, but it is still not there.

Obviously, once you pick your distro, you have to pick your window manager. Ubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu? Or maybe there is only one window manager for your distro, but then that nice application you saw on your friend's house belongs to other and is not supported on yours. And how were you suposed to know?

Once you get past the initial trauma, you will eventually reach the point on when you can make your stuff work on any of them, but do you really expect someone that used Windows all his life and can barely install his printer whose drivers are already bult-in on Windows to really make this jump?

And don't even get me started on the different shells. Everyone likes to pretend that there is only Bash out there, but some distros still swear by the original Bourne. Or even CShell.

So, yes, there is a lot of noise.

It is not a matter of software, but a matter of usability. Think of a Windows user only perspective. When installing a distro, you are confronted with the choice between X, KDE, Gnome, Compix, or whatever else Windows Manager is out there now, just to SHOW the Desktop. You haven't even started to use the OS and you must already make decisions about what to Window Manager to use. Most people don't even know what a Window Manager is. Now Google about them and all you will find are people that love their choice and diss all others and all of them seem wonderful in their eyes.

Some other games there are quite 'modernized' as well. SimCity being an example.

I don't really care if it is an acceptable Lisp when I decide if I will or will not learn something. :P

BUT, I will use that excuse on my teacher on the Calculus class.

Java is not really my field. However, I have half a mind to learn F#.

I must have wasted years playing those games... Wonder how many of them are abandonware now?

CL on Lispbox is what I have now. Which means I use (use being a overstatement) e-Macs with a Lisp extension.

That's exactly what I am trying to do. but I am hearing all those omens about Lisp but I sense I need to understand it better before I dive myself into it. There is absolutely NO market for it where I live so, if I would learn it, it would be for personal gain. Not that it is a problem, but without a market compass, I feel like I need a map.

Thanks for your answers.

It may not be for you, but it was for me in the beggining.

I already went through 3 distros - Kurumin, Suse and Ubuntu, and the only reason I still have a Windows partition is to play some games that I couldn't (or didn't bother to) make work under Linux. I can tell you, the bar is very high to start. Ubuntu made it lower (and lower at each version) but it is still too high for mainstream.

And it need not be. The whole problem is always understanding the differences. If I pick that distro or that distro, what changes? What do I lose? What do I earn? Unable to find answers, one doesn't choose lest one chooses poorly.

Lisp implementations are the same.

Thank you for your answers. Allow me to add just two more. If one says Arc is not CL, but a whole new kind of Lisp that tries to solve some of those problems, what exactly are the differences? What does Arc advance as a Lisp standard?

And even though Scheme was designed to be clean and elegant, CL has to be backward compatible and thus cannot be 'cleaned', right?.

Is there any 'cleaner' CL standard, or at least a 'best practices' guide to code in a cleaner way, avoiding the worse pits that had to be kept in the standard due to backward compatibility?

I can give you a simple C++ example of what I mean. In C, you had those *parameters that had to be matched by &args when the function was called. C++ brought some self-referencing &parameters that were passed normally and worked the same way than the former but were (saidly) less error-prone.

Is there any similar effort being made in Lisp?

I never tried Scheme so you can assume I am talking about CL if that helps, but since I don't know the difference between them, the question is directed at both.

In fact, if they are both 'Lisp', why do they exist at all? Why there ARE differences? If CL is a 'very good' ANSI standard as you say, why people use Scheme? Arc is also CL, but why does it exist at all? What does it has that justifies it being created, increasing even more the noise? If I wanted an implementation of strict CL, which one would be it?

I am not sure about the heavy metal / classical music approach. There are many classical music that are very challenging by themselves, even more than some heavy metal songs (which usually are 'play the same note at light speed'). I've heard of an author whose name escapes me now that composed songs that weren't suposed to be played due to the sheer difficult of them.