ilimilku's comments

I remember having this book. I was probably 14 or 15 years old, and I was just getting into aviation after being given my first flying lesson. I had a copy of MS Flight Simulator, and I had taught myself some C++, but of course the content of the book was a bit beyond my capacity at the time. It's nice to relive the excitement of getting this book with the idea of being able to make my own flight sim. Of course, the sim they make in the book, IIRC, was nigh unplayable!

Great, but it's buggy. I guessed the correct word (nancy), but it rejected it. Perhaps there is something wrong with the capitalization.

I studied with Professor Golb for many years at the University of Chicago. He was my doctoral advisor and taught most of the classes I took in my program. He was a genuinely good man, kind, a true gentleman, and the most astute reader of texts ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature from the Mishnah through Ibn Ezra, the Cairo Genizah, and Judeo-Arabic. He wrote comprehensively on the medieval Jewish community of Rouen, such that he was given the key to the city by the mayor. He was not just a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, even if that his how he is usually known. He was demanding of his students yet gracious and magnanimous. I took a Hebrew Grammarians class one term thinking that we would be reading medieval Hebrew. The first few texts we read were to our surprise in Judeo-Arabic, even though he never determined whether or not we knew any Arabic. He must have just assumed that we would assimilate it through the hard work of dealing with the text, and we did. We read the Copper Scroll together, the Masada fragments of Ben Sira, so many wonderful texts. I regularly had "Indiana Jones" moments, when sitting under the painted, vaulted ceilings of the Research Archives of the Oriental Institute. It was just that awesome. Even though now I am a software engineer and no longer in academia, everything I am as an analyst and a thinker, I owe to Norman Golb. May his memory be for a blessing.

Sesame Street! Yes! My friends and I called it "Fisher Price".

Exactly. This guy nails it. The serverless paradigm is a managed service, so you are paying extra for that management. Serverless also is built for automated connectivity within the AWS ecosystem, i.e. as a nerve center for all of AWS's nifty gizmos. This is why Amazon places such an emphasis on training certified solutions architects who know what works best for each situation.

The Christian bias on scroll scholarship was widely corrected in the 90s with the Scrolls' public release. Since then Jewish scholarship of the Scrolls has contributed an enormous amount, cf. Lawrence Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, et al.

It's a good point, and the distinction is not one that most historians would deal with being more scientific in nature. However, in the long and heated debate about the scrolls' origins, scientific analysis of the scroll and jars has been offered.

Yes, there was one article published a number of years ago (the author's name escapes me), who did a good job of parsing out the various communities that could have been responsible for certain caves, priests, Zealots, etc. I'm not sure it got much traction, but I found the exercise intriguing.

It has to do with the scholarly consensus of the local, i.e. Khirbet Qumran, origin of the scrolls, namely that they were produced at that settlement. Contrary views say that they scrolls were principally produced in or around Jerusalem and brought to Qumran during the Roman invasion of CE 70.

The "big picture" background here is that the scholarly consensus, established prematurely before all but the scrolls in the 1st cave were found, was that they belonged to an Essene "monastic" settlement at the ruins of Khirbet Qumran nearby. This has been challenged in a number of ways, yet the consensus of the local, Essene origin remains in tact. A Jerusalem origin hypothesis was developed principally by Norman Golb and advanced by a few others, yet the history of Scrolls scholarship has proven to be nasty to say the least. This new evidence, while saying little in the grand scheme, does possibly hint at a non-Dead Sea, i.e. Jerusalem origin of the scrolls.

Yes, the scrolls have been published in their entirety in the series Discoveries in the Judaean Desert numbering some 40 volumes. These are the official "first editions". There are numerous other collections of a non-critical nature as well as translations. A simple search should yield the relevant results.

The other thing this article seems to miss is the level of abstraction at which FP applications need to live. At the OS level, where state is being managed, using FP would be insane. I don't think anyone really would want to do that. The UNIX philosophy of piping along a stream, while it may have something in common with FP, it still exists at a higher level of abstraction than the kernel, which is still a giant, complex Turing machine.

This rather scattered and jargon-laden article seems to be pointing out the differences between the lambda calculus (stateless) and the Turing machine (stateful), which, while computationally equivalent, are not formally equivalent (pardon me if I get the verbiage wrong as I am not a mathematician). While the hardware architecture is essentially a Turing machine and thus stateful, the lambda calculus cannot be mapped onto it without somehow extracting state. In my (rather simple) mind, this shouldn't be a problem if functional programs are not used to do things that they were never intended to do in the first place. If you are trying to use Haskell to do stateful jobs like UI or DB management, you are probably using the wrong tool. Use Java or some other OOP language. Use your FP languages for middleware services that take an input and give an output that can be consumed by whatever is consuming the service. And guess what, the enterprise is already build that way.

This is exciting to see. I am a Semitic philologist (Ph.D.) now breaking into the IT industry, and this sort of work is on my radar, though mostly with Hebrew and Aramaic. Arabic, being a Semitic language, has a non-linear morphology, which means that extracting the root has to be done by extracting non-inflectional consonants from all possible positions in a word. If you train a NN with full conjugation paradigms, over a data set, it should be able to begin to recognize what the various inflectional morphemes are. In other words, instead of looking for the root, look for everything that is not the root, and the root is what is left over. For example, the NN should be able to recognize that mu-, ya-, ta-, 'āC-, -ā-. -Ct-, -unna, etc. are all inflectional morphemes. It should also begin to recognize the various matres lectionis or letters indicating long vowels just as alif, waw, and ha. (I'm including vowels in my analysis, because I think like a philologist, not a typical reader of Arabic. Using unvowelled text might be more difficult for the NN.) Anyway, these are just some off-the-cuff thoughts. I look forward to digging deeper into your code and methodology sometime soon.