jgg's comments

I don't know what's in the Python course, and they very well could be doing a decent job of teaching CS concepts. However, I'll assume it's a "here's how a for loop works"-type course.

The ultimate utility is ignoring a specific language (Scheme really has nothing to do with the book, and SICP is not a Lisp book per se) and teaching students how to think about computing. It enables problem solving and understanding of the more abstract concepts involved with programming. Scheme just happens to work because there's nothing to the language and there are few boundaries, in terms of functionality.

Honestly, your school can decide if they want to churn out Students Who Program in Python (tm) or students who are taught to teach themselves and can reason about programs on their own, and who feel comfortable understanding varied language concepts. There may be other approaches to accomplish that, but SICP does it well. It's really the only thing that distinguishes a computer science curriculum from a vocational degree, which is an idea that has fallen out of favor or even been lost in the rush to graduate more CS students and embrace "industry standards." Does your school want to educate students or simply teach them programming trivia and practicum that they can pick up on their own? It's an important distinction. Would you want a Linguistics degree that started off by teaching some travel phrases from a Spanish guide purchased at a gas station?

Plus, given the depth of the book, the course could be scaled to a relative difficulty, which would probably be necessary. Recommended pre-reading could consist of the Schemer series (Little & Seasoned) with the expectation that the students might not make it all the way through them before the course starts.

Perhaps you could persuade the faculty to offer a basic Python course and an "honors" CS course that used SICP, or have the SICP course after the Python one, since I think in practice having some basic programming experience is probably a good idea before diving into SICP.

I went Googling for another perspective, and I found http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/sicp.html, which says a lot of the same things.

People who are new to programming look at SICP and like to say something to the effect of, "Wow, it's a shitty old Lisp book from a bygone error. I actually want to accomplish something, so I'm going to read this O'Reilly Java book now, because I can actually get a job that way." (heavy condescension implied), but perhaps this is a case of the amateur not really knowing what's best for them.

In the end, interested students can always pick up the book in their free time, and you will probably be fighting an uphill battle (at least if you're in the US).

SparkNotes Version: SICP encourages a thought process. A traditional class encourages you to learn how to do X in language Y. It is possible to do the former without SICP, but SICP does it very well.

They also created a pretentious video where they explained that the NSA hacked people's e-mails through a rigged random number generator, complete with an attempt at explaining elliptic curves and modular arithmetic, that ignores the fact that barely anyone used that PRNG and most e-mail isn't encrypted properly in the first place.

Either I'm a really grumpy person, or their videos are actually terrible. I think there are enough interesting things in math that can be explained without falsely embellishing uninteresting results and ideas.

Are you trolling? I seriously can't tell...

It would depend on what you're programming, IMO, but I don't think they're really analogous, and I majored in math and can program.

I had no idea it was actively used in Slovenian...I think even Modern Greek has "vestiges" of the dual, though.

I definitely do not buy the strong Sapir-Whorf at all.

I do not believe someone is explicitly constrained by the language, but I do believe that the explicit existence of certain concepts can facilitate a different kind of thinking more naturally than in other languages, which is the only real point I'm trying to back up.

Well, I was making the point that, at some point, Ancient Greek was more morphologically complex than any variation of English (which is true to my knowledge).

I agree that we can accomplish specific meanings without explicit grammatical structure, but the rabbit hole we were tumbling down was the simple idea that the prominence of a grammatical construct might facilitate a different kind of thinking than in a language that doesn't contain said construct.

Grammatical gender is a rarely-useful concept, I agree.

> No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

I thought you said certain parameters were set during language acquisition, which would mean that the language inherently modifies how you think.

> I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

I understand, thank you.

It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system, but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.

I may or may not have learned at a boring job with filing cabinets and other locks...I promise if you hire me, I won't do that, though.

Anyway, this is a crazy hard skill to master, simply because of the feel required to actually push each pin in place, and the fact that you're doing it blindly and often without so much as audible feedback from the lock.

You definitely need to practice to get good, and there are all types of funky locks outside of your home country

I'm a guy who likes abstract stuff, and that definition seems extraordinarily abstract to me, to the point of obfuscating the actual meaning of what we're talking about. Am I right that seems that the definition of grammar there is an almost-meta abstraction of structure?

I still can't help but believe that, in practice the 'less radical' points I mentioned, like tense, mood and case (which I think would be switches, right?) arise differently in different contexts, if at all, owing to differences in cognition in various groups, and thus reinforces that mode of cognition in someone who learns the language.

The difference in morphology between, say, Ancient Greek and Modern English is pretty drastic, so what gives? In fact, I don't think English has ever been as morphologically-complex as Ancient Greek, and yet some hypothesize that they even descended from the same Indo-European language...if both languages start out from the same point, but evolve with a completely-different grammatical structure that makes different concepts explicit or notable, why would that happen in light of a true universal grammar that is inherent to everyone?

It's one thing to say that everyone at a certain intellectual level have a capacity to understand and use certain grammatical constructs, but to claim them as inherent to all people seems sketchy...

>The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

If a writing system doesn't count (it's a fair point, and I understand what you're saying), then how does one counter the evidence in the article that one speaker of one language does a task better than speakers of a different language?

If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system?

I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others.

>I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.

I was using the computer languages as a facetious example to illustrate a point, the idea being that a context one is immersed in colors perceptions, and I was simply stating that applied to a human language, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case.

There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

What? What about the studies that show that reading Arabic literally uses different parts of your brain than when reading other languages, or even the evidence presented in the article?

Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different?

I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course).

src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457

I'm not a member of any "Crypto Cabal", and I use the term sardonically, directed at the people people who come out of the woodwork to pimp/gratify themselves and their businesses by posting bullshit about crypto, especially on HN (e.g., the "USE BCRYPT USE BCRYPT USE BCRYPT" guy who claimed that the problem with an RSA exponent of 1 was that "1 is a prime number" (?), or ironic articles of the "I JUST LEARNED ABOUT [crypto topic] SO DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ENCRYPTION" variety).

My opinion, as someone who is not important, is that most crypto software is bad, and most software that is fun to use has bad crypto. The Silent Circle stuff looks good, as does the Whisper Systems stuff, and I personally use Pidgin + OTR, which is crap from a UI standpoint.

I totally understand the design/UI motivations behind Cryptocat, but IMO Nadim needs to stick with a protocol design and crypto primitives that work, fix any flaws and then leave it alone until he's more comfortable (perhaps he's done that already).

I don't think he's unwilling to cooperate, and I don't mean to pick on the guy, because he's basically become a whipping boy. I think the reason he reacts so adversely to the criticism is the obvious use of him by bloggers and "crypto pundits" to bolster themselves. It's not constructive, and I don't wish to encourage that.

That said, security issues are still security issues, and my tl;dr as someone no one on this site cares about is for Nadim to just stick with a set of crypto primitives and protocol design that work, fix the problems that arise and stay there until he's more confident in what he's doing.

I voted you up due to sentiment, and I don't mean to sound like a grumpy member of the Cabal of Crypto Criticizers, but what's the point in Nadim developing the application if he won't respond well to honest peer review and wakes up every day and decides to fuck around with the basic structure of the application, and not only that, but makes fatal flaws when doing so?

I'm all for learning and experimentation, but not when some dude from Syria is literally Tweeting you and saying, "Hey, thanks!", which is the point of the article. I think end-point spying is probably bad enough at this point that we really don't need a broken protocol too. I don't really see the point in constantly changing out crypto primitives like he does, and it has introduced major security vulnerabilities in the past. He should find something, stick with it and then get it audited and reviewed, and then I think less people would bitch.

I support the goal of making crypto more usable.

FYI, be careful what you post and respond to. I'm not sure if it was this comment, my many "Fuck the NSA" comments or something else, but it appears that all of my Internet traffic is now being routed through an EC2 instance in Ashburn, Virginia (which is very close to DC): http://i.imgur.com/IEcdqol.png

I noticed it while getting a bunch of inappropriate 403 responses on basically any website, and my location kept showing up as "Ashburn, Virginia" automatically on weather sites.

I disagree entirely. The genius behind the the US Constitution was its acceptance of the idea that power, no matter how just, will eventually corrupt, which is why our freedoms were supposed to be rather absolute. I think there are almost no sane reasons to infringe on a basic human right in general: the burden of proof should be on the government to do it selectively, and even then it should be treated with great scepticism.

Further, we have almost no power as a representative "democracy": the public can't recall a representative at all, for example, and it is only done by an internal chamber discussion (it has happened very few times in the history of the US).

Thus, we're really not supposed to "vote away" basic, sane axioms in the first place. The point of the US was to have those rights held firmly in place, and for its citizenry to use their right to bear arms to protect themselves against a government that tried to take them away. It's indicative of the US's culture at this point that stating this position (which is easily backed up by many of the founding fathers' writing) brands you as a "libertarian wingnut" or "on the fringe." Am I advocating violent revolt now? No, because most would not actually know what to revolt against (and probably don't perceive the corporate/government power structure in place in the US).

Then again, any attempt to do the aforementioned has failed in this country. A great example are the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed conveniently around the time of the French Revolution.

Sorry for not replying (I had noprocrast on!)..I think he's not only exploiting empathy (for power and justification), but is also using the article to bolster himself and make himself fantastic, when the characteristics he assigns to himself actually have no basis in reality. This is textbook psychopath behaviour.

As a "reformed" psychopath, the article is all about him, his abilities and how he should be treated. Further, he claims that he sees "weakness", as if everyone he has or could have manipulated and screwed over was "weak" (instead of being someone who trusted him, which could theoretically be the same, but in practice most people would consider different), and he has just learned to control himself and not exercise his superior strength.

In reality, a psychopath is indirect, delusional and self-centred, and they will lie, subvert, cheat, steal and abuse to get their way, but rarely ever seek out true weakness in themselves (unless you count covering emotional vulnerabilities artificially) or make a stand for anything. For being a "strong" person obsessed with finding "weakness", you can pop the bubble of a psychopath simply by showing his network of followers and clingers exactly what he is...psychopaths are a strange mix of selfishness and deluding and changing themselves to fit in. They preach to others, put others down and castigate the flaws in others, but the second you put irrefutable evidence of the psychopath's incompetence, weakness or maliciousness in the open, in a way that everyone believes, he will have a meltdown and flip out. It's kind of like people who hang out on Internet forums, rise to the top of the ranks by spewing mindless platitudes and bullshit, who pretend to be rational while criticizing others mercilessly, and then when someone outs them as incompetent, malicious or even maybe just wrong, they throw a big fit and implode.

Finally, he talks about how his psychopathy gives him superior "strategic" abilities, but in reality, psychopathy actually limits long-term thinking and planning. They actually tend to be very impulsive, and one of the key tenets of psychopathy is a short-term, parasitic lifestyle.

He used the piece as a selfish exercise to bolster himself, paint his actual or potential victims as weak, and did it all with absolutely nothing based on reality, hence, I do not believe his is sincere.