While this is a true 80th level hipsterism and snowflackery, it is also a beautiful case to realize that there was reasons behind choosing Common Lisp as the primary language for AI.
The Common Lisp code is almost as easy to read as the pseudocode of the book and it is absolutely unnecessary to go through all that type clutter and fancy compositions to satisfy the type-checker. There is zero advantage in doing all this static typing acrobatics.
The AIMA supplementary Common Lisp code is definitely worth looking and it is the case study for demonstrating the advantages of dynamic typing.
BTW, AIMA python code is also very nice, short and clear but order of magnitude slower compared to the compiled native code state-of-the-art implementations of Common Lisp produce.
For exploring the (Theravada, but really 'fundamental/historical') Buddhist perspective, the best resource I have personally found online is Access to Insight at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/
Feynman gave a whole lecture on this subject - the second or third lecture of the Messenger Lectures (much better timepass than night time TV show, second only to the Wizards Lectures and the five three seasons of The X-Files).
It seems that this is an ideal case for the Less Is More principle.
If anyone else is wondering what "The Wizards' Lectures" are, they are a set of MIT video lectures from 1986 by Abelson and Sussman on "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
Thanks! I was too enthusiastic to emphasize that the Abelson and Sussman lectures are out of the context of Physics. Nevertheless these are no less classic than Feynman's.
you can screw up your body in numerous ways if you overdo it, ie grow enlarged heart, screw up joints or spine and end up semi-disabled relatively young. just look at pro lifters, most of them after career end up obese with various health issues, some barely able to walk or lift anything more than sheet of paper.
it's a think line to walk, unique to each of us, where you try to grow as much as you can without crossing it
Sure. Time is a mere environmentaly conditioned mental conception. No such phenomena exist. Only environmental and social conditioning. It could only be derived by an intelligent observer. No observer - no time. For a photon there is no time.
BTW, conversation laws are hinting to an illusory nature of time. Change of compound structures do exist and it is in everything we are able to observe. But the whole is unchanged, no matter what fancy theories or simulations would say.
4chan is an echo chamber, especially /pol/. The other echo chamber is 8chan's /leftypol/. What's good about them is that if you're a rightwinger you can go to /leftypol/and if you're a leftie you can go to /pol/.
And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
For programming look at PAIP or the lisp code supplement to AIMA - this is programming. Take a look at Plan9 - this is programming. People who have created Erlang were engaged in programming. Code that runs Google's AI is programming. This is an art, same as writing poetry, composition of music, writing symphonies or complex novels.
But there are very few slots available, because demand for programming is very low - it is still difficult and very expensive. Conveyor belt coding, on the other hand, is indeed fits the Kay's pyramid metaphor. And the result of such process is crap - everyone have seen "enterprise code" made by such sweat shops..
The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal. Something like this:
[] ++ ys = ys
(x:xs) ++ ys = x : xs ++ ys
While in the in the second case is just a process of production. Not in the sense of Japanese perfection of every move and detail, but in the sense a hipster produces yet another narcissistic blog post.
> And that pyramid, well, it definitely is the way how a corporate and enterprise Java software has been and still being made. Java itself is an ecosystem for creating coding factories - to parallelize the process of coding (one cannot honestly call this programming) among teams of easily replaceable, uniform (in terms of abilities) cheap workers. Every manager will tell about this ideal.
So is the web today, its bloat eclipsing even Enterprise Java. The idea you described is the idea all businesses pursue, because it's the one of reducing costs and increasing profits.
> The crucial difference between an art and merely piling up more crap is that art means an attempts to approach an ideal, an optimum, perfection - it is, ideally, a reduction process with eventually converges to the closest possible approximation to an ideal.
Unfortunately you can rarely get paid for this.
In a way, I'm happy markets are not efficient. A lot of good, important, useful and/or beautiful stuff would never be done if the market was perfectly efficient.
Pyramids are nothing. Judging how things are going, I'm sure in a far distant future on the most advanced spaceships in the galaxy there will still be a Windows XP workstation running some critical machinery.
And they'll have a couple cryogenically frozen 20th century sysadmins in case the thing breaks.
Not really. Most pyramids are throwaway. The web is 99% throwaway code. Businesses themselves are throwaway too, so a lot of software made by them and for them goes to bin after few years.
What remains? Projects that are so useful that dominate their niche. Windows, Linux. Office. Photoshop. CAD tools. I suspect VLC will remain, 7zip may too. Some of those tools are pyramids, some others aggregation of small artpieces. I don't think survival depends on whether or not the software is a pyramid or a thatch hut.
Personally, I'm evidence for it, since I spend my days building pyramids, and program only on the side.
But the entire thing does not add-up. The artful activity is so much more productive that I can not stop believing that in any market you are able to create a slot doing it, you will outcompete all the pyramid builders. (Yet this pyramid pays me too well to just abandon it.)
I have switched to be a guide for Tibet tours (Lhasa, Kailash-Manasarovar) and high altitude trekking and motorcycle tours in Nepal, Sikkim and Ladakh. Customers enjoyed my guided tours in Jokhang and Potala.
Better demand and much more tolerable life than in a coding sweatshop. For everything else there is literally no demand for anything except Joomla websites and Android apps outside the valley, which is already saturated.
And, of course, I have zero interest in things like React or Node.
The sad truth is that indie and small shop IT is already dead. Unless you are a young CS major in US there is no demand for programming jobs. Otherwise there will be a market, not just a few brokers like Toptal.
Perhaps, this is the case when an observer affects the observation. It appears to the instrument, created according to a model, that electrons are "like grands of sand" when they should be "fields".
But how could these "fields" in principle be observed with an instrument made out of atoms?
The Common Lisp code is almost as easy to read as the pseudocode of the book and it is absolutely unnecessary to go through all that type clutter and fancy compositions to satisfy the type-checker. There is zero advantage in doing all this static typing acrobatics.
The AIMA supplementary Common Lisp code is definitely worth looking and it is the case study for demonstrating the advantages of dynamic typing.
BTW, AIMA python code is also very nice, short and clear but order of magnitude slower compared to the compiled native code state-of-the-art implementations of Common Lisp produce.
BBTW, Swift3 port would be really cool.