ELLIOTTCABLE changed the topic of #elliottcable to: #ELLIOTTCABLE — do something cool, shove it into throats, everyone thinks it's crap, then it's all amazing.
<cuttle> I conjecture that the Lisp-school essayists — Raymond, Graham, and Yegge — have not “needed mathematics” because they spend their time worrying about how to make code more abstract.
<ELLIOTTCABLE> “One gets the impression reading Raymond, Graham, and Yegge (all self-styled Lisp hackers) that the ultimate goal of programming is to make a program that is more powerful than whatever program preceded it, usually by adding layers of abstraction. Call this the “Lisp school of programming.””
<ELLIOTTCABLE> “In contrast to the Fortran tradition [...], the culture of Lisp is almost willfully ignorant of mathematics. This ignorance is disguised by all the talk of formalism and the instinctive genuflection before the Lambda Calculus, which, not unlike the Summa Theologica, is a closed computational universe that sheds little light on the observed world.”
<alexgordon> interesting idea
<alexgordon> I disagree, but interesting
<alexgordon> mathematicians need to learn that not all of mathematics is as important as they think it is ;)
<alexgordon> most programmers are generalists. it's our job to piece together libraries written by specialists
<alexgordon> I don't know how to do video encoding. I bet if I spent 10 years learning I still wouldn't be able to do video encoding as well as ffmpeg does
<alexgordon> I'm sure there's a lot of maths in ffmpeg, but that is totally irrelevant to me if I'm trying to encode videos
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<alexgordon> if I'm a generalist, better ways of piecing things together is far more useful than any amount of mathematics ever could be
<ELLIOTTCABLE> fairly astute point.
<ELLIOTTCABLE> bbl chili's.
<cuttle> alexgordon: well yeah but everyone who does something *important* knows math
<cuttle> alexgordon: like, writing a video codec
<cuttle> alexgordon: or something on that level
<alexgordon> cuttle: sure, but do we need to use the same language for both?
<cuttle> alexgordon: like, all the punctuations in the punctuated equilibrium of the programming world come from someone who knows math bringing it in
<alexgordon> not saying ffmpeg would be better written in lisp or smaltalk
<alexgordon> but I don't think instagram would be better written in fortran
<cuttle> alexgordon: did you read the article? you're not really arguing with it
<alexgordon> I am!
<cuttle> just what you think it is based on the quote i posted
<cuttle> unless you have read it in which case i apologize
<alexgordon> I read all of it
<alexgordon> :P
<cuttle> ok
<cuttle> :p
<alexgordon> the article is saying that maths can be more important than abstractions, which is true
<alexgordon> but the reverse is ALSO true
<alexgordon> people don't generally implement fibonacci, they connect to databases and generate html, or they put buttons on a screen and display alerts
<alexgordon> like I said, generalist programming vs specialist programming
<cuttle> guess so
<cuttle> help me think of a halloween twitter name
<cuttle> :p
<alexgordon> cuttle: Mormon Micah
<cuttle> lol
<purr> lol
<alexgordon> ain't nothing scarier than mormons!
<cuttle> some irl people follow me and the joke would not be the same to them :p
<alexgordon> cuttle: do mormons celebrate halloween anyway?
<cuttle> alexgordon: yeah
<cuttle> alexgordon: you're thinking of jehovah's witnesses
<alexgordon> well they don't celebrate christmas
<alexgordon> cuttle: just thought, might be seen as a secularization of a christian festival
<cuttle> jehovah's witnesses don't celebrate anything
<cuttle> not even birthdays
<alexgordon> not celebrating halloween would make a lot more sense than not drinking coffee!
<cuttle> sure
<cuttle> :p
<alexgordon> I suppose religion isn't about making sense
<cuttle> not believing in translation from gold plates joseph smith angels blah blah blah would make more sense than believing in it...
<alexgordon> cuttle: that said, it's very hard to reconcile for me because mormons are a lot nicer than regular people
<alexgordon> at least the mormons I know
* cuttle nods
<cuttle> yeah that is somethin
<cuttle> g
<cuttle> probably more true outside of utah than it is inside of utah
<cuttle> although still somewhat true
<cuttle> but like
<cuttle> try becoming fully steeped in mormon culture
<alexgordon> I've stopped seeing religion in terms of the text and now I just see it in terms of the reality
<cuttle> and you will probably disagree
<alexgordon> yeah I'm sure
<cuttle> god i hate everything
<cuttle> :<
<alexgordon> cuttle: everything? even puppies?
<cuttle> idk probably not specifically things like puppies
<cuttle> just feeling very frustrated right now
<alexgordon> have you tried taking it out on a puppie
<alexgordon> erm puppy
<cuttle> i have not
<cuttle> don't know where any puppies are around here
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<devyn> GUYS
<devyn> I have Manchu font support now
<devyn> vertical font rendering is horribly broken :D
<devyn> lol
<purr> lol
<jesusabdullah> wth
<jesusabdullah> that's crazy that those are words
<jesusabdullah> ohhh
<jesusabdullah> it's vertical cursive
<jesusabdullah> neato
<joelteon> are you using linux
<joelteon> you poopy fart
<jesusabdullah> no
<jesusabdullah> $work gave me a mbp
<jesusabdullah> and honestly I'm pretty bad at living on more than one computer at a time
<joelteon> no i mean devyn
<jesusabdullah> so are the squat characters supposed to be taller?
<jesusabdullah> are they getting skooshed?
<jesusabdullah> or do your fonts just look crappy?
<jesusabdullah> idk anything about manchu
<joelteon> some people are NEVER happy
<joelteon> why am i reading rate your music
<jesusabdullah> idk dude
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<purr> lol
<yorickpeterse> lol?
<yorickpeterse> not sure if bot
<prophile> i'm pretty sure purr is a bot
<whitequark> prophile: i respectfully disagree
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<prophile> how very dare you
<prophile> i challenge you to tiddlywinks at dawn
* prophile throws down gauntlet
<whitequark> right... british :S
<whitequark> ooooooooooh
<whitequark> dude
<whitequark> after about 12 years of wondering, I now know what the fuck was that set of a small disks from my childhood
<whitequark> I fucking love you
<whitequark> it might or might not have looked literally like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flohspiel_hg.jpg
<whitequark> as in, I think it did, but that's probably false memory.
<prophile> that's just why i'm here
<whitequark> though now that I think of it
<whitequark> the russian facebook clone totally has a "zodiac sign" field shown by default
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<joelteon> fuck ME
<yorickpeterse> maybe
<yorickpeterse> what do you look like?
<joelteon> like this
<joelteon> ok, so i booked an amtrak train to cincinnati
<joelteon> because i'm afraid of flying
<joelteon> but it looks like i should've just sucked it up and went
<joelteon> because this is gonna be a massive waste of both time and money
<whitequark> ELLIOTTCABLE: huh, you remember that thing in freefall where robots need to sleep to move memories from short-term to long-term storage?
<whitequark> I thought it was a gimmick, nope: actual human brain works that way
<joelteon> humans need to do that right
<joelteon> oh
<alexgordon> whitequark: I'm not sure that anybody actually has a clue about that
<joelteon> anybody know if there's a unix command that shows the name of a unicode character
<whitequark> grep
<joelteon> does it really?
<whitequark> if you have the right file
<joelteon> you mean, a list of all unicode characters and their names?
<whitequark> yes
<joelteon> classic whitequark
<whitequark> if it's not obvious
<whitequark> you can download it from unicode.org
<joelteon> well, i'd just google it, but my browser won't connect to anything
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<joelteon> wow i get a decent download speed from 3g
<joelteon> all i really want is the ability to google stuff
<whitequark> use lynx
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<yorick> yorickpeterse: got two more alas jokes, how about you? :)
<alexgordon> work in progress