DSL

What is a pattern? A properly captured by the Mind (of an external observer) into a named abstraction “frequently emerging arrangement”. There are obvious weather patterns, seasonal patterns, social patterns, and so on. The most “concrete” emergent patterns are the “structural patterns” – rivers, trees, proteins, biological species. The most fundamental structural patterns has been captured as abstractions: linear sequences trees (acyclic directed graphs) tables (lookup tables) More abstractions has been derived...

Python is eating the word. When I type “Python” on the Library Genesis search prompt I’m getting some 300 pages (7628 files found | showing results from 1 to 25). This has to be bullshit. Arguably, the mass hysteria has started when MIT switched from the classic MIT Scheme to Python as its main teaching language. The AIMA code at Berkeley has been ported from Common Lisp to Python at about the same time....

I created for myself the meme Going Full Gogans (you know) which is, literally, what one should do in order to achieve anything slightly above mediocrity. To go “higher” one has to Go Full Steppenwolf. which means to fully embrace and stick to the classics, ignoring everything “modern” as one ignores “user-defined genders and pronouns”. By “classics” I mean just a few distinct well-established traditions and related cultures. The LISP tradition, with distinct MIT Scheme, Norvig and Graham books, and later Clojure cultures....

Trying to understand complex social systems was my favorite timepass. I went through Eastern philosophy and religions. algorithmic trading, Informix system administration and functional programming. of course. I am a FreeBSD and Gentoo addict too. I almost always compile my stuff from sources (so I know all the dependencies by heart). In particular, Eastern Philosophy (the Early Upanishads and Early Buddhism) helped me to sort out what the current AI tools can achieve and what they cannot do in principle (and I showed why)....

You probably have already read things like “Async computations form a Monad” or something like that. Did you ever ask yourself why would they? Here are the answers for you. Have you ever seen that kind of device in some chemical and physics labs – a glass wall, with two holes in it which have a pair of thick gloves attached to them, to reach inside? A person put his hands into these gloves and reach into a contained and sealed compartment (environment) and is able to perform some tasks, like moving and filling things inside....

Once one has been exposed to a wrong concepts or just bullshit it is very difficult to unlearn what is “already known” and to see things as they really are. Especially when a necessary abstraction barrier is neglected or not even well-understood and some implementation aspects are mixed arbitrary with definitions of an abstraction itself, and with parts of a supposedly abstract interface, which has to form (establish) the abstraction barrier....

Lets talk about something really hard. There are at least 3 whole asynchronous, concurrent “full stacks” on top of the Java Runtime written in Scala (which compiles to the JVM bytecode and its standard library is a wrapper around Java’s). The first one, arguably the most widely used. is the Twitter’s platform. Then comes Lightbend (formerly Typesafe), and then stack upon which Spark has been built. The most amazing thing is that vastly complex codebases, like Twitter “it just works”....

The great programmers of the past, who wrote the fortran numeric libraries, lets say, drew flow-charts for every procedure they are about to write. This gave them the right intuitions and the right feeling about what they do. At the level of expressions you have just (only) recuring 3 patterns - it will be either a sequence, a conditional (branching) or a loop (recursion), so when they begin to write the code, they were never confused – it has to be one of these....

There are already several websites which publish a “roadmap” of how to teach yourself programming (University keve) using freely available courses and textbooks. Here is my 2 cents. First of all, SICP is an advanced textbook. It is by no means suited for teaching freshmans, unless you are a MIT student, who is math-lover and a “slow thinker”. Brian Harvey, the great, managed to teach the CS61A at Berkeley – a SICP-based course which goes at a slow pace....

Some hard problems will never be solved by “brainstorms” (more like bullshit-storms) or any about of babbling by Chuds. They require the trained minds like of C.A.R. Hoare or Leslie Lamport. or Philip Wadler or Martin Odersky – the outliers and top performers.. Ideally, they have to be mathematically mature, and preferably on the compiler side (so they also understand important implementation aspects). The “direction” is actually clear and well-understood (a small miracle), and it is in restricting too general concepts and formalisms with additional constraints (so they actually match the environmental constraints), or just typing....