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From: Harald Hanche-Olsen on 2 Jun 2010 10:38
+ pjb(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):

> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?

I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 2 Jun 2010 17:22
Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche(a)math.ntnu.no> writes:

> + pjb(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):
>
>> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
>
> I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
> If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?

Hence my proposal for a Naggum 2.0 ! :-)

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
From: Tim X on 2 Jun 2010 18:38
Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche(a)math.ntnu.no> writes:

> + pjb(a)informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon):
>
>> Does the reading make the man, or does the man choose the reading?
>
> I would have thought it obvious that the answer is yes to both.
> If reading doesn't change you, what is the point of reading?

but reading is not sufficient in an dof itself. You have to be 'active'
in your reading to comprehend the content. However, there is something
even more fundamental and difficult to define. I believe each person
responds in different ways to different writing styles. For example, I
always found Knuth's books very good, but I know others who don't and
who prefer authors that I find less accessible. I found the same thing
with other areas of study as well - after a time you would find certain
authors who presented things in such a way that the concepts and ideas
they are writing about fit well with your own cognitive models and you
tend to 'get it' from what they have written much faster than you would
from someone else. .

I learnt a long time ago that sometimes, when trying to understand
something new and unfamiliar, it wasn't necessarily just because I was
being a bit 'thick' that I was having trouble understanding it,
particularly the more subtle aspects. Since others seemed to
be getting it, it isn't just that the author is a poor writer. Rather,
it is due to a disconnection between the authr and reader's cognitive
models. continuing with that author is unlikely to change matters. A
better result is usually found by finding another author. Sometimes,
this can be difficult - especially when dealing with new topics that
have not been dealt with by many writers.

Tim



--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au
From: Giovanni Gigante on 3 Jun 2010 04:42

Btw,
I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days
ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and I
noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language had
the standard update recently (2005).
I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors
(verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are
probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI".
So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada more
or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning (for a
lone european lisper such I am)?
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 3 Jun 2010 05:01
Giovanni Gigante <giov(a)cidoc.iuav.it> writes:

> Btw,
> I see that there are several books on Ada in Erik's library. Some days
> ago I happened to look at the debian language shootout benchmarks, and
> I noticed that Ada is really fast. I also learned that the language
> had the standard update recently (2005).
> I don't know nearly anything about Ada, except the usual rumors
> (verbose, strict discipline, formerly mandated by DOD) which are
> probably as rich and precise as "Lisp is slow" and "Lisp is for AI".
> So I was wondering: (a) Is ada still alive (in the sense of: is ada
> more or less alive than common lisp)? (b) Is ada still worth learning
> (for a lone european lisper such I am)?

It is put to some use in embedded systems.
It's not a bad Algol-like programming language.
(It beats C and C++, but what language doesn't?)

One thing of interest is that it includes at the language level
(therefore portably) threads and inter-thread communication
primitives.


Now, whether there are more Ada jobs than Lisp jobs, I'm not even sure
it's the case...

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
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