dibbeke · HackerTrans

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

Weirdly, nobody is complaining about the contrast. This might all seem crisp on a high-def screen in good lighting conditions, but try a cheap tablet or laptop and evaluate again. Elderly have tremendous problems reading the labels on the buttons. Try the firefox plugin https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/wcag-contrast... to evaluate the contrast.

dibbeke

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

The task is complicated, since it asks for a constant choreography of the mind needing to remember to be mindful of what the body eats in a situation that is clouded by suppressed feelings regarding food. Untrained, the mind tries to constantly downplay the positive impact of the diet and tries to focus on the immediate reward of eating food.

Something can only be seen as difficult if you have a clear view of the task at hand. Chopping wood or solving equations might be difficult. Something is complicated when the mind needs many different tactics to solve a problem. Solving equations and the understanding and acting upon multiple feedback loops is difficult.

People suffering from weight problems often cannot comprehend their whole problem. Understanding the products that are eaten will focus on perception, therefor clarifying over time the big picture. It's like asking a gambler to calculate the odds of every bet he makes. Soon, the math becomes more important than the winning, thus freeing the sufferer from the emotions that are attached to food.

Another way of seeing the complications involved with food problems is by understanding that most of the food we eat nowadays is processed. For example, we tend to eat the carbs but not the fibers. This unbalances millions of years of natural evolution and allows for exorbitant high levels of insulin without feeling saturated. Counter-acting these processes that happen partly inside and partly outside our mind is a complicated process that takes years or decades of someones life.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

How would you render trees or (big) matrices? Recursive functions? Infinite lists?

I'm upset because the method of discussion here seems to revolve around tainting the credulity of the author ("That you'd make such an argument indicates you aren't in command of all the facts"); by claiming a conflict of interest while this is not applicable (the OP does not claim authority!); or by appeals to authority ("because I've spent 1.5 decades coding in one").

By the way, I feel that those who have to play the "If you ever get someone upset, you've struck gold!"-card, should listen to some more gentlemen talk about syllogisms.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

In peer-review, the original authors are redacted, so the peer-review committee's bias is reduced (not eliminated, of course).

When a scientist is funded by the petrol industry, but has a long history of showing sound scientific results, I'd give him my full attention. Perhaps my reading of his results would be biased negatively if I would know his research is funded by a certain industry.

When that doctor publishes an article on his new drugs, I question where it is published, whether there have been similar results by other researchers, whether similar approaches have seen widespread application, whether the author can connect the results logically with other research, whether there has been a good peer review and whether I can understand his results. These metrics give me confidence. The funding of the researcher might interest me, but another researcher with a perfect clean sheet might get his funding in a more black-market way. They say you should follow the money, but generally it is difficult, if not impossible, to find the trail.

This means I question almost everything I read and unfortunately have little certainties. Then again "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." -- Wittgenstein

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Thanks for the reference, I'll surely read it. [Pause] I've just read the first couple of chapters and it is most surely an enjoyable read. It brings the current discussion into a completely different light. Thanks again.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Eclipse needs a good amount of memory and recently, unfortunately, has a tendency to crash. Most of the features can be disabled; the UI can be reconfigured to your liking. Btw, I generally disable the javadoc view and just F3 to the location to see the code and docs together (docs are often wrong anyways).

The problem with mockups is that they haven't touched reality yet: there is always so much detail you don't see at the start.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Ah, finally, here we have the gist of the argument: "Many of his points aren't very useful for other languages." The rest is all noise and no signal.

Well, although that point has been answered on other parts of the forum, it seems the auto-eval function is reserved for immutables only and non-recursive languages. So it seems this restriction reduces to number of applicable language to around zero. Thus, at least one of his points applies to all other languages. Do you want to hear argumentation for the other points?

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Agreed, they aren't the prettiest thing in Java and they only allow one 'layer' of annotating (you can't use expressions in annotations for example), they do prove it is possible to document your code in Java in a way that it becomes part of the 'environment' (again, 'environment' is ill-defined, so all arguments in this line are a bit frail).

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

As far as I can see, you're arguing:

"Since he's a Java developer, he delivers critique on LightTable".

thereby pointing out that any other kind of developer would probably not have made such critique, thereby relating the validity of his critique with him being a Java developer/Eclipse user, thereby being an ad hominem attack.

On your last argument I would like to add that on Hacker News it is clearly branded as the next big thing since sliced bread.

Of course languages such a Clojure, Scala and Haskell need more sophisticated IDE's than vim + plugins. Especially for larger projects. And as such I think the features in the POC are a good idea. Still, they are nothing new and I'd expect them in any modern IDE. I could add some idea's of my own (stealing from an IDE I use daily):

- annotate the source with a git history - highlighting based on AST instead of regex's - outlines

Anyways, we agree that Light Table is not novel, nor groundbreaking and it's not an invention. Exactly the point Prashant Deva was trying to make. Nothing to see here, move along.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Ah, another ad hominem! Let me reply with an ad hominem:

Would you translate your statement into:

"It is difficult to get Prashant Deva to understand something, when the salary of Prashant Deva depends upon his not understanding it"?

No? Then don't make your senseless statement. Please argue his statement instead.

Or, maybe you're not a computer scientist, because you're not able to comprehend and participate in a normal discussion?

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

His argument is on how most concepts in light table are not novel. Branding light table as novel or groundbreaking is therefor incorrect and his post is called for.

You seem to attack his argument on his background as a Java developer and not on parts of his argument. As far as I know, this is called an ad hominem attack and in my opinion does not belong on Hacker News.

If you can find good counter arguments on his arguments:

- Light Table is not novel or groundbreaking since Eclipse has had these kind of features for at least a decade (and several Smalltalk IDE's have had them for several decades), - Light Table's examples are contrived because real world examples do not behave in this way,

we'd be having a real discussion.

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I smell 'ad hominem'

dibbeke

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

Java's annotations could be seen as 'part of the environment' (whatever that may mean). I often use annotations which indicate how a method should be used, and those annotations are used by static analysis to validate correctness.

When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as well.

You say Java is deeply flawed. I argue that Java is one of the most successful languages around nowadays. It does what it is designed to do: be relatively easy to learn, a natural successor to C++ with a wide range of libraries. Yes, Java code can often be verbose, but this depends greatly on the kind of paradigms used. I can write verbose and ugly code in Clojure and write relatively concise and elegant code in Java. It depends on architecture, a good understanding of OOP (and its limitations), composition over inheritance. The problem with Java is the sheer amount of 'bad' code written in it (because of all the leagues of beginner programmers), giving it a bad name. Have you seen Clojure code of a large product (equivalent to around 1M code lines of Java), produced by a team of diverse programmers and maintained by another team during a 10 year lifespan? You would cringe just as hard.

Finally, lighttable is a proof-of-concept... It's not there yet; there are no reviews; leagues of smart engineers have tried to reproduce something similar and could not escape the POC phase at all.

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