Erlang and functional languages in general will never take off because they are counter-intuitive. In addition, they don't provide an order of magnitude improvement in productivity and performance over existing approaches. Erlang was created by geeks for geeks. It's a pain in the ass to learn. The world is looking for easier ways to build apps, not harder. Sorry.
Ask yourself the following question. If you want to connect a sensor to an effector, is it easier to write a function or to draw a line from A to B?
It's time for the computer industry to move away from descriptive (i.e., linguistic) programming models toward a strictly constructive (implicitly parallel, compositional and visual) paradigm. One man's opinion, of course.
True. In my opinion, it's because they got it wrong. The trick is to find the lowest common denominators of software, the DNA elements of software, if you will. These are the basic building blocks on which everything else is built.
Once you've done that, you need to come up with an organizational plan, not just for a given applications but for the entire universe of software applications. Like everything else in nature where order and complexity are the names of the game, the plan calls for a tree-like structure in which every possible application or object is a node in the tree. That, my friend, is the future of software construction. It's a future where every body and their uncle who uses a computer, is a programmer, whether they like or know it or not. Not a very enticing future for current programmers (their skills and knowledge will be obsolete) but an exciting one nonetheless.
This is pure unmitigiated BS and you know it. Religious hackers don't talk about their belief in God on hacker sites because they get heavily censored (down-modded) and subjected to ridicule by the rabid atheists who have taken control of those sites (including YC) and are on a crusade to promote the myth that science belongs to atheists exclusively. Fuck that.
The very fact that your stupid comment was up-modded is a case in point.
If you believe in God, especially if you're a Christian, you're going to suffer all sorts of censorship and ridicule on all the socially moderated hacker sites such as YC, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc... For examples, you are not allowed to say anything against atheism, materialism, evolution, the big bang, CO2 global warmning, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, time travel, etc... You must fall in line and contribute to the myth that science and technology belong to atheists and atheists alone.
I am a Christian and I am as passionate about science and technology as anybody else. If that bothers you, fuck you and the atheist mule you sleep with. How about that?
The only thing that's going to beat Google is a superfast, high-res, 3-D virtual world (kinda like Asimov's imperial planet Trantor) where people can browse by using approved and licensed vehicles to cruise the virtual streets, alleys and hidden corners of their favorite neighborhoods. The system makes money by convincing advertisers and vendors to compete for virtual property and goods. Private and/or secret enclaves can be set up so as to require an entrance fee or a subscription from prospective customers and interested parties. As the system gets larger, new businesses can start selling maps, transportation and information on how to get around and find what you're looking for. Above all, it should be fun and there should always be something new to discover and explore. It's should be much more intense and interactive than what's already out there (e.g., Linden Lab's Second Life) and give the user powerful tools with which to create their own enclaves, avatars and anonymous corporations.
But then again, Google is already moving into the virtual world business and, besides, the kind of immersive virtual 3-D world I envision will require a much faster and distributed internet, at least 2 orders of magnitude faster. Oh well, it's nice to dream.
The MDI Air Car is not a hoax. It actually exists and runs. Tata announced months ago that it would begin to manufacture a limited quantity in India. I guess they want to do a trial run to see how it goes and how it stands to wear and tear. The problem is that, if something goes wrong with the drive train, you can't just take it to the mechanic around the corner. Initially, you will be forced to operate it within a relatively short distance from the dealer.
It has been in the news for at least 10 years, IIRC. There is a Yahoo group that has been discussing it for the last seven years. There was even talk of a bunch of air taxis being built for Mexico city years ago. For some reason, it never attracted serious capital or interest from the big auto makers until Tata came along. We'll have to wait and see. With the price of gas going through the roof, I figure it has a much better chance now than it ever had. One nice thing about it is that it uses regenerative braking.
No wonder I can never get any funding. My stuff is too out there. Venture really means "do not venture", i.e., "to boldly go where everyone has gone before". LOL.
Not to discourage your perfectly valid interest in this subject but I am curious about the percentage of software engineers that use any knowledge of computational complexity in their everyday work.
I am fast realizing that YCombinator is turning out to be a den of asteroid orifices where you get modded down by asteroid orifices for telling inconvenient truths.
You people are chicken shit and your attempt at censorship is chicken shit. You can't stop people from expressing themselves on the net. YCombinator is not the only outlet for expression, you know. I express myself freely on my blog and I get hundreds and often thousands of hits a day. You asteroid orifices can't stop that. IOW, F*ck you and the mule you sleep with. LOL.
Dude, what is wrong with you? The point that you are missing is that, if you include time as one of the dimensions of the universe, then change becomes impossible. That is the meaning of the block universe. This is why Popper called spacetime, Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens. Counterintuitively, a time dimension does not enable change or motion, it forbids them.
The conclusion to be drawn is simple: There are no such things as spacetime or a time dimension and any talk of time travel via closed time-like loops in spacetime is just plain stupid. Guess what that makes those who insist on talking about time-like loops? Stupid, that's what.
I don't think you get it. A block universe in which nothing happens cannot possibly exist since it is clearly falsified. We observe change, do we not? So speaking of loops within a block universe is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Is it me, or do other people go out of their way to be illogical?
I am not sure exactly what you explained. First off, relativity, like Newtonian mechanics, is a classical physics theory. I am not aware of any such thing as non-classical relativity. So why even say classical relativity? At the very least, it is redundant.
Second, of course the universe is probabilistic, a fact that falsifies both relativity and Newtonian physics.
Third, the universe is probabilistic precisely because time cannot change. Why? Because, since time is not a variable and is thus non-existent, the universe cannot calculate precise temporal durations. Thus, in order to properly conserve energy, it is forced to use the next best thing: probability.
Fourth, this has everything to do with article since entropy, as explained in the text books, assumes the passage of time and thus a time direction or arrow. Since time is abstract, it follows that an arrow of time is imaginary. As a result, it makes perfect sense that one cannot reverse entropy. Or anything else, for that matter.
The purpose of my comment was to get people to think and to stop accepting everything they hear on face value. If time cannot change, which is trivially shown to be true (changing time is an oxymoron because it is circular), then all the so-called time-travel conjectures by famous physicists like Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking, David Deutsch, and many others, are pure crackpottery.
Time cannot change by definition. Nothing can move in spacetime for the same reason. This is why the late Sir Karl Popper (of falsifiability fame) once compared spacetime to Parmenides' block universe and called it "Eintein's block universe in which nothing ever happens". (Source: Conjectures and Refutations).
In his textbook, "Relativity From A to B", renown relativity expert Robert Geroch wrote, "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes." Very few physicists know this but it's the truth, a nasty little truth for some, but the truth nonetheless.
In conclusion, any talk of time travel in any direction (forward or backward) is pure crackpottery. There is only the NOW, the ever changing present. Don't mod me down because you have a different opinion. Incessant propaganda and sci-fi movies like Star-Trek have duped a lot of people. Just think about it and figure it out on your own.
I think the voting problem is a serious one. Apparently, only a minority of readers and posters vote and they seem to have a gang mentality that works like this: "If I don't like you, I'll vote you down regardless of what you write." This sucks the big one.
The same problem is happening on every site where voting is allowed. There is usually a loud, highly emotional and political minority with a lot of time on their hands that invariably takes over and impose a fascist dictatorship on the rest of the community. Digg, Slashdot and Wikipedia are cases in point. I wish there was a way to motivate a greater percentage of readers to take part in the voting process.
Another problem is that a lot of people receive updates via RSS news readers and I suspect that most go directly to the link and rarely check the comments or attempt to vote. YC needs a way to entice people to visit the site and incorporate the number of times a link is clicked to the formula that computes the popularity value of the story. Just one man's opinion.
In my opinion, that's exactly what they are doing. They have adopted a paralllel computing model (multithreading) that is known to be a pain in the ass to program. So far, they have no plans to change the model. They either don't know how or they are stuck in a rut because they need to maintain compatibility with legacy systems. They are in a state of panic right now, spending money left and right trying to find a solution that does not exist for their chosen model. This is a great opportunity for some other company (or a startup) to come on the scene and make a killing.