I agree with the sentiment of this. I think our obsession with innate mathematical skill and genius is so detrimental to the growth mindset that you need to have in order to learn things.
I've been working a lot on my math skills lately (as an adult). A mindset I've had in the past is that "if it's hard, then that means you've hit your ceiling and you're wasting your time." But really, the opposite is true. If it's easy, then it means you already know this material, and you're wasting your time.
I ran some of my recent emails through it. It picked up my overuse of exclamation marks and my use of "all of the time" instead of "all the time." It definitely doesn't seem to sensitive - I would lint all of my emails with it if it were easy to do so.
Girl Talk is considered the poster child for musical sampling, but in my mind his output is uncontroversial because it's actually just DJing. No one ever sues a DJ for playing their track.
These copyright issues only become interesting when you consider works which assert more transformative power on the samples.
I disagree with the sentiment that the best way to move forward is always to start hacking. I too tried to learn TDD by simply writing tests first, which was frustrating and unproductive.
That approach seems similar to learning to program by typing random words into iPython until something happens - it could work, but it's going to take you months to even discover a "for" loop. It's better to read a tutorial and the documentation while experimenting.
I finally caught on to TDD after watching the screencasts at destroyallsoftware.com, and I highly recommend it to others wanting to learn. TDD is a completely different way to develop, not just an additional step on your old routine.
I took your comment to heart and removed most of the comments in the source. I found the video inspiring (and infuriating) - just more proof that I'm a long way from unlearning my OO design tendencies. To start, I made the Neighborhood class a function instead. Thanks for sharing.
The logical simplicity of the rules makes it impossible to resist implementation, it seems :) I love being able to draw on your version - I missed out on implementing drag events.
I notice that you separate your "views" (this.cells) from your "models" (this.grid). This seems like a good idea from an MVC perspective, but I would worry that I'm forgetting to keep them in-sync in all cases.
Bravo on making it work with WebGL! It's super smooth.
I see we both went with variable names like 'up' and 'left' for the subscripts in the "neighbor count" code. I'm always looking for ways to sidestep numerical array indexing because it's such a fertile ground for bugs. For example, I find it really hard to look at:
var up = i-1>0 ? -1 + i : -1 + h;
...and tell if it's correct. I used a mod_wrap function instead, which is an implementation of Python-like modulo, which 'wraps' negative numbers to the top of the range.
Thanks for pointing that out! I had assumed that Literate Programming was simply any programming with a focus on human readability. I've changed the title of the post and credited you at the bottom.
I've been working a lot on my math skills lately (as an adult). A mindset I've had in the past is that "if it's hard, then that means you've hit your ceiling and you're wasting your time." But really, the opposite is true. If it's easy, then it means you already know this material, and you're wasting your time.