Not sure I agree. I listened to a handful of the books that MS encoded. I would not be able to listen to a full book like that. It's just not quite right - the timing is fixed and while the words are correctly pronounced and each have the right accent, there's a lack of natural emphasis on certain words within each sentence that makes if feel cold and alien. I admit this is miles ahead of any previous text-to-speech I've heard, and would be good for reading, say, a blog post or article, but not a full book. At least not fiction. I read fiction for enjoyment and agree that the narrator makes the difference. I've stopped listening to several audiobooks because the narrator didn't cut it for me.
I'll watch this space and reevaluate, but I wouldn't listen to any of this batch.
I concur with a lot of what other people are saying here. Late 50s, programming professionally for around 25 years. But recently switched to management. Really hard for me to focus on details of the companies code anymore.
But... when I get on some personal project, I'm on fire. I can learn new languages and concepts and systems and build pretty complex things that people are amazed at.
I think it's more job burn out after years of writing code for other people. You write the code and you work towards the deadline like the world is going to end if you don't make it. Then that code is in production for a year or two. Maybe more if you're lucky, and then it's gone, replaced by some new thing. You stop caring quite as much. But you see these new young kids on fire and working all night and you get imposter syndrome and you try to care and you beat yourself up and think you're losing your touch. tmi?
- I like the struct/receiver/interface interplay to create an analog of classes.
- Nice standard library.
- Cross compilation.
Things I wish for:
- Ternary operator.
- Something a bit closer to inheritance. Embedding structs in other structs fools you into thinking there's inheritance, but you quickly learn that it doesn't work the way you think it will.
- At the same time, fully implementing a functional programming paradigm isn't particularly easy either.
I've also had very good luck with cairographics bindings in multiple languages. For python there is pycairo. But it does require installing the native cairographics libs on your system. That might be a deal breaker for you. Not sure.
Series author here. To respond to some of the comments...
Making it interactive with a repl would be great, I agree. I've thought about going down that route a few times in the past, but it's then something new to maintain forever. Text and pseudocode will last a long time without touching it.
Thanks for the contents on the Youtube channel. The reason I stopped was because it takes a lot of effort to make those things. And I never was able to successfully monetize them. I've made videos on some other platforms and made good money from them. I just don't have the time to sink into that now for nothing in return.
As for needing a better sales pitch, etc. heh, yeah. This is just a labor of love. It'll go up there and stay up there for many years hopefully. If people find it and get something out of it, I'm happy. I don't expect to make a cent out of it. I'm just passionate about writing and teaching. And I find I learn a lot more when I try to teach.
In that case I'd say that although the seed is random, the system is anything but random. This also goes for various forms of "chaos games". You make random choices on each turn, but those choices are within a framework of possible choices that winds up producing surprising order.
I don't have a RM device, but from all I've read, it comes down to:
The Remarkable is a good note-taking/sketching device that can also display some ebooks. The focus is on the writing/drawing. The reading experience is limited.
The Boox devices are very powerful reading devices, with a decent sketching/note-taking function, and the ability to use most Android apps.
Author read this and has no idea what you're talking about. I'm not doing anything to disable highlighting or searching and it works on every browser I've tested it on across multiple OSes and mobile. Give me some repro steps and I'll take a look.
Author of the original article here. I feel your pain, but again, it's just a different set of conventions. Mathematicians are used to f(x) = ... kind of notation. Once you get used to it, it makes total sense. That particular one I got used to ages ago. f(x) is the same as a function in your code. It takes and argument, x, and returns some value.
Often specific symbols have implicit meanings, like theta θ is pretty commonly used for some angle, r is often used to mean a radius. So you'll often see something like "r sin θ" with no explanation. At first it's meaningless, but once you know the conventions, it's crystal clear. It's considered so basic, that nobody would waste the space explaining it. Same is if you're reading something about code and something says "const float x = 0.1" or something. The author is probably not going to go into an explanation of what a const or a float is or what x means. You're expected to know.
So what I like about the book is that helps someone without knowledge of all these conventions to begin to understand them.
You may be viewing the field from your own bubble. There are a LOT of programmers who do not have formal CS degrees. I hire them regularly. There are a lot of boot camps and intensive non-degree programming schools out there.
There are also a lot of people who got a degree in some other field and later moved to a programming career (I see a lot of Philosophy majors get into programming, interestingly.)
I agree, saving every iteration is overkill. I've done it on projects before too and it's too much. I just want an easy way to say, "I like this and I might want to go back to it later"