For anyone interested in the "critical" aspect mentioned by h0l0cube, please consider also reading "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate" by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe.
Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist (>50 years); Keryn Walshe is an archaeologist (>35 years). Peter Sutton in particular has spent large amounts of time living with indigenous people in the far north. Their book describes many deficiencies in Dark Emu, and also gives a huge amount of interesting information about how aboriginal people lived, and the way they curated the land and the food resources available to them.
Maybe watch the video. Artists have to eat, and they relied on patronage and commissions. The church and the nobles were the only ones with the free cash and the motivation to fund artists and their creations for much of the Christian age in Europe, regardless of their looks.
But also: something changed in the 16th century: do you contend that the monarchs suddenly got uglier to the point that artists didn't want to paint them anymore?
Reading your comment made me feel like someone had been spying on me in my car. I go through this same thing in my Lexus every time I drive it as well. It is such a relief to know I am not the only one.
The Nullarbor is a vast, arid, unpopulated plain over 1000km wide. I think the comment was meant to suggest that infrastructure projects like this are challenging in Australia, because the distances involved make them expensive, but the low population density makes them much less profitable than in places like the US and Europe with high population densities.
Many tourists from other parts of the world come to Australia thinking they can "just drive" from Melbourne to Cairns or Perth to Adelaide, not realizing how much of an undertaking that is because they don't have a good sense of the distances involved.
I don't disagree with the general realpolitik you describe, but it's not clear that damaging Huawei isn't damaging the USA as well. American companies supply Huawei, and their business is being harmed; and American consumers buy Huawei equipment -- if Huawei is excluded from the US market then presumably that may have an inflationary impact on substitutes, so American consumers will be paying more for certain goods.
Wouldn't this also have been considered as part of the decision to ban Huawei? And yet the administration proceeded anyway.
Something that might be worth noting: two minutes of googling didn't turn up the author's age, but I recall seeing this photo on his website when I bought it some time after it was published in 2008: https://hcsw.org/contact.php
It's possible he was quite young when it was published. If that's the case, then I think the book is all the more a towering achievement. It's abrasive, and it smells a bit of 2000s forum fanboy discussions, but mature people should be able to read past the more opinionated parts and find the gems in the technical treatment.
On your first point: I seem to remember plenty of companies that failed that were not telecom. In fact when I went looking just now I found a bunch of listicles about retail startups that failed.
The telecom bubble and crash was almost a side-effect. The telco executives saw the web taking off and used it to justify wildly over-inflated projections of traffic demand growth, and then began building out debt-financed networks to meet it. When the traffic didn't materialize (partly because the dotcom bubble burst), they had a bunch of overcapacity not generating revenue to service the debt that financed it, and that killed them.
That's more a matter of experience and attitude -- even simple things like reference types are nice. Also, templates offer a lot of abstraction power that can be used to model the hardware nicely, without sacrificing efficiency.
Many embedded programmers come from a background that doesn't expose them to those sorts of ideas though.
Nothing. I've worked on Cortex-M4 projects in C++. It's nice in many ways. The people working on the project had a much more diverse background than the typical EE who learned C as an undergrad mentioned in another thread.
"Real engineering" also runs on a different (slower) cadence, in part due to the longer timescale between inception and realisation of ideas, and due to the costs involved in making physical things.
Sorry this comment is so late; ATS is also interesting because it has linear types that allow compile-time resource tracking similar to Rust's ownership and lifetime tracking. If you use linear types you can opt out of the garbage collector. That makes it very attractive for systems programming, and in particular embedded systems. I believe there is a demo of ATS running on an Arduino of some sort.
I haven't had the time to learn it yet, though I would like to.
Well, SBCL does not ship with an interpreter, for example. Expressions entered at the REPL get compiled directly to machine code, so there's no difference in performance for a function entered at the REPL (or via SLIME C-c C-c) and one built as part of a batch compile.
Contrast that to Haskell's ghci interpreter, which is slower (last time I checked) than the same code built on the command line with ghc, the compiler. But I would still consider Haskell a compiled language, not an interpreted one, since you never run code in production under ghci, you always ship your binaries.
I suppose it's about perception. To me "interpreter" refers to a language implementation strategy. It's fuzzy, I know, since there is some continuum between interpreting an AST directly, compiling the AST to bytecode and running the bytecode on a VM, JIT compiling the bytecode to machine code on the fly, and compiling offline direct to machine code (like C/Go/Rust). To some ears, "interpreted" can sound synonymous with "slow", which is I guess what prompted my comment.
Finally, to me the place where you can enter expressions to try out your program interactively is the REPL, not the interpreter.
Anyway, thanks for explaining your position to me. (Also, good to know Python dev environments have improved, but I guess it's to be expected, 10 years is a long time :-) .)
Interpreted language? Common Lisp is typically compiled. Besides which, why is interpreted a particular advantage? e.g. Python was interpreted 10 years ago when I was using it, but Common Lisp felt far more flexible and powerful, because you can compile single functions with a key press in SLIME and seamlessly load them into your running (compiled) image... shortest feedback loop I've ever experienced. Maybe Python has caught up in the mean time, I haven't used it seriously for a long time though, so I don't know.
Yes, I've noticed that about myself too. Reading is a high investment / high reward activity, and you have to make an effort to do it. One approach is to set aside a time slot daily where you just read, like the hour before bed time for example. You could also set goals for your self (e.g. read a book a week, a chapter a night, etc.) but that might turn it into a chore and make it less likely that you'll stick with it. It depends on your personality I suppose.
I've also noticed that reading in the office attracts strange looks sometimes. I don't know what to do about that. Reading research papers and text books related to what one is working on should be encouraged in a knowledge profession, yet I almost never see colleagues doing it. I guess if your hands aren't on the keyboard those JIRA tickets won't get closed.
Ha! I should have been more precise in my language. I was avoiding learning how to write more substantial shell scripts and programs, not the command line per se.
I also got my start on pre-GUI computers (a VIC-20, specifically).
Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist (>50 years); Keryn Walshe is an archaeologist (>35 years). Peter Sutton in particular has spent large amounts of time living with indigenous people in the far north. Their book describes many deficiencies in Dark Emu, and also gives a huge amount of interesting information about how aboriginal people lived, and the way they curated the land and the food resources available to them.
https://www.amazon.com/Farmers-Hunter-gatherers-Dark-Emu-Deb...