Philip Greenspun Answers 156
How do you expect this degree to be worth anything
(Score:5, Interesting)
by slashdot-terminal
People spend thousands on a university education because they think it's a benefit and will lead them to a good job. Are there any employeers that have or would be willing to accept a graduate of your university. Do you think the numbers will increase?
Phillip:
We're not a vocational school. If someone wants to get a high-paying job, I would hope that there are easier ways to do it than working through a formal computer science curriculum. We even suggest one on our site: visit education.oracle.com and learn to be an Oracle DBA.
That said, the Baby Boomers are beginning to retire. Employers can't afford to exclude people who are qualified to work. Someone who can show a potential employer some running systems that he or she has built, a transcript with good grades from ArsDigita University and recommendations from a few of our PhD CS nerd instructors should not have any trouble getting a job.
Travels with Samantha
(Score:5, Interesting)
by X
I remember reading Travels with Samantha when it first came out on the world wide web (some of my first real reading on the web). What struck me about it, aside from the fact that I enjoyed reading it, was how much of yourself was laid bare in the story. Publicly exposing oneself like this is something that celeberties do all the time, but it was (particularly at that time) a rare thing for Joe private citizen to do (although certainly within your nature ;-).
I'm wondering you can describe what happened as a result of exposing so much of yourself online. I remember reading the comments on the story, and there were certainly a wide range of responses, but I was wondering if you noticed any larger consequences?
Phillip:
Travels with Samantha isn't about self-exposure; it comes from the same motivation that leads people to open-source software: the desire to help people build on what one has learned or done. If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web :-)
Publishing the book online has had some huge consequences for my life, but not the ones that I would have expected. For example, I got a large number of questions about photography. I thought it would be more useful to people if I codified my knowledge in a set of Web pages (http://photo.net/photo). The codified content generated yet more questions so I implemented a database-backed discussion forum for the site. Voila! I turned into the publisher of a 50,000-member, million hit/day online community. Trying to serve the changing needs of the community led me to build the ArsDigita Community System (ACS). Trying to keep up with the companies that wanted systems built on top of the ACS led me start ArsDigita Corporation. Profits accumulated by the efforts of our 100 developers enabled me to start ArsDigita University.
12 hrs/day * 6 days/week == severe burnout?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by ToastyKen
When I read about Ars Digita University, the first thing that came to mind was what an extreme amount 12 hrs/day, 6 days/week, on A SINGLE SUBJECT is. I mean, there do exist people who can take that much work, but don't you think a large percentage of your student population would simply burn out?
I go to a major university, there's no way I put in 12 hrs a day of work, and I'm still already stressed out. And that's with multiple subjects so I can take my mind off of one and switch gears occassionally.
Do you have any plans to counter potential burnout?
Phillip:
A typical MIT student takes 9 courses in 9 months. ArsDigita University teaches 9 course in 9 months. Thus the overall pace should be similar to what has proven to be successful at MIT. Taking multiple subjects simultaneously has some advantages but it also requires students to be good at managing their time. Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.
The Ars Digita University is cool, but...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by hey!
the real problem I see is that there are people with a clue, and people with degrees, and there's not necessarily much of a correlation positive or negative between the two. Ideally, to improve the situation so clueful people get access to the important ideas of CS and that employers get some better idea that when they hire a degreed engineer they're actually getting something worth a premium.
It seems to me that CS degree work should be opened to more people who would advance by demonstrating the ability to do real work integrating important theoretical CS ideas with real world problems. Yet the very format really excludes a great deal of people, especially those who have to work to support themselves.
Does the Ars Digita program offer any real advance in CS degree program quality or accessibility to people who would benefit themselves and society the most?
Phillip:
Imagine Jane Humanist. She went to college in 1985 and wanted to touch human lives. In 1985, computers were generally only found in specialized locations and had little impact on the average person. So Jane very sensibly elected to major in government or psychology or history. Fifteen years later, it turns out that computers are ubiquitous and that the most efficient way to touch a lot of human lives may very well be to build some sort of information system. ArsDigita University is intended to offer Jane Humanist a second chance so that her impact on the world won't be limited by her choice of college major back in the mid-1980s.
As for the "great deal of people" who can't travel to Cambridge, must work to support themselves, don't have high test scores, etc., we will support them via online lectures, course materials, and collaboration tools. That said, I doubt that the average distance learner will have enough motivation and discipline to come up to the MIT/Stanford level.
Question
(Score:5, Interesting)
by doonesbury
The idea that you propose is controversial, and potentially disturbing to the entrenched university/degree program - especially considering the billions that these programs earn based on the concept that the "magic paper" only available through degreed universities is the only qualification for intellegence and competence.
A) Where would you like to see this program move towards, in relation to universities;
B) Do you plan on a "pay" version, for people who can actually afford to pay?
C) The qualifications (and I took a *real* good look at them, I really want to go!) are a bit unusual - in that they require SAT scores.
I miss by 50 points, but isn't that exactly the attitude that you're trying to escape - that you need a standardized test to determine intellegence, that you need cash to determine eligibility? Or am I reading too much into the program?
Phillip:
With our pitiful $1 million/year annual budget we're not trying to shake a $15 billion organization like Harvard University to its foundations. Our relationship with other universities is pretty simple. We try to use their curricular materials where appropriate. We offer our curricular materials to anyone who wants them under an open content license.
A "pay" version? No of course not! The university is more to benefit the instructors (see http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism) than the students. We are privileged that they choose to hang out with us. Teaching is its own reward and is part of what we think of as the good life. (Note the "part of"; I personally wouldn't want to teach full-time.)
Our qualifications unusual in requiring SAT scores? Every college requires SAT scores! That's because they are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc. Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.
Are any Open Source databases production ready?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by DuBois
Philip:
I've read "Philip and Alex's Guide..." and hoped to implement your kind of website on my own server. But then I noted that Oracle requires thousands of dollars of licensing fees.
Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?
Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?
Phillip:
I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html.
The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).
Will the "University" be open or biased?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Wee
I certainly mean no denigration by this, but will this "University" be universal or will it teach only concepts that use Ars Digita's preferred architecture: AOLServer, Tcl and Oracle? For example, you mention that 40 hits per second exposes the limits of Perl/CGI/DBI (which might be a questionable statement in and of itself), but I've worked on teams that built stuff which very nicely handles hundreds of hits per second using Java servlets and MySQL (for only one example). Will this sort of thing be taught in addition to the stuff you guys prefer?
I just can't help but think that the University will be biased in some way. Certainly, it's biased towards rote memorization in applicants (a rather inflammatory earlier statement alluded that a score of at least 1400 on the SATs was a requirement for being bright), but will the technological course material follow? I know that there's an Ivy League ethos that surrounds many people and institutions, and it would be a shame if that same sentiment ruled out "less bright" technologies as well as people in this new University. (And for the record: I work with extremely smart people -- some of whom never graduated college -- who use none of what Ars Digita uses, so I may be a little biased myself... ;-)
Another thought just hit me: Couldn't this University been seen as a thinly veiled way to promote Ars Digita's technological choices? Honestly, I don't know many people that actually use Tcl or AOLServer to do much, especially in a production environment. If future gradutes of your program are well-schooled in using those products, wouldn't they necessarily think of these technologies first when doing future work? Won't they be biased? So can't this just be seen as an "Tcl/AOLServer Mill"?
Again, I don't mean any slight or to seem like a troll, but this whole thing sounds to me like it'll be as well-rounded as any MCSE learning might be.
Phillip:
Sorry to disappoint you but we won't be teaching Java or MySQL or Perl. We'll be teaching the standard computer science curriculum that has evolved over 25 years at schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT. We would certainly not teach AOLserver or Tcl because a student who couldn't learn these things in a day by him or herself would never make it through SICP, Discrete Math, or Algorithms!
(By the way, the ArsDigita Community System is a set of data models and workflow that has nothing to do with AOLserver or Tcl; for the presentation layer you can run Apache if you like and we've announced a 100% Java version.)
Opinion vs. Fact
(Score:5, Interesting)
by ryanr
I read "Travels with Samantha" not too long ago when I ran across a link to it. As a result, I poked around photo.net a bit, and ended up buying a paper copy of "Phil and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing." Great book, recommended. Even though it's on the web, it reads better on paper, the book is nicely put together, nice heavy paper, and the photos look good (all stuff Phil will tell you, too. :) )
My question is this:
In most of your writing, you often put some statement out there as fact, when it is actually an opinion. In many cases, I can spot it as such, and just roll my eyes a bit if I happen to disagree. Are you aware that you do this, do you worry about it, or do you expect your readers to spot it and take it as an opinion? Or are you a typcial college professor whose opinion IS fact, and won't be told otherwise? :)
The reason I ask is that I do a little writing myself, and I find it a unnerving to put something in print that becomes more-or-less unchangeable. I.e. I just worry about being "wrong" either because I am plain wrong, or wasn't clear in my statements.
Phillip:
When I first started writing journal papers (back in the early 1980s), I had a great editor named Curt Roads who crossed out all the occurrences of "In my opinion" and "I believe" from my writing. He said "It is obviously your opinion because your name is on the article and it is obvious that you believe this or you wouldn't be saying it." So I tend to shy away from weasel and waffle words.
Why tight coupling to a RDBMS?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by kslee
First of all, thanks a lot for Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and introducing Edward Tufte's excellect books.
My Question is:
What's the merit of tightly-coupled-to-Oracle architecture of acs(ars digita community system) as a web application platform? ZOPE is in my mind as the not-tightly-coupled-to-any-RDBMS web applicaton platform?
Some people came to ZOPE because they can not afford an Oracle(in my case, the prefernce of python to tcl played a lot).
Or any comment on the web application servers/platforms which does not have the honor of being commented upon in your web tools review is apprecitated GREATLY!
Phillip:
You're welcome on the Tufte recommendation. His books are certainly easier to install on one's shelf than Oracle is on a Linux box :-)
There are two separate issues raised by your question, both of them worthwhile. The first is "If you're going to use an RDBMS, why not make your code more portable and abstract instead of hard-coding in Oracle dependencies?" If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism you'll see that we value innovation over market share. If one has limited time and resources, it is better to worry about making the application great rather than "Does it run with Informix 9.05 or SQL Server 7?" We're not in love with Oracle but it is adequate for what we want to do and therefore we don't spend time and effort on portability.
The second issue is "Why not an object database?" If one's source of persistence were an object database, that would change all kinds of assumptions about Web development style. For one thing it would make object-oriented languages such as Java much more useful. Sadly, however, the object database folks haven't successfully tackled some important problems that the RDBMS handles very well: concurrency and isolation of application program from database.
So of course ZOPE is an honest effort and a great contribution. But most companies are forced by practicalities to be very RDBMS-centric and I think that makes our suite of software more useful. Also, we attack a much higher level of the application stack than the ZOPE guys. See http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp for a draft book chapter that I've written that talks about this issue.
Techno-social considerations
(Score:5, Interesting)
by jellicle
The technical challenge of building an online community is less than half of the total work involved. Social considerations are tremendously important, and a change in one line of code can totally change the flavor and viability of a community. It is my suspicion that ArsDigita has not yet run into communities as challenging as Slashdot, that is, places where some percentage of the population is dedicated to destroying the place through denial of service attacks of various forms. The challenge is to enforce some level of responsibility without eliminating anonymity, without being called a censor, without tracking users like a stalker... Few if any online communities can be said to have gotten it entirely "right", but somehow the majority of real-world communities manage to have civil discourse at a reasonable level. This is really a sort of sociology problem - and hardly an easy one - which is instantiated in computer code. How would you solve these problems? Or, more precisely, how would you start to learn how to solve these problems?
And no, "Trial and error." is not an acceptable answer. :)
Phillip:
Actually at photo.net we've run into many of the same problems, but probably not as severe as at Slashdot. First, a couple of things that make photo.net simpler than Slashdot. We are a PURPOSEFUL community. Everyone at photo.net wants to become a better photographer and therefore that implies a shared purpose of user-to-user education. Second, we are anchored by a lot of magnet content that I wrote, e.g., http://photo.net/photo/tutorial/
Most people who don't agree with at least part of my way of looking at photography education will turn away from the site before becoming involved in a discussion.
What makes Web development tougher than other kinds of software engineering that I've done is the constant challenge of idiosyncratic humans. For example, in the 1980s I did a lot of computational geometry, graphics algorithms, and computer-aided design programming. The algorithms could be hard to understand but once coded they would work properly forever without modification. The reason that it was possible to completely solve the problem was that the input to these algorithms was machine-readable and fixed in format. In Web development, however, user interfaces and annotation that work for 50 simultaneous users invariably break down when 50,000 users pile in (a friend of mine runs cnn.com and told me that they once got nearly 1 million comments on an article! The ArsDigita Community System would present these in a flat list on a single page... not very modem-friendly!).
What are you shooting now?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by HerrNewton
I know this will likely get pushed aside by more net oriented questions, but what are you shooting for a body, lenses and film these days? I know, different tools for different occassions, but what is your most common setup?
Phillip:
These days I'm mostly chained to my desk at ArsDigita and hence I don't do a lot of work around Boston. ArsDigita now has offices in Tokyo, Pasadena, Berkeley, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, London, and Munich. This plus the occasional speaking engagement means that I travel a bit and fill in the spare hours with sightseeing and street photography. My favorite tool is a Fuji 617 panoramic camera, loaded with Ilford 3200 black and white film. This enables handheld photography and the production of a 6x17cm negative, which enlarges nicely to cover the walls in our 100,000 square feet of office space worldwide. I also do a lot of work with a Canon 50/1.4 lens, usually attached to an EOS-3 body loaded with Fuji NPH film (ISO 400 color negs with a subdued palette). I was just in Florida and couldn't resist buying a $10,000 600/4 IS lens to take pictures of birds. Check out
http://photo.net/photo/pcd4101/index-fpx.html
and
http://photo.net/photo/pcd4715/index-fpx.html
for examples of new work (unlinked from anywhere so far, exclusive to Slashdot readers!).
Bottom line is that a monkey can take good pictures. Talent is cheap. Time is precious. If you put a lot of time and hard work into photography, you'll have good pictures. If you are a burnt-out nerd grabbing snapshots in spare moments you'll have... the stuff above.
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I added these myself because I thought they were worthwhile.
Do *you* ever suffer from burnout?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by timgriffin
Given that your interests/tallents are so many and varied, how have you found the last several years of corporate CEO-dom? Inevitably there isn't time to do everything. What do you miss? What's most rewarding? What's most irksome about your responsibilities? What does the future hold for you?
Phillip:
Do you know the scene in King Lear where he meets Edgar disguised as a pitiful guy wandering the heath in rags? And Lear asks "What happened to him? Does he have daughters?"
I used to think that assholes became business people but now I realize that the causation works in the other direction. Now when I find a deranged person shouting at someone, I ask "Oh, does he have employees?"
If you have high standards and you grow fast you will inevitably find yourself having to tell people how they're not meeting your standards. Oftentimes I'm struck by how much better a job someone at ArsDigita has done than I would have done. But I only get to spend 15 seconds enjoying that feeling before moving on to attack a problem. Being a manager means focussing on stuff that isn't going well. It made me crazy enough that I was really happy to hire Allen Shaheen, one of the founders of Cambridge Technology Partners, to take over as CEO. Now I'm Chairman and will concentrate on technology (what problems to attack and how to attack them), education (how do we turn smart people into great Web service developers), evangelism (sadly I'm still the best spokesperson for ArsDigita), and company culture (no we won't hire people just to grow; yes your boss will be able to do your job; yes we will hold programmers accountable for the overall quality of the Web service; yes, dammit, we ARE going to spend a fortune on beach and ski houses where programmers can build modules, write documentation, journal papers, and book chapters).
Your outlook on industry partnerships?
by petervessenes
Phil, I own what is, to my knowledge, the third ACS based company in the world, ybos.net. We have a fairly aggressive growth plan, (more aggressive than furfly's for example), and I have a number of questions:
What's Ars' outlook on industry partnerships going forward? We're too small still to do the projects you guys want, (million+/year) and I don't think we'll be there for at least a year or two. I believe that making partnerships, and building relationsips with companies like ybos is important for you as you go forward: more alternative service providers gain you mindshare in the same way that giving away a year of free training at Ars U does.
How do you feel about ACS/Pg? Using Oracle is a major blow to doing smaller projects, obviously. Also, I know the state of Postgres two years ago, so I don't blame you for the switch to Oracle from Illustra, but do you have intention to backport to a more open database architecture, or 'bless' Ben Adida and co's work on the ACS/Pg? I think what appeals to me about ACS/Pg is not Postgres (rather obviously), but the more open nature of the development -- Ybos has begun releasing useful ACS modules to the public, and enhancing some slow-moving Ars ones, and it's a medium-level frustration that they'll never get rolled into your toolkit, or that we have to develop side by side. (for example, bryan che kindly lent us his data model early for the events module, but we developed about half a module under his data model before you released the newer module, and we scratched it and started over.) This leads to my final question:
Do you have thoughts on the relative openness of the ACS development? Would you consider an 'inner circle' development model that would let confirmed developers check code in and out of the development releases? I think that you'd see some significant benefits. I ask about this rather than a 'true' open source system because I'm betting you'd say "no way" to an aggressively open model. I probably would, too.
Meanwhile, I hope you're well! Congratulations on the recent funding. I hope we're not far off.
Phillip:
Ybos isn't the third ACS-based company! Just about every European country seems to have a collection of monster developers who've started an ACS-based services company. There are some great guys in Brighton, England that I'd kill to hire, for example. But I digress...
We believe so much in partnerships that we our very first MBA was Cesar Brea, a Bain refugee, our VP of Business Development. We could not have gotten Siemens without Boston Consulting Group. So we make partnerships all the time but we just don't bother to announce them with press releases and stuff (probably we should).
As far as ACS/PostgreSQL goes, we've given the project a free server and definitely support it. I offered money to the PostgreSQL group to pay for them to implement an "Oracle syntax SQL parser" (so that all kinds of Oracle-based apps could run on Postgres, not just ACS).
On the cathedral/bazaar split let me say that we've taken in lots of good ideas from the community. It hasn't been as formal as I'd have liked so we're looking to hire a whole bunch more dedicated toolkit developers who will have time to look at CVS diffs from outside developers, etc. We're not quite ready to go for the public CVS tree because we change our core structure too much. Maybe in ACS 5.0 we'll be able to do that (this fall?).
Data Modeling Tools
by Tassach
Dr. Greenspun,
Given that the ArsDigita Community System is so heavily database-driven, I was wondering what tools you use for data modeling and schema management.
What is your opinion of modeling tools like Sybase's PowerDesigner and Platinum's ERwin? What kinds of tools do you think are necessary to facilitate the development of highly portable, vender independent database designs? Finally, what is your opinion of UML and to what extent does ArsDigita use it?
Phillip:
First, my brother Harry is a real doctor so I'm forced to go by "Philip Greenspun, merely a PhD". The tool that we use for data modeling and schema management is ... GNU Emacs! E-R diagrams are basically useless once a data model gets beyond a certain size. And for smart people they aren't all that useful for small and medium-sized data models. UML would be useful if one could build entire Web services from the UML spec. This is kind of thing that we teach our students at MIT: come up with a machine-readable specification language and write a program to generate the programs that run the site. See http://photo.net/teaching/psets/ps4/ps4.adp for an example.
Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.
-----------------
Other interview notes: We're still waiting for answers from RMS and SCO. Next Monday we'll be seeking questions for Douglas Adams, and Thursday we'll need questions for Metallica about their tiff with Napster. If you know someone you'd like to see interviewed here (*and* you have contact info for them), please send e-mail to roblimo@slashdot.org. (Don't bother telling me we ought to get Stephen Hawking; he's already our single most-requested potential guest. I've e-mailed his graduate assistant with an interview request but have not yet gotten a response.)
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Slashdotting Philip Greenspun... (Score:1)
Comes off as a little arrogant (Score:1)
ars digita university is cute, but lets face it, the education market is already saturated with legit players and most of these are making serious headway into distance/web education. two years from now ars digita U will be seen as a vapor project that was given too much airtime.
How come Greenspun keeps raising interest rates? (Score:1)
Re:Still a typical MIT bigot? (Score:1)
Rational Rose, on the other hand, I use every day (probably because I'm only an average java programmer).
SAT Scores?? (Score:1)
That's really interesting, considering I am an university right now, and I have never taken a single SAT test, the university even gave me a $1400 scholarship.
Maybe you are just thinking US-centric? Which is really funny because your school is located in England. I am not sure if they have SAT's in England or not.
Re:Populist Crap (Score:1)
Oh yeah the sorority girls at alpine with the bitch pants are real brillent. Not to mention the ayn rand freaks, the jesus is risen people, the jocks, the Kappa Alpha "bombers"
Re:$50 million (Score:1)
Our *customer* decided that he wants us to integrate Yahoo! shop into the web site that we created for him. Having spent last week poking around their "regular" (HTML forms that generate placeholders with predefined fields) and "advanced" (proprietary to Yahoo! RTML language, something between actual HTML and programming language) editing modes I can tell you one thing: "It stinks!"
All we wanted was to have buttons on the left side as separate images with ability to do JavaScript
roll-overs. And to have links from *our* web site that would utilize 'add', 'view' and 'checkout' options of the shopping cart located at Yahoo!. No can do:
1. Predefined templates can generate only an image map for navigation menu by combining separate
buttons. Thus no JavaScript roll-overs.
2. To keep buttons as separate images you need to get *deep* into understanding of RTML.
3. RTML documentation provided at Yahoo! is a joke. No other information is available.
4. Their tech support sucks. It all boils down to one simple answer: "These are the options that we provide, if you don't like it -- piss off."
5. After pocking around RTML I can tell you that it's not worth learning. Yahoo! store's designers decided for you which elements to use as building blocks (thus non-modifiable, even if you *need* to edit them).
Also combining HTML with features from programming languages (iterations, global/local variables,
functions, etc.) adds to the confusion.
Maybe they got the $50 mil you were talking about, but the product is not worth rat's ass. Any HTML/Perl sweatshop could create a much more functional and useful set of forms and placeholders for the content.
Re:I slashdotted my own site! (Score:1)
Then explain it to Rob Malda, cuz he's not using big hardware either.
Re:BZZZT... wrong (Score:1)
Also, there's a higher chance of getting laid at UMCP compared to MIT, according to my friends who go there. I don't doubt it a bit. That feature ranks pretty high on some peoples' lists of things they're looking for in a school.
BTW, I worked two summers at JHU, doing CS stuff in a non-CS department. I wasn't particularly impressed (it wasn't bad by any means, but not outstanding either).
And yes, cold weather sucks ass. Every now and then, you'll hear me mutter "why didn't I go to Stanford" when a cold gust of wind nearly knocks me over. But I can tolerate it... it's just cold weather; think of the much more intolerable inconveniences in life that we deal with on a daily basis. Crappy weather pales in comparison.
Re:Tcl in a day ?!? (Score:1)
Tcl is a simple, stupid little language. Once someone tells you that whitespace and bracket placement is not negotiable, you're home free. It's a bit of brain damage to re-learn what braces, brackets, and parens do what, but it's not any major mental effort.
AOLserver has only about 50 API functions, and only 10 or so are really commonly used. Also, if you're doing the work in Philip's class, you have assloads of sample source to look at.
Ever hear of the "MSCE" (Score:1)
This-Or-That" crap? None of that's accredited,
and you might even find job want-ads that list
it as a requirement.
It's all in the advertising....
Re:Reasons LISP is cool: (Score:1)
I must also add that you are taking the tone of the whining, pissed-off LISP bigot, not the tone of an effective defender of LISP. For example, "But to humor the remainder of your post..." Honestly, you don't need to humor me. You would find that your words are much more effective if you provide me with compelling evidence.
You give some good points about some of the aspects of LISP as to why it may be better than other programming languages. But that's not what I was requesting, if you remember. What I asked for is this: Name me some applications that are written in LISP, and name me the technical reasons why LISP was chosen in those situations. I will add one more caveat here: the application must not have been written by MIT people.
Phillip Greenspun gave one example, but he only fulfilled half of my request: he didn't tell me why LISP was chose -- meaning, what were the compelling technical reasons to choose LISP over any other langauge? Also, was the application written by MIT people? Also, was the application written entirely in LISP, or only partially? The answers to these questions could quickly weaken the yahoo store as evidence of the usefulness of LISP. Furthermore, he brought up the number $50 million three times. I interpreted this as an ad crumenam argument.
"So, you've reiterated your position; which we've heard like 4-5 times now." This cannot be true, for I think I've only posted my opinion two or three times. If you were just being snide, then remember that your being snide, condescending, or insulting will not convince me. Evidence will.
"Your contention that LISP has no functional value is hopefully negated by the above." Actually, it's not negated at all. Your argument is pathetic. I asked specifically what would convince me that LISP is useful outside of academic snobbery, and yet your response matches what I have heard up to this point. Reading your answers I can conclude that LISP would be very valuable as a teaching tool, but I still see no evidence of anything outside of that. Perhaps if it *were* something more than that, then you and millions of others would be using it in place of Perl. I could be wrong, though, provided that you or someone can provide me of some evidence of real applications that are actually written in LISP.
"But you have failed to inform us why your preferred languages are better, other than that they are popular (which we already knew)." The usefulness of LISP will be proven much more easily by LISP itself, not by me trying to "one-up" LISP with something else. All I ask is that someone show my why LISP is more than just the snobbery of some elitist MIT bigots. I don't think that's too much to ask, considering the grandiose claims that MIT people seem to make about LISP.
It's obvious that you know a lot more about LISP than I do, and I'll even say that you know a lot more about programming languages than I do. Given that, perhaps you'd like to tell me the areas in which LISP is crap as compared to other langauges, and why that might contribute to its non-use outside of academic and MIT circles.
Re:okay, but this is the last one (Score:1)
Honestly, I didn't think this to be a comp.religion.flamewars thing. In my world this was all started by Phillip's statements:
Lisp is the most powerful and also easiest to use programming language ever developed.
The best introduction to Lisp is also the best introduction to computer science[.]
Lisp programmers forced to look at Perl code would usually say "if there were any justice in this world, the guys who wrote this would go to jail."
I was merely questioning these kinds of statements. I wanted some evidence to back up those statements. Tell me, is it not Phillip who was making flamewar type statements?
And I must respond to something you wrote:
But you came on the scene telling philg off, saying that LISP and other MIT tools are bad news, and demanding refutation.
I do not remember telling Phillip off. Perhaps you thought that my words were aggressive, for I did question his judgement (because of his fawning over what I believe is a language that is useless outside of academic circles). I did not say LISP is bad news (though from the little I've seen I do believe it to be a Lot of Idiotic, Stupid Parentheses), nor did I say that "MIT tools" are bad news. I did infer that MIT people were snobs, based on what Phillip had said about LISP. And I did not demand refutation, I demanded evidence. And If I have the burden of proof, as you claim I do, tell me, what is it that I am supposed to prove to you? I remember questioning, not alleging. And the burden of proof falls on he/she who alleges.
The reason I'm so "obsessed" as you claim I am is because I asked some simple questions and got an earful of slander. Your attitude in your first response is no expection (but I do appreciate your improved attitude in this recent response). If you read Phillip's first response to me, you'll see he was downright rude. So now it's bit of a sticking point to me. It's petty of me to do so, but the fact that I couldn't get straight answers the first time around and received a bunch of personal attacks has made me want to demand the truth of the LISPers.
And yes, I know that I can pick up LISP and learn it. I tried that about a year ago. Funnily enough, the resources on LISP are meager compared to the resources on Perl, Python, C, Tcl, etc. When I did find a tutorial, I found language to be non-intuitive and ugly. Plus I'm fond of things like iteration and variables. Perhaps I didn't receive the right introduction, perhaps I'm just stupid. Regardless, I know quite enough syntax of C, Perl, and shell to do everything I need to do. I don't want to waste my precious time having to learn another language which I think is worthless outside of academic circles. Programmers always have to choose which programming language to use for their projects, and there must be a reason why the vast majority of them choose not to use LISP.
And I told you why I thought your argument was not valid. Your previous argument only goes to show how LISP can be a good educational tool, but does not show any uses of LISP.
I hope that this helps show you what I'm thinking. I'm not against you or Phillip. What I'm against is this notion that "LISP is great, and if you don't agree then you're not a good programmer." This is the attitude that I've seen emenating from LISPers, and I think its a negative and divisive attitude that needs to die. Is my impression wrong? I'm not afraid to admit that I'm wrong, for I often am.
Am I making sense to you?
Regarding the .sig, thanks. It's a long story where it came from. e-mail me if you're really interested.
Re:Populist Crap (Score:1)
~luge(and I have a better basketball team;)
Re:It's His University (Score:1)
I think he uses the SATs to narrow the field to people who have a very good chance of succeeding. While it may be true that others could succeed, he doesn't even have to consider them to fill his class.
I think the final decision is a subjective one, and it's tougher to evaluate tons of applicants when you could just be evaluating a far fewer number of "reasonably safe bets".
Re:Naive (Score:1)
The answer was "zero".
Re:Naive (Score:1)
It's His University (Score:1)
If he can accept a certain, very small number of people to give a free education to, and has a very limited amount of time to pick those people, I don't think it's unreasonable for him to use SAT's. It's his university. Whoever gets accepted will be accepted on entirely subjective terms.
I guess that when you make your millions, you will be able to sit down with the people that are trying to get the free education for a week or more. Most millionaires don't have that combination of generosity and free time.
Can't you use the doom-wankers' server? (Score:1)
Re:ars digita CHAIRS! (Score:1)
The job is great, but at the old job I sat on an Aeron. I miss it.
Re:Resources for learning Lisp/Scheme? (Score:1)
Takes 9 months to learn to be MIT student (Score:1)
one of the top nerds to MIT where you are just
an average nerd is so overwhelming that takes
months to adjust.
MIT has a metaphor for this: "A MIT education is
like taking a sip from a firehose."
University of Phoenix (Score:1)
A course is four or eight all-evening sessions
for a month. One course at a time.
The people you are around make the difference (Score:1)
The professors at MIT, whom you do have access to,
will be the ones who have written the textbooks
(you'll be using the drafts that will be years
ahead of those in bookstores).
You'll be surrounded by nerds, all with 150+IQs.
That is a mind-blowing experience.
OF course you can be timid, not soak this up,
and end up with the same result as State U.
This doesn't guarantee you a better paying job
than somewhere else. However there is more to
life than money. I found four years in nerd
heaven/hell to be well worth it.
One course at a time (Score:1)
Re:ArsDigita's take on Zope (Score:1)
Re:ArsDigita's take on Zope (Score:1)
I said it was internal because there are no links to it from the ArsDigita website. You have to know the URL.
Re:ArsDigita's take on Zope (Score:1)
Bravo - that hasn't been done before (in my memory)!
Re:Nice idea, but ... (Score:1)
But what about the big iron? (Score:1)
Re:GNU your life ... (Score:1)
Well, I just knocked this [gla.ac.uk] off. The lettering's a little wonky, and perhaps someone more skilled with the gimp could get rid of the headphones, maybe put tux where the imac handle is...
Why LISP is nice (Score:1)
LISP is very elegant. Because of the simplicity, it is an easy language to do proofs in (and for). Also, because "everything's a list", data and program are easy to merge, making things like AI much easier to do (for instance, you want to change a procedure on the fly and then pass it as data--no problem).
If you've never used LISP/Scheme/Guile, I suggest you try it--it's a great experience.
However, I agree with your main point: There's nothing special about using Emacs that makes a person a coding god (or vice versa).
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
Photo.net (Score:1)
--
Re:I'm waiting for Oracle 8.1.6 (Score:1)
The installer is badly broken, but if you're a little creative, it's easy to get it going.
BTW, I was ready to start ArsDigita's psets and set up an interview, but your "ArsDigita is just not a very fun place to work for people who want to have an easy life, weekends with the kids" comment in the original /. thread turned me away.
I'm not so concerned with an easy life, but time with my daughter is a necessity, not a luxury. I found it strange that someone who values time with his dogs so highly can be disparaging of those who value time with their children.
[OT] Where is the RMS interview? (Score:1)
Does anyone know the status on the RMS interview?
As A History Major... (Score:2)
It's a noble way of giving back, Phillip. Thanks for doing it. It will let alot more humanities majors like me contribute.
I attended night school to get where I am today (programming enterprise Java systems on Wall Street), but only because some enlightened employers paid for my education. Not everyone has lucky breaks like that. You're a great guy to notice that.
I've always wanted to take course 6 at MIT. Thanks for the chance. I'll be following the lectures online.
Jon Steiner (jon@htmhell.com)
"Heavy Duty"? I think not... (Score:2)
David E. Weekly [weekly.org]
Re:Populist Crap (Score:2)
Don't sweat it- I probably went to high school with most of them
~luge
Re:Elitist delusions (Score:2)
~luge
Speaking of incomprehension.. (Score:2)
Regards,
Ben
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:2)
Say what you want about our school system, I won't defend it, but to me, this seems to be cutting the percentage of people who can attend down to about 1% of the population, and frankly, most people that smart or motivated probably have the money to pay to go back to school if they'd like to, or have found something they enjoy doing already.
Of course, if I could take the ACT now, I could probably score a 32, I didn't even get Trig until my senior year in high school, and my math score killed me:
Taken spring of '93:
Overall: 30
Math: 24
English: 28
Science Reasoning: 33
Reading Comprehension: 36
So what's my point? My degree is in Psych, I could see myself wanting to do something like this someday, but if _I_ don't qualify, I feel a lot of people who would benefit from this program won't either...
---
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:2)
In both cases, the average class/section will be taught by a graduate student and you'll be quite lucky if the professor even knows the names of ten people in the entire course.
That's a laugh. My freshman physics recitation (8.01) was taught by Alan Guth (an almost-certain Nobel prize winner in Physics for his work on cosmology). He knew my name within two class sessions - but that was easy, because there were only 18 of us in the recitation.
Maybe that was a fluke, but I don't think so - because my introductory computer science recitation (6.001) was taught by Rod Brooks. Yeah, the guy who created AI robots with insect-like intelligence (his current project is a artificial human).
Or let's take a look at my sophomore year, when my Computer Systems Engineering recitation was taught by Ron Rivest, "the R in RSA." I enjoyed that so much I took his Computer and Network Security class the next term. And he remembered me!
Mind you, these are just recitations - the lectures were taught by equally luminous professors. Like my 8-person topology seminar with James Munkres, who is basically the top guy in the field. Or my graduate AI class with Patrick Winston. Or any of several classes by Marvin Minsky or Noam Chomsky.
Lest I be accused of name-dropping, this illustrates the point quite clearly: you really can get a personalized education from the very best in a field if you go to a Really Expensive School. If you have the opportunity, go for it!
Re:pretty unimpressive (Score:2)
I think that he could have said pretty much the same thing without that 'preaching from on-high' tone.
He could have conveyed some small bit of respect for his audience.
In fact, the only times he came across as anything other than pedantic, was in response to questions about his photography and writings. Very much like a real professor at a real college, when asked about his 'research interests'.
So I guess he's well on his way to being a Keeper of the Ivory Tower - even if it is not accredited.
It's a choice (Score:2)
But I'm saying that it is certainly possible to do everything ArsDigita wants... just minus the space and time filler that school normally has instead of learning.
-AS
9 courses in 9 months? Heh... (Score:2)
CIT, for example, it would be normal to take 15 or 16 courses in 9 months. For 4 or 5 years...
So, even if it's barely enough time for human reproduction, if we're assuming that ArsDigita students are of the same caliber as MIT, CIT, Stanford, etc, 9 months of intense important classes could conceivably equal 2 years at CIT, without the distractions of core classes, or GEs, or social activities.
I think it would work ^^
But I'm biased
-AS
Resources for learning Lisp/Scheme? (Score:2)
I "forgot" to learn Lisp during my CSE undergrad college years. Now I regret it!
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:2)
I disagree. First of all, if you are talking about going to college as opposed to not going, then I would argue that the main benefit is intellectual stimulation: your brain is forced to learn/understand stuff and that's good for it. The key word (when speaking about colleges) is "forced" -- sure, you can learn the same stuff by yourself in half time, but people in general are too lazy to do it without a big stick (e.g. a project deadline) hanging over them.
Second, if your are talking about going to a first-rank college as opposed to a fifth-rank college, then IMHO the main benefit is the quality of people around you. I know that IQ tests (like SAT) are not perfect, but so far nobody has come up with anything better. And I don't think anybody wants to dispute that an average student at MIT is way smarter than an average student at Bumfuck, South Dakota community college.
The requirement reeks of elitism and discrimination against those who do not have the opportunity to take review courses or other such techniques to artifically increase a person's score
Highly doubtful. [brag] I've never taken any review courses "or other such techniques", but in all three standardized tests that I passed I scored in the 99% percentile. [/brag] Does it prove that I am very smart? No. All it proves is that I am very good at taking standardized tests. Review courses, as far as I've heard, can help somewhat but they are not going to increase your score by 50%.
Kaa
Re:Still a typical MIT bigot? (Score:2)
That made me start thinking about how I actually use these tools - I realized that in fact I can tab through a whole dialog and probably never need to leave the keyboard, even to launch the dialog in the first place! So why does the dialog seem so slow and annoying?
That's when the thought that it was the simply the amount of data needed for the program to perform an operation was so much greater than what I had to provide in a well stocked text environment.
I only posted again because I wanted to point out that when many people complain about mouse based input, they may be wrong about what they really hate just as I was - I think there are many cases where mouse based input may be the best thing to do as long as using the mouse means being able to enter less information or provide a quicker entry of information than would be possible with a keyboard.
I think many programs could learn from this - for instance all you RAD tool makers, how about letting me enter a quick table of attribute names then expanding them all out into Strings attributes with get/set methods with one keystroke? How about multi-selecting attributes and changing the type of the whole lot at once?
Blue colar programmers (Score:2)
You seem to agressively go after the cream of the crop... It sure is nice to have them work for you but they are a scarce resource (as you well know.)
Do you find value in mid-level programmers? Emacs is cool, but using it alone as IDE presents quite a barrier-to-entry/learning curve for new employees / mid-level programmers.
We rather successfully employ a range of developers with and without formal CS education. We are able to do this by having an easy to use IDE & established coding practices. Our toolset and techniques make it easy for anyone to produce quality code. (We make it so that it is easier to do it right than to do it wrong.) Our software is no less sophisticated for it. It also makes recruitment and payroll less of a headache.
--Mark Denovich, Software Development Manager
Re:Elitist delusions (Score:2)
I do give a damn about CS. Let's look at the US News rankings on CS programs:
1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Stanford University (CA)
3. University of California-Berkeley
4. Carnegie Mellon University (PA)
5. University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
6. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
7. University of Texas-Austin
8. Cornell University (NY)
9. University of Washington
10. Princeton University (NJ)
11. Purdue University-West Lafayette (IN)
12. University of Wisconsin-Madison
13. California Institute of Technology
14. Georgia Institute of Technology
15. University of Southern California
16. University of California-Los Angeles
17. Rice University (TX)
18. University of California-San Diego
19. Johns Hopkins University (MD)
19. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY)
19. University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Gosh, about half are public. Where's Duke?
Looking at other technical fields, I still don't see Duke in the top rankings for engineering and hard science. I do see a lot public institutions, however. What's up with that?
Re:Arrogance is okay but incompetence isn't (Score:2)
There is never an excuse for arrogance in front of a customer. In fact, there's rarely an excuse for arrogance, period. Saying that your brother and Cesar are Harvard grads and can't help being arrogant is no good. Perhaps Harvard needs to teach some customer facing skills in their MBA program.
You might want to cool it on the glitz in front of the customers, too. I can't think of anyone who would be anything but preturbed and/or intimidated by the description I read of your office surroundings. Neutral ground is usually the best for project proposals and presentations. It's okay to go out and reserve a nice hotel conference room, perhaps even spend a lot of money. Hotels are generally conservative and less intimidating than glitzy offices.
Re:Jane Humanist's point of view (Score:2)
I'm in a similar position, but I self educated in CS theory for many years, so that when I finally went back to night school, I already had not just a strong practical coding background, but a considerable knowledge of algorithms and discrete math. I was a a member of ACM and IEEE and attended many of the local professional development sessions. This served me extremely well when I did go back to take formal CS classes.
I spent quite some time going to BU's night school. Much, it turns out, depends on your teacher; the BU night school had some of the best and some of the worst. I learned compiler theory from a guy who designed optimizing compilers for massively parallel computers from Thinking Machines; mixing practical and theoretical background just doesn't get better than that. I learned databases from this guy who was, as far as I could see, some dBase quack who knew less database theory and practice than I did. However, I still made good use of my time in his class.
I think the real problem with the Ars Digita concept is that in a field like IT, education cannot ever stop. I think it would be entirely reasonable for a company to allow a professional programmer to spend 20% of his time in skill building activities. I think this would actually help companies.
This might be an important uncovered role for Open Source -- to provide alternative areas for development of professional status and skills. Does anyone care if Larry Wall has a CS degree?
Improving the (Score:2)
Re:About Zope (Score:2)
The main point here is that ACS and Zope are, in many ways, apples and oranges: At the heart of ACS is a set of integrated data models that backend a variety of applications, e.g., discussion forums: there's a users table, where information about actual users of the ACS-backed site is stored, and there's tables that depend on users, e.g., user-contributed forum postings, comments on static pages, etc.
Contrast this with Zope: Browse the UML model for ZODB [zope.org], and you'll find a DB class, a Connection class, a Transaction class, a Persistent class, but no DiscussionForum class or ForumPosting class.
This contrast doesn't suggest that ACS is superior to Zope. It just illustrates how ACS is different from Zope: Zope does deal with "lower" (i.e., closer to the computer) things like databases and object persistence, whereas ACS deals only with "higher" things like human beings and the things they say.
The term "higher" in this context is not meant to be a measure of quality. Rather, it refers to location in the stack of software layers that comprise a database-backed web app. ACS focuses on what goes into the "database" part of the problem, and Zope provides (among other things) a solution for the "-backed web app" part of the problem.
I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't take data models from the ACS and build a web app on top of it using Zope, instead of AOLserver.
I realize that this level of analysis is simplistic, but I hope that it helps to clarify Philip's statement about levels of abstraction.
Another good question: The short answer is that the current version of ACS (3.2) does not provide tools that lets "designers/content managers" publish web pages on their own (though they can publish certain structured types of content like news items and press announcements). Zope, on the other hand, does.One of our programmers in Berkeley (Karl Goldstein) actually developed a content management system in the course of building a site for one of our customers: PogoPet [pogopet.com]. Karl's system is in use on a number of ArsDigita-built sites, and our plan is to roll it back into the ACS this summer.
Re:SAT scores... (Score:2)
Ok, a course may tell you how to guess on multiple choice questions. Yippee - yeah, some of them guarantee a 100 point gain (as long as you start out under a certain level). Not tough.
You *should* know a fair amount of english words by the time you are a junior in high school. TV, books, *class* - these things all help.
If you can't understand the questions or the math problems on the SAT, you just might not have the aptitude for a serious tech education. Remember that the minimum score for this is just around what... the 55th percentile. If you aren't smarter than half the people out there...
Ability to learn those concepts though a defined chunk of time (10/11 grade levels) *is* a measure of how smart/capable someone could be. Not the best, but still fairly accurate.
(note: I'm biased - a near perfect score will do that to you...)
Re:BZZZT... wrong (Score:2)
When I was considering colleges I considered MIT (breifly, before I realized I'd be miserable any farther north than I am, I can't stand cold weather), Caltech, or JHU; but I have absolutely no regrets about the time I spent at UMCP. I even stuck around to get my MS.
When I was a junior there, a high school friend of mine who'd gone to JHU transferred to UMCP. He said the UMCP program was much better, and about a tenth the cost. (An impression that's been confirmed by two friends of mine with engineering degrees from JHU.) So don't beleive that just because you're paying more, you're necessarily getting more.
Are there things that I would have learned at MIT that I didn't learn at UMCP? Possibly. (OTOH, my studies of non-technical fields may have been stronger at UMCP.) Are there things that I would have learned at MIT that I can't learn on my own, given the foundation I got at UMCP? Doubtful.
Now, I wouldn't let anyone tell you that such-and-such school is out of your reach. OTOH, just because you could afford something somehow doesn't mean it's the best buy. (I could afford the payments on a new Ferrari, but my little green Toyota is much more sensible.) It's really, really nice not to have to deal with student loans.
Well, it's quite different when it's someone else's money, isn't it? The only classes at UMCP I ever had that were taught by grad students were acting, piano, and weight training; I don't really think these were a negative impact on my academic progress. B-)Re:Populist Crap (Score:2)
Re:Open Source RDBMS (Score:2)
I'm waiting for Oracle 8.1.6 (Score:2)
Arrogance is okay but incompetence isn't (Score:2)
So give me a call at 617-386-4112 or email philg@mit.edu and let me know what we did wrong. I promise to send you one of my prints and an aD fleece (they are very nice!).
Zope is good! (Score:2)
the SAT scores are just a minimum (Score:2)
Re:Photo.net Slashdotted (Score:2)
Besides, I think the box that runs photo.net is only a hp box with a couple of 180mhz processors.
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:2)
And the larger universities don't even mean that they have the better profs even. At the University of Manitoba where I went, one of our profs is doing research into data mining and was beating MIT and other larger universities at many compitions, or at least being in the top rankings.
And I can just say I'm glad I didn't have to take SATs.
Check your links! (was Re:GNU your life ...) (Score:2)
Indeed it is, but check your links!
Should be http://www.paylars.com/paranoia.jpg [paylars.com]
Cheers,
Andy
Re:BZZZT... wrong (Score:2)
The difference between a score in the 1500s and a score in the 1300s or 1400s has to do with vocabulary and the ability to detect tricks and use a modicum of creativity.
When I was applying to college (not too seriously), I made the mistake of playing the SAT game well but not playing the admission/interview game as well. Don't forget that good SAT scores don't guarantee acceptance, especially if you're a male Asian from the East Coast (cough).
Open Source RDBMS (Score:2)
Have you used any of the Open Source databases like MySQL or Postgres enough to recommend one of them for a light-usage site?
Or perhaps none of the Open Source databases are yet ready for production use?
Phillip:
I talk about this a bit in http://photo.net/wtr/aolserver/introduction-2.html .
The bottom line is that for people who care about data integrity, concurrency, and 24x7 redundant operation, there really is not an adequate substitute for commercial RDBMes (even the commercial object database companies haven't been able to make any headway against the heavy-duty RDBMS systems).
The implication here is ominous to me, in that he seems to be implying that someone interested in building a community oriented site shouldn't even bother trying to use an Open Source RDBMS.
I know that what he says is true about MySQL [mysql.com] (for lack of transaction support, and the fact that it isn't truly Free) and PostgreSQL isn't yet 100% SQL2-compliant [postgresql.org], but is it possible that
b. Borland/Inprise Interbase 6.0 [interbase.com] could be appropriate?
It is fully GPL'ed, fully SQL2-compliant, and very fully-featured compared to the alternatives. It is somewhat slower than PostgreSQL (and much slower than MySQL, of course) with more simultaneous connections, but if we could garner enough support from the Open Source community to build a decent threading mechanism, I think it could easily beat PostgreSQL in the long run. It woulde be incredibly useful to have an Open Source alternative to Oracle.
There are other features that would probably take some time to hack together to make Interbase 6.0 competitive with Oracle, but if everybody just takes Phillip's advice (no offense, Phillip, I agree with 95% of what you say) instead of helping to develop alternative tools, we will never have an option at all.
Just my two cents.
OT: Travels with Samantha (Score:2)
I remember reading TwS when it first hit the fledgeling web, and was one of the first truly cool things therein. Great layout, great design, and pretty damned well written. The only problem was that I eventually came to the conclusion that PG was the exception to the rule that travel broadens the mind.
I hope he's grown up a bit since then.
As an aside, has he made sure that the American Chemical Society (registered as ACS) is OK with his choice of acronyms?
Re:SAT scores... (Score:2)
You got it backwards. The SAT does not so much reveal an intrinsic quality of a person as abstract as "aptitude" or intellectual ability, but rather a person's accomplishments in the specific areas of 1) being able to take the SAT, 2) knowing the definitions of certain words, 3) minimal comprehension, and 4) rudimentary math skills. All of these are *learned*, not a measure of how "smart" or "capable" a person is.
Typical students (Score:2)
A typical student has 3-5 years to complete his/her program. Ars student will have 9 month - that's barely enough time for human reproduction.
However it is typical for colleges to offer programs like this one for a year but there you pay lot's of $ for that year. So this is what Ars will become, a free college.
Re:Check your links! (was Re:GNU your life ...) (Score:2)
Re:IDE = integrated development environment? (Score:2)
Thanks for answering my question, by the way. I completely agree with you that a fancy tool is no substitute for a clever programmer; but if you have a clever programmer AND an effective tool you can achieve even greater things. While a master carpenter can produce beautiful woodwork using only hand tools, by using power tools he can do the same job faster and with less effort. As you may have guessed, I do a lot of data modelling. I like to use powerdesigner, as it meshes with my work style quite well -- but I also use vi and some awk & sed scripts I developed just as often. A good programmer will use whatever tool or tools work best for him.
Thanks for the link to the problem set. I'm going to tackle it this weekend :-) You'll have to forgive me if I use Sybase instead of Oracle, as I already have Sybase up & running on my Linux box.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Re:ArsDigita's take on Zope (Score:2)
Ok, time to quit reading the tobacco trial transcripts and FOIAing documents. This isn't some vast conspiracy to snub out another product.
Yeah, this document is so internal that ANYONE can read it. That's hardcore internal insider off the record stuff.
Obviously they used Excel to make it impossible for Linux users to open. Very clever. You outwitted them, good work.
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:2)
I don't know exactly what the SAT and associated processes involve, but I gathered that clubs one is involved in at school and even sports (?!?) make up a part of it - I can't understand this at all.
So getting back to the interview, I would say that these are certinally not any sort of indicator as to weather or not someone is suitable for a course... But then I find the whole $$American higher education system a little hard to believe.
Re:pretty unimpressive (Score:2)
No, he could not have conveyed the same thing without that preaching from on-high tone. Phillip is arrogant, everybody who knows him knows that. But smart people don't feel threatened by arrogance. The question is, is he smart, and Phillip is pretty bright. To really smart people, Phillip's approach is showing respect. It's the smart person's equivalent of talking trash or head-butting. It says "I'm smart and if you are too, it won't scare you. He doesn't want to sound all warm and fuzzy because then he'd just have to plow through more applications from people who would suddenly feel like they belonged at ADU.
you don't have to spend a week interviewing a student
His original statement ("spend a week interviewing each student") could alternatively be parsed to mean that he doesn't have a week to interview all the students in toto. See? the ability to come up with all the various parsings and not go chasing after only one of them is the mark of a person who got high SAT scores. That's what Ars Digita is looking for.
P.S. I'm just talkin' trash here too, so don't get all hot under the collar: this is fun! :)
Re:$50 million (Score:2)
LISP, like Pascal, can be a great teaching tool, but is otherwise worthless.
Pascal is not a great teaching tool. It's "good" in the sense that it's fairly simple. It has a few features that take you from the realm of programming into "CS" (recursion, call by value v. reference, lexical scope), but its union types are broken and not typesafe. It's better than Fortran, ok. But lexical scope is truly interesting when contrasted with dynamic scope for which you need Lisp. Recursion's ok, but tail recursion is startling (the ultimate goto). Objects, heap storage gc, erasing the distinction between code and data, none of that is easy to explore with Pascal (except in the Turing Complete sense). Smart people taught me LISP decades ago, and now the rest of the world has "invented" a tiny piece of it in the form of XML for which they've written a bunch of sucky parsers. And the worst part, they don't even realize it.
Good luck with the school, though. It'll make the world a little better.
Another point of view (Score:2)
I am somewhat of a newbie so I feel good that I finally have something to contribute to this forum, since I have some direct experience with Philip Greenspun and his work.
I stumbled across his web site and I thought it was very interesting. I emailed him and asked to sit in on his upcoming 6.916 class (Web Application Development) at MIT. He never wrote back. (Later at the intermission of a lecture he was giving, he checked his email messages--over 7000 messages received during a two week period.) I showed up on the first day of class and he said I was welcome to audit the class. I didn't have to plead my case, which was good because there was absolutely nothing for him to gain by accomodating my request. I was offered a user account, access to servers, help from TAs, help from Ars Digita staff(!), etc, etc. Please note that I am not an MIT student, I just walked in off the street.
One thing I have to say is that Phil not arrogant but is, in fact, hilarious. I crack up constantly during class. What some may take to be arrogance is honesty and humor. In fact, I would say that Phil is actually a very humble and self-deprecating person. I have seen this firsthand over the course of months during his interactions with students, TAs, and people attending his outside (free) lecture events.
I get the sense that some people feel he is pushing one set of tools over another, but he is not an evangelist for any particular server, database, scripting language or whatever. This is very obvious in class. The point is to use what is appropriate and available for the job at hand. Why and how he arrived at a particular architecture is very well and plainly laid out in his writing, and he frequently points out the shortcomings of various components of the present architecture.
One big thing I think some people are missing is that he is offering a proven open source toolkit for constructing the software part of heavy duty web site for free. I once worked at a dotcom that spent tons of money for crapware to do what ACS will do. I work as a web developer at a huge mutual fund company that is also spending tons of money to implement a system that I already know will suck. For anyone who wants to start or expand a dotcom or dotorg, it is like Phil has written you check for a million dollars.
Maybe ACS isn't for you, but if it meets your needs, why start from scratch and reinvent the wheel? If you are that religious about your components then just check out the ACS data model, it is all out there in the open, and just take what you want to use.
Nice idea, but ... (Score:3)
Uh, from my expierence this not the way to go. Having studied mathematics I got the impression that complex concepts need some time, I remember a professor saying about the tensorproduct that "you don't understand it, you get used to it" and consequently always introduces that concept to first grade students.
This should apply to other fields too.
And my feeling is that I get some more insight into some things even without actually looking at them/thinking about them. There seems to be a mechanism somewhere back in our brain which put structure into knowledge, but this thingy is not very fast.
Re:Still a typical MIT bigot? (Score:3)
You cannot replace "Emacs" in that statement with "any text editor". Evangelizing aside (at least as much as is possible) I'll try and explain why I think that to be so.
To start with, Programming tools run the gamut from "you must know every ounce of code in the system" (text editors) to "Look at this picture of the whole system, the tool will manipulate everything for you" (Rational Rose, TogetherJ). Things like IDE's are just a step down from RAD tools like Rational Rose, indeed the Rose type tools slowly march downward to taking over IDE functionality (being able to generate more and more code and even compile for you), just as the IDE's slowly move toward functionality usually thought of in a RAD tool (like generating classes or code metric reporting).
The reason that I think his statement about Emacs to be true is twofold - first, that you can perform in Emacs almost any operation a RAD tool can do in terms of structuring code. Secondly, you can do many thing in Emacs a lot faster because in almost every IDE or RAD tool they do not let you use the keyboard enough when it is appropriate and do not let you customize what happens to a great enough extent.
In Emacs, I can write small macros and/or lisp fragments to generate get/set methods or whole types of classes. I can write code to apply design patterns (such as Proxy, Container, Factory, and so forth). I can refactor classes that have been badly split or not split in the right way to bring cohesiveness and beauty back to the whole.
In short, I can do almost everything apart from some of the more detailed reporting that I can do with a RAD tool - the only difference is that a lot of the diagram is in my head instead of on the screen.
To further my point I'll take a simple example of generating a get/set method in a class. Using TogetherJ (currently my favorite RAD tool by a wide margin over Rose) or Forte (great Java IDE) is about the same - I am presented by a dialog listing the attribute name I wish to have, the type of data, and so forth. I have to go through the dialog and then dismiss it - while I can use the keyboard for pretty much the whole dialog I usually at least had to use the mouse to initiate the action.
In Emacs, all I have to do is type something like "String userName", activate some function, and get
The difference is that in the first case, the tools make sure to ask me for many details about what I want - this makes going through the dialog slower as I have to think about each option. In the case of Emacs I can totally customize what I want to happen based on the most minimal input possible. If too much happens (I didn't want a set method but one was generated) I can quickly remove that one section more quickly than I can with even a mouse (with the Meta-movement commands. Sculpting by carving away something that is there is always easier than adding many small parts together to make a whole.
I've tried to think for a long time about just why I am so much more productive in Emacs than I am in an IDE (even for GUI work, I can put together a whole panel full of complex elements a lot faster in Emacs than in a GUI IDE). I think it really is that Emacs helps you to be able to do complex operations quickly and move around code fast enough that you can maintain a large picture of a system in your head through constant refresh.
I do think modern RAD tools like TogetherJ have finally started to be useful - mostly because finally they can backparse EVERYTHING I've done outside the tool and let me manipulate things from there. That way I have access to really great things like automatic UML diagramming based on what I've actually done (not what I think I'll be doing) and sequence diagrams to help me show possible flow through the system.
The time has come when the tools we have are at last useful, but Emacs is still for the most part the best primary means of creation.
Re:Why do people go to college? (Score:3)
Education is what you make of it. The quality of instruction often *can and will* be worse at some cheaper schools, but that isn't necessarily a money factor, and, as I think most
Smaller class sizes and non-lecture based learning also helps a lot with the student/faculty interaction problems you mentioned. There were several professors at my school that took the time to make sure they knew everyone by sight, even in the mid to large lectures. That really helps later on. It makes it easier to talk to them, and helps out when reccomendations come around
I've already posted some of my thoughts on the SATs... and most of your thoughts are right on target. I have concerns on requiring SATs for this program, but, hey... they *do* need to restrict is somewhat. Of course, there are many people who never took the SAT (maybe the ACT or some other test, or maybe it wasn't recent...). Do they maintain another path for these people to enter? Certainly there are a lot of qualified people who never had the opportunity to fill in lots of circles with a #2 pencil.
I don't think their score was all that remarkable, so it should be low enough to counteract some of the socioeconomic factors... my high school graduating class (~100 students, public school) *averaged* about what this required score was... this shouldn't be too limiting. I think the national average is ~1000 - not too tough.
If they took IQ scores instead, people would have the same gripes.
Re:Still a typical MIT bigot? (Score:3)
Also, just because one example of a Lisp program (Yahoo store) doesn't work a well as you'd like doesn't mean Lisp is a bad language. Think of all the shitty C/C++ or Perl code that sucks even harder.... By your metric you've just eliminated those languages from any kind of competition.
Autocad is (or was) largely written in Lisp, and Nichimen graphics http://www.nichimen.com [nichimen.com] sells one of the more popular 3D graphics engines for artists of console games, all written in LISP that's right, high end 3D graphics in Lisp...
Face it, most people who think Lisp is just for ivory towers, or is too slow, or blablabla don't know anything about the language...
For Scheme see : Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, and Scheme and the Art of Programming...
For Common Lisp (the industrial grade standardized lisp) see Paul Grahams books "On Lisp" and "ANSI Common Lisp"
Download one of the free Lisps: clisp.sourceforge.net or www.cons.org/cmucl...
Read "comp.lang.lisp" archives...
Photo.net Slashdotted (Score:3)
When the system recovers, I would be interested to see the stats. What was the failure point? The database connection? AOLserver?
Steve
the biggest ACS communities are about 600,000 user (Score:3)
About 1/3rd of ArsDigita customers started as raw startups (www.infirmation.com, away.com, uslaw.com (recently linked as AltaVista's exclusive Law channel)). We've watched them grow. I wish I could tell you that they've all started to turn a profit because ACS is so great. But as far as I know they are all more concerned about building market value, company size, etc. Many of them seem to be getting acquired for big bucks, raising additional stupefying sums of venture capital, etc. So they are achieving their business objectives but I doubt that very many of our startup customers have to pay income tax.
Anyway, ACS per se can scale quite nicely if you budget for a big RDBMS server and a rack of small Web servers and a load balancing switch (about $300,000 all together). But the users might not be happy because there will be too many comments on each page, etc. It is up to the publisher to use the user groups features intelligent to split up the community a bit.
We do have someone else talking to the public! (Score:3)
and they end up having to learn Tcl and AOLserver programming as a subtask (we never explicitly teach it them; they are expected to pick it up).
The whole point of Tcl is that you're not supposed to have to be a programmer to use it! Read Ousterhout's original paper on why scripting languages are a good idea.
This isn't a theoretical point. We've taught software engineering for Web apps to several hundred people now. We've used AOLserver/Tcl precisely because we don't have to spend any class time teaching it. We could use a Java version of our toolkit for future courses but I'm not sanguine about the prospects of introducing Java as a two-hour subtask during pset 1.
Anyway, we do have marketing shills at ArsDigita now, but I feel like the Slashdot community deserves a response from our tech staff (of whom I'm still titular head).
Bottom line as far as I can tell is that there are a lot of folks on Slashdot who want to believe that they are smart even though they received poor SAT scores and did not graduate from college. They think that ArsDigita U is passing judgement on people who didn't graduate from college or got trashed on the SATs. But it isn't so! We're simply trying to copy Harvard and MIT as much as practical and thereby reduce our risk of failure. I didn't even graduate from high school so I'm hardly in a position to call people losers because they don't have impeccable credentials.
IDE = integrated development environment? (Score:3)
If so, I'm a big believer. That's what we had on the old MIT Lisp Machine back in the late 1970s and it was much more productive than programming with raw tools. The thing that the Lisp Machine lacked was a database for persistent storage and hence it really isn't practical to use that old environment for developing Web apps.
So anyway, I love great programming tools and wish that we had better ones for the work that I do. But I don't like to get religious about it. A really good programmer in the end will be able to debug a system with print statements.
About Zope (Score:3)
GNU your life ... (Score:3)
This is rather amusing hehehe [paylars.com]. Wonder if someone could change that to GNU, BSD, Linux, or heck lots of things apply there.
What I want to get at is that I'm really glad that people slashdot sends questions to in interviews get seriously answered. And these are people with rather busy days that need to answer these questions. Good job /.
Reasons LISP is cool: (Score:3)
1: base support for complex types. How many times can you write a linked list before puking? Run-time type checking on dynamic tuples? Can you even do that in C? And for the record, 'strings'. Amen. C? No. (I don't know why you've grouped C, Tcl, and Perl together; I use Perl, elisp, Haskell, and a little Java).
2: Functions are data, vice versa & lambda calculus. Where do you think this came from?
3: A real, honest to god object system. I spit on your C++ structures-with-inherited-functions.
4: GC.
5: Correctness. Fucks' sake, all I ask for is an overflow should degrade to bignum. Not even Java does this. LISP's philosophy seems to demand that operations should not fail due to hardware design.
6: Simplicity. You can write a Scheme interpreter in one page; moreover, the concepts are all simple.
7: Ease-of-use. The interpreter doesn't have to be baby-sat through strong typing. It infers necessary types via what operations happen to a piece of data.
Sounds fun to me. Better than running down memory leaks, writing complex list eval fxns in C, bizarre type casts, and no lambda calculus.
I hope you can see the point that Greenspun tries to make, which is drawing attention to how a language should really be written. Languages evolve, and if we shout, maybe our voices will be heard.
Now, I use Perl, because Perl uses many of the above concepts (some poorly, like GC). Everyone else in my company uses C++; I'm slowly bringing them around. Where LISP comes into this is: I _really_wish they had been taught LISP in school, just to train them to think in the higher patterns that LISP allows. Working on C/C++/Java is too low-level and too inconsistent; people get lost and programs get buggy.
My complaint with functional programming circa 2000 AD is that the 'referential integrity' whores have crippled new FP languages for IO. Good-bye scripting...
So, you've reiterated your position; which we've heard like 4-5 times now. Your contention that LISP has no functional value is hopefully negated by the above. (and the polysemous use of 'functional'{think FP}) But you have failed to inform us why your preferred languages are better, other than that they are popular (which we already knew).
I refrain from defending Emacs, in that others have spoken far fairer and clearer than I. But xemacs-mule is much easier to work with than any other multi-language editor I've found.
Naive (Score:3)
If he thinks an unaccredited school's degree is going to be worth anything, he's smoking serious crack.
The regional accreditation system (see here [edupoint.com] for some information about accreditation) is not perfect, but there has to be some standard in place. Accreditation not only takes into account academic standards, but also financial standards to make sure the university is not going to go bankrupt.
Yes, you can get a degree from a non-accredited University. But where the rubber meets the road is when you try and get a more advanced degree (Masters or Doctorate) at a "real" university. That's when you find out your l33t degree is worth exactly zero.
Not to mention that when your employer looks at your degree, all they will see is a big red "non-accredited".
Bottom line, if he wants this thing to succeed, he better get regionally accredited or it is doomed to failure.
--
Populist Crap (Score:4)
Someone else here pointed out that a guy at some small college is beating the pants off MIT at something. That is all well and good. The trick is that the rest of his department, and the other departments at the school, aren't beating MIT. They aren't coming close (no offense.) Consistency counts for something, and that is something most State U's don't have.
Oh, and one other thing- my classmates are of generally a ridiculously high quality of academic and intellectual ability. There are some exceptions, but they are just that- exceptions. At the average State U, the average student is just that- average. Being surrounded by other students who really give a shit makes a huge difference in the quality of your education, and that is something that a big State U just can't provide. You can call me a snob, but then go look at the stats for how many students in state colleges have to retake high-school level algebra and writing before they are even qualified to begin college work. Then go look at Duke's stats and see what percentage of kids have already passed Calc before they got into Duke.
No matter how you want to slice it, there is a difference between selective private institutions and big state Us. The resources(=small class sizes), selectivity, and across-the-board quality of professors and departments are just a step above. I wish this weren't the case- I look forward to the day when everyone can get the education I've been privileged to have. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this is already the case.
~luge(couldn't agree more about SATs, though)
ArsDigita's take on Zope (Score:4)
The document is actually very good and covers many of the advantages of Zope over the infrastructure that ACS [arsdigita.com] is built on (AOLserver, Tcl, Oracle, ACS utilities). There's a "killer app alert" for Squishdot [zope.org].
Weirdly, it doesn't seem to touch on Philip's arguments regarding the need for concurrency and insanely high performance.
Take a look at ArsDigita File Storage [arsdigita.com]. They spend a lot of time analyzing their competitors!
$50 million (Score:4)
On the Emacs front, it just happens to be the text editor that everyone I know uses so I employed the term "Emacs" for concreteness. Obviously Emacs per se doesn't help you understand a data model (though I do like to run SQL*Plus in an Emacs shell because it is easy to cut and paste queries).
Anyway, I'm not a Lisp programmer anymore! I write Java, PL/SQL, SQL, (gasp) Tcl, and sometimes even Perl!
Why do people go to college? (Score:4)
Oh, and the requirement for a certain score on the SATs? Frankly, the SATs are more a measure of socioeconomic status and ability/training to take the test than of any innate quality of intelligence. The requirement reeks of elitism and discrimination against those who do not have the opportunity to take review courses or other such techniques to artifically increase a person's score over what he or she would have ordinarily scored. Moreover, what precisely does the SAT measure? It certainly does not measure critical thinking skills, nor is it a predictor of future success (high school grades are significantly more reliable). Is it truly just for a university that nominally presupposes to offer open access and transparency to base their admissions to such a large degree on an indicator that lacks real validity and implicitly places certain groups at a distinct and quantifiable advantage?
BZZZT... wrong (Score:5)
Well, guess what, I think I've gotten my money's worth (well, my parents' money's worth).
Don't allow yourself (or others) to be held back by the notion that state schools are just as good as the Ivy League schools. They aren't. Regardless of how much money you have, if you're good enough to go to Harvard, there's a way for you to attend Harvard.
I have not taken any classes at MIT that are taught by grad students (the recitation sections are sometimes taught by grad students, but that's normal). In fact, the only class in recent memory that I've taken, that wasn't taught by a professor, was 6.916, Philip Greenspun's class (which was awesome, btw). Professors do actually know some of the students' names, you can visit most of them in their offices, etc. Some of the profs that teach freshman classes are hard to get to, though.
I do agree with your views on the SAT, it is partially just a game, and certain time/effort/money investments can be traded for higher scores. However, not many people, prep course or not, can break 1500 on the SATs. It is, at some level, some sort of indicator of critical thinking ability. If it were purely a measure of financial ability or "aristocracy", it would be thrown out immediately.
Most decent schools know that SAT scores don't mean much, and that's why there's stuff like an essay requirement, an interview, and teacher recommendations. It's the whole package that is considered, not just the SAT score.
Still a typical MIT bigot? (Score:5)
Bottom line is that Emacs + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer.
I brought this up when the AD university was announced, and I received quite a bit more ad hominems than I did real responses to my argument. My feelings about AD then are the same as they are now: this is coming from a person whose teaching is swayed by this bizarre bias towards LISP and Emacs. Honestly, why could the sentence above not be written as, "Bottom line is that a text editor + clever programmer will always crush a fancy commercial tool + weak programmer."? Is Emacs really so incredible that anyone not using it is not a good programmer (as Phillip implies)?
Let me reiterate my position: I think LISP and Emacs are used more for their religious value than their functional value. (Moreso LISP than Emacs, for people are actually using Emacs to develop things -- people in my office are doing it right now. But they're not writing in LISP, of course.) LISP, like Pascal, can be a great teaching tool, but is otherwise worthless. I asked people to tell me what has been written in LISP, and I received nebulous answers, "research projects," and ad hominems. However, if someone can produce some evidence for me that shows me that LISP is something more than just ivory tower bigotry (that means show me actual applications that were written in LISP and why the technical merits of LISP made it the optimal language to use for those applications), then my opinion about LISP will change. Since I see no evidence that LISP is anything but ivory tower bigotry, I think that Phillip's judgement must be questioned when he calls LISP "the most powerful and also easiest to use programming language ever developed."
A side note: are LISP people just jealous that C, Tcl, and Perl are much more useful (and thus used) than LISP?
And Phillip, if you're reading, I did not get a response to my last post. You can check it out here [slashdot.org]. I was enjoying the discussion and was hoping I could get some answers to my questions.
Flames, as always, will be ignored. And if you find yourself flaming me, then you are losing the argument.
SAT scores... (Score:5)
Speaking from personal experience (mine and my brother's) - we both scored well on the SAT verbal (760 and 800), but did either of us ever do a rough draft for our writing assignments? (nope) did we do things on time? (only when we felt like it) could we have gotten straight 'A's in English classes? (yes) did we? (no, we didn't care)
That score doesn't reveal any of that information (neither does the AP test for that matter...) - all it measures is your aptitude, not you accomplishments. Standardized testing is great for some things (like getting me into schools
maybe it would be time to upgrade from 180 MHz CPU (Score:5)
I slashdotted my own site! (Score:5)
I feel like an idiot. Generally I never publicly link these pages but just use them for my convenience in developing new content.
Doh!!!!!!!!
pretty unimpressive (Score:5)
Also we're lazy and don't want to spend a week interviewing each student.
um...that's pretty weak..you don't have to spend a week interviewing a student to get an idea of how dedicated/bright/talented he or she is...also:
That's because [SAT Scores] are a great indicator of someone's willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc.
Nope. Not true. SAT scores are a good indicator of future success which is very different from their "willingness and ability to sit down, do homework, take tests, etc." High SAT scores mean you'll likely be successful in the future because either 1) you are genuinely very adept at taking tests, or 2) you are rich and could afford tutoring, meaning you have a rich background and will be likely to have good contacts in the future. So what Ars Digita should be asking itself is is whether their admissions process can really separate between the two groups...and whether "test taking apititude" is something they care for at all... okay, and what about:
The university is more to benefit the instructors [snip] than the students.
umm.. this probably should be clarified a bit before anyone signs up..
ars digita arrogance (Score:5)
I couldn't help thinking about how the million dollars they wanted to charge us was going to go directly into stuff like the aeron chairs we were sitting on, the rooms full of sgi flat screen displays, and the ferrari out front.
Still, I'll admit that they do some great work on a very specific class of problems.