Are we really looking at the best group of people that the current president could find to do these roles that agree with his policy platform? There was no one else with relevant experience willing?
The guilt isn't due to the simple fact of being prosperous it's more about the prioritization of self-interest over that of a win-win option that helps the broader good.
Would you consider Germany's CDU/CSU to be close to the republicans in the US? I pegged them more as being Democrat's equivalents. Macron is also more of a US democrat then a republican.
Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.
That’s tricky- I’d say the modern CSU/CDU & Macron are closer in social policy to the Democrats but economically closer to the Republicans.
Looking at the CDU’s manifesto I think it’s overall more palatable to the Republicans. As the Democrats would likely never support corporate tax cuts or cannabis restrictions.
Yes a capacity increase from the developer side is great but it's supply side and we need to figure out how to accelerate transforming needs into demand. This is what I foresee developers turning into (at least some capable of this). Articulating logical solutions to be built to problems and evaluating results from what's generated to ensure it meets the needs.
Aka Devs can move up the chain into what was traditionally product roles to increase development of new projects. This is using the time they have regain from more menial tasks being automated away.
That's argument is easily contradicted by plenty of worldwide examples of opposition trying to use the courts to combat dictators. Dictators often ignore court decision they dislike because they have the ultimate power of enforcement.
Not quite. There was 1 TV in the median household in the 80s and 90s, which made TV a contested common resource from one point of view and a focal point of social gathering from another point of view.
The median American household today has >1 internet-enabled screens, many children from the age of 5-7 have their own "personal device".
90s TV at least had physical boundaries on its use. Most people couldn't watch TV in the bathroom for example. Phones and the Internet can be used anywhere at this point.
I think it could be argued that the language used in universities is unlikely to be the one used professionally. I remember when the derogatory term "Java school" was commonly used for schools that shoehorned Java in all courses just to try to match the language of the day in enterprises. It really should be about what is the best pedagogical tool to teach the concepts the student is expected to understand irrespective of future professional tools used. If racket exposes those concepts better without making it onerous on students to learn that's great.
When MIT switched from scheme to python for their undergrad classes there was a big debate here aboutit. I think the argument was that python won't make learning the concepts any harder but is less of an issue for students to learn and has some long term value professionally so win-win. I don't fully agree but I can see the logic.
It's not (just) that python is "easier" to learn than python (which I dispute - lisp is as easy to learn as a first language as any other. Depending on the language it may be a difficult second language though). The world had also changed radically since it was introduced into the curriculum:
"Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme — it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that’s all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered — you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc — you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.
And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."
> It's not (just) that python is "easier" to learn than python (which I dispute - lisp is as easy to learn as a first language as any other. Depending on the language it may be a difficult second language though). The world had also changed radically since it was introduced into the curriculum:
A lot of texts will use pseudo-code and it is (from my experience) easier for beginner programmers to see the relation between pseudo-code and Python than for many other languages.
I'm still surprised Sussman describes the 2000s as a "new" job whereas to me it's just mediocre soil from an unstable industry. Mucking around is not engineering.. it's alchemy.
The logical culmination is modern ML, where no engineering is involved. "If the thing fails on some case and kills somebody, train it more." This is voodoo, not engineering.
Given Sussman's aversion to mysterious black-box AI, that's an interesting observation. The curriculum change brings everyone one step closer to not really understanding how things work.
Of course, it's often pointed out, "Well, if you write in Scheme (or C or Java or whatever) then you're not writing in assembly language, much less machine language, so you already don't understand everything." There's certainly truth there, but, to me, going from, expertise writing code in a high-level programming language to, gluing together libraries that you kinda-sorta understand, feels like a bigger leap in what you do or do not understand than going from assembly language to Python.
I suppose it depends on what issues we should consider to be introductory. Maybe the older theoretical approach was more fundamental then than it is now. Like, maybe that was effectively more practical given the old hardware performance constraints and likely having more control of the entire program stack.
It's interesting that Sussman kind of lumps together "uncertain software libraries" into the same category as machine control robustness (e.g. hysteresis). I never thought of it that way but I guess in practice it's all just "stuff", those libraries are just another piece of your program's environment like any other.
Maybe MIT approaches post 2000 engineering with a solid foundation of analysis that creates both a beautiful creation process and reliable beautiful software artefacts. But what I observe is a never ending stream of partial doc reading, partially out of date, with random attempts until it looks it won't fail it left running for a few minutes.
Ability to deal / reflect with unknowns for engineering is of great value, but so far I've never seen that in office.
> It really should be about what is the best pedagogical tool to teach the concepts the student is expected to understand irrespective of future professional tools used. If racket exposes those concepts better without making it onerous on students to learn that's great.
One of the challenges with an approach which doesn't concern itself with "industrial grade" or "production ready" languages is getting buy in from student. Even if there were a perfect language for teaching, if students don't see the applicability of that language they aren't going to learn enough of the concepts to move to such a language later.
I think it's very easy for us (and other technically competent folks) to see value in learning how computers work for the sake of that knowledge; however, students, as an over generalization, don't. The fact that relevance and motivation are some of the hardest hurdles to overcome in early computing classes is a perfect example of this. Using languages with a professional pedigree is important because it increases student buy in to what they're being taught.
An analogy I like is that you wouldn't give someone new to woodworking a toy hammer and hand saw because they need to learn fundamentals like striking and cutting before they can start using "real" tools, you would provide them with capable, but beginner friendly, tools that allow them to build those skills as they learn.
I'm my opinion good CEOs know when to press that emergency button and to use it sparingly. Some CEOs like Musk manage exclusively by it and I don't know that it's the healthiest of long term strategy. He does get away with it for the most part it seems.
