General Discussion

[Aarah]

So that's why I was sent a rather foul languaged filled report about myself from Beta. Dude really needs to stop using Cakes as half of it is cake related.

I find it odd that for a guy that claims to be keeper of cakes, I have not once seen him mention buying, baking or even eating a cake.
Strange, no?

[The SheoDovah]

He steals it. I bet he is building some kinda of bipedal cake capable of shooting giant cakes out of it whilst he plots to take over the world and force people to cake. However, Sheodovah will be his downfall via a very well told plot and do battle with The Cake Gear.

[BetaB17]

You neglect that folder. It must be jealous of the SAG folder.
(SAG=Smug Anime Girls)

But SAG is where the good stuff is at tho

:

Also, you know nothing about me and my livelihood with cake. For all you know, I could be building a stockpile to feed world hunger.. Well okay, that's a blatant lie, but my point stands(Not about the feeding the world part. Yall can starve without my glorious cakes)

[Aarah]

Also, you know nothing about me and my livelihood with cake.

I've got time for a story...

[BetaB17]

It all started many.. Many years ago.. With a young Beta, a cupcake, world domination, and a box of condoms

[The SheoDovah]

And a playground is where he spent most of his days....

[Aarah]

You've successfully made me not want to know the rest of the story..and Dovah's Fresh Prince lyric made it all the more weird.

[BetaB17]

Glad to no that status quo hasnt changed then.

I say something that is better left unquestions. Dov makes it weirder. And Aarah shakes her head in disappointment.

Now all we're missing is Mars jumping in and giving us the goatmom stare

[The SheoDovah]

Untill a couple of Goatmons came and stared....

[Kestral]

How does everyone feel about functional programming style?

I'm used to (And get paid) for coding in an object oriented fashion, but after picking up a Lisp-based language I've been having a lot fun with a statically typed, functional language like racket.

Code: Select all

; valid racket code
(map add1 (list 1 2 3 4))

Seems so much more nice than:

Code: Select all

// valid java code
public List<Integer> add1ToList(final List<Integer> nums) {
    List<Integer> newList = new ArrayList<>();
    for (int num : nums) {
        newList.add(num + 1);
    }
    return newList;
}

Not to mention getting monadic style to work, treating functions as first class data types, and so on. Stuff's cool, yo.

[HatofMadness]

THEY PLAYED US LIKE A DAMN FIDDLE!!!

[Cassandra]

You've successfully made me not want to know the rest of the story..and Dovah's Fresh Prince lyric made it all the more weird.

Whatever do you mean? How could you not be intrigued by this unknown epic? This is most likely the story of the century, and you ignore it because it's weird?

[Aarah]

Whatever do you mean? How could you not be intrigued by this unknown epic? This is most likely the story of the century, and you ignore it because it's weird?

There are types of weird. This was the 'don't need to know' type.
I'm all for hearing weird stories, but cakes, world domination and a box of condoms are three things that should not be in the same story.
(Though it's acceptable for a James Bond film.)

[Cassandra]

So you admit that it would be a good story? I mean, the James Bond series is pretty popular.

[Aarah]

James Bond stories are fiction, and Beta was supposed to be telling a factual account of how his cake notoriety came to be, so no, I still don't want to hear his daft account.
That's what he wants - to fob us off with a fanciful story that, though it may entertain, is not the true story, and my job as a reporter person interested in the truth, is to separate the lies from the facts.

[BetaB17]

I prefer alternative facts over 'lies'

[Crawldragon]

How does everyone feel about functional programming style?

I like functional programming. I don't get to mess around with it a lot (unless you count C, which is basically functional programming) but it's very satisfying getting a functional program to work. I also like how the paradigm runs in parallel with mathematical syntax; kind of makes it more logical.

[Kestral]

How does everyone feel about functional programming style?

I like functional programming. I don't get to mess around with it a lot (unless you count C, which is basically functional programming) but it's very satisfying getting a functional program to work. I also like how the paradigm runs in parallel with mathematical syntax; kind of makes it more logical.

Not really sure C can be considered a language that follows functional paradigms.

Consider how it treats with functions. You can take a function pointer in C and reason with them, but you can't reason with them as types of data. I also think that function pointers are desugared by the compiler but that's just my intuition.
C is also filled with too much mutability to be functional to me. It's fine that it does, it's supposed to be able to mutate thing to the nth degree, but a functional language genuinely tries to avoid mutation.

[Crawldragon]

Yeah, it's not really a functional language. It's close, but no cigar.

Anyway, I want to teach myself Haskell at one point. I kind of like that. It satisfies my functional programming urge. I didn't realize how much I wanted lazy evaluation until I messed around with infinite sets. I don't know what I would use them for, but I want them.

[Kestral]

Yeah, it's not really a functional language. It's close, but no cigar.

Anyway, I want to teach myself Haskell at one point. I kind of like that. It satisfies my functional programming urge. I didn't realize how much I wanted lazy evaluation until I messed around with infinite sets. I don't know what I would use them for, but I want them.

Haskell is really hard to learn imho without learning about programming languages in a formal setting because the language makes such an effort to be so damn education. I mean, what kind of language includes monads natively? But it sounds like you might have that, so give it a crack! I've been having a ball of a time programming with Typed Racket in my programming languages class. We've been implementing our own programming language, and I think it's turing complete at this point. It's a real language, probably!

And a fun note about infinite sets: my senior project (and my project at work, since they're the same) includes a Java library which can reason about infinite sets in a very nice way. It's so cool to refer to "the set of all strings not ending in 'a'" and it's fairly lightweight to create with the library I think.

[BetaB17]

I have no idea what is going on here

[Kestral]

I have no idea what is going on here

Well you see, functional programming is a paradigm for programs that treat functions, or programs, are data objects. It's a very neat way to reason about programs and is pretty powerful for data processing

Functional programming is opposed to object oriented programming (which is what Java tries to do) and imperative programming (which is what most systems level and lots of user-level programs are written in). FP, though, is mostly an academic topic for the moment.

[Crawldragon]

Yeah, it's not really a functional language. It's close, but no cigar.

Anyway, I want to teach myself Haskell at one point. I kind of like that. It satisfies my functional programming urge. I didn't realize how much I wanted lazy evaluation until I messed around with infinite sets. I don't know what I would use them for, but I want them.

Haskell is really hard to learn imho without learning about programming languages in a formal setting because the language makes such an effort to be so damn education. I mean, what kind of language includes monads natively? But it sounds like you might have that, so give it a crack!

To be fair it sounds like you have a much better formal understanding of programming language paradigms than I do. My general theory when learning a programming language is "oh, this looks easy! Darn, I broke something... I'd better google that error message. Oh, I get it now! This is easy!" Repeat. For example, I didn't know until fairly recently that it's not possible to pass an array into a function in C; it always gets converted to a pointer for you. I can't properly express the amount of despair and rage I felt when I first learned that, so here's a random picture from Google image search that sums it up surprisingly well:

Hidden:

I almost want to say that my skill when programming is that I'm generally pretty good at figuring out solutions to problems without necessarily being very skilled at the language in which I'm doing it, but until I've had more practical experience and more people criticizing my code I couldn't say that with any confidence without sounding incredibly arrogant. I will say that reading my own code as little as a couple of days after coding it makes me want to jam pop-tarts up my nose and inhale deeply until I get a sugar high intense enough to forget the embarrassment.

[Velvet LeChance]

Seems so much more nice than:

Code: Select all

// valid java code
public List<Integer> add1ToList(final List<Integer> nums) {
    List<Integer> newList = new ArrayList<>();
    for (int num : nums) {
        newList.add(num + 1);
    }
    return newList;
}

I can only code really code at any appreciable competence in R but if I'm reading that correctly as just adding 1 to each element in a list:

Code: Select all

#valid r code
NewObjectList <- lapply(ObjectList, function(x){x + 1})

Which seems nice enough to me.

But then, as someone who only programs for data cleaning and stats work I've never really been bothered by how clean or nice my code looks - I just want BLUEs. It's one of those things that I think probably bothered some of my compsci co-workers back when I interned on a data science team over the Summer.

[MARS]

I prefer alternative facts over 'lies'

This is why you're only a beta mod.

Just joshin