adeelk
Whether or not someone is sufficiently motivated to study something should not affect their ability to understand it. Vector spaces and linear maps are actually much easier to understand, and I think that at some point in mathematics (probably your first analysis course) your motivation has to come from the beauty of the theory itself rather than some real-world application.
No, that means on average, an arbitrary set of eight adults contains two with a mental disorder. (Presumably this refers to adults in the U.S.)
If you believe this, then what is the purpose of putting illegal drug users in jail?
If people stop voting up such comments, people will eventually stop making them.
Obviously any equation can be expressed in words, but those who are familiar with the notation are able to read the equations and understand the ideas in a paper in a fraction of the time. This is important for those who read papers regularly.
You are comparing en.wikipedia.org with their redesign of www.wikipedia.org. Notice that the latter is, with respect to content, the same as their redesign: languages, search, and sister sites.
Secondly, in the screenshot you are looking at, the content of the article has obviously pushed down due to the activation of the “quote” mode. Honestly, I doubt you do not realize this and I can’t help but wonder what motivation you have to criticize their work so unfairly.
Do you have much experience with non-OO programming? Or even OOP, for that matter? How can one honestly believe that every instance of passing data into functions is automatically OOP? Did you even consider the fact that this has nothing to do with objects?
Time objects are a really bad example because time calculations are exactly the kind of hairy mess you want to hide behind some kind of abstract API.
You miss his point here. Time not being an object would not imply that it can't be abstracted into an API. Just see Clojure's clj-time library for an example.
Time to learn some more languages.
I am not nitpicking. I honestly don’t think any sense can be made from leot’s statement. If I am wrong, I invite you to refine it in a way that makes sense. Your earlier refinement (text is not the best medium for every message) makes sense, but the point is that art is not defined as “mediums other than text”, and therefore it isn’t relevant to the previous discussion about art.
Technical note: even in languages where every expression has a value, it is possible to have an `if` form that doesn’t require an `else` value: just return nil. See, for example, Clojure: http://clojure.org/special_forms#if
Are you joking? There are tons of very intelligent people who know nothing about coding.
What Atwood is arguing against is the idea that “everyone needs to learn programming”. Because of the title he chose for his first post (which didn’t actually represent his point correctly), now many other groups of people, with a lot of varying views, are arguing with him on points he wasn’t even making. You individually are arguing that everyone should be technically literate, but that’s not what he was arguing against anyway.
What evidence is there that programmers have better mathematical and logical thinking?
> I've tried teaching many people the difference between "8" and (the literal value) 8...it never seems to stick until you write and run a simple piece of code to test it out.
This is unrelated to both mathematics and logic.
Come on, iA Writer is not competing with Emacs.
Typography is not subjective. That non-experts are unable to distinguish between good and bad typography is simply a consequence of the fact that “incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people” [1].
[1] http://news.yahoo.com/people-arent-smart-enough-democracy-fl...