here's a link for you. okay, a bunch of links

[alexr_rwx]

MC Frontalot is getting boingboing'd. His new video is about interactive fiction text adventures. Check check check it.

It's from his lovely new album, Secrets from the Future.

Other recently interesting news for you:
- Asafa Powell breaks world 100m record. 9.74 seconds. A football field. Jebus.
- Woman jailed for serving salty burger to police officer. Not far from Atlanta. Oh, the police. Oh, McDonald's.
- 1966 prediction of home computer in 1999. Everybody loves retrofutures!
- Mark Guzdial: Software Engineering and the Cause of the CS Enrollment Crisis. Mark (whose funky bunch I was a member of, last year) speaks about the dearth of Awesome in current CS education. (paraphrase)
- Virus implicated in bee decline. Apparently it wasn't cell-phone towers or global warming. Not that we shouldn't still be concerned about those.
- Ronald Jenkees. OMFG Ronald Jenkees rocks out so hard. Improvised phat beats and hott keyboarding. I'm getting his CD.

And comics:
- Overcompensating. It's pretty awesome.
- the latest from xkcd.
- Diesel Sweeties. Why don't you read these comics already?

Comments

[rusty42.livejournal.com]

wow, those two software engineering entries on guzdial's blog are some of the most pretentious bullshit i've ever read.

"Programming languages should have inference engines and machine learning algorithms built into them to fill in the gaps from what the human specifies."

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

-1, Troll.

And: I pretty much agree with Marky Mark. Programming should be fun and easy, and there's no reason we can't make it be more-fun and more-easy. We're in the building tools for tool-builders business, as programmers.

With those particular examples -- I don't want to write an inference engine every time I need one. And I sure use Weka (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/) when I need some well-understood machine-learning algorithm. It'd be nice if they both shipped with, say, Python, or were really easily available; maybe your environment would grab them on demand. DRY applies across people too.

[rusty42.livejournal.com]

huh? whether some code is included in a language's standard library or not is irrelevant. i interpret that particular statement to mean that the programming language environment itself should figure out what the programmer (er, computationalist) really means.

here are some more inane statements:

"Spending more time on comments, assertions, preconditions, and postconditions than on the code itself is an embarrassment to our field." i disagree, and he doesn't even mention testing.

"Computer scientists do not need to write good, clean code. [...] The code that I have seen produced by computational scientists and engineers tends to be short, without comments, and is hard to read." this certainly explains the security track record of comanche/swiki.

"Rarely, and certainly not until the upper division courses, do we emphasize creativity and novel problem-solving techniques."