Re: Introspect whether setCharacterEncoding i s present..

Robert Sanford <[email protected]> writes:

> Closures... Those hurt. Those make me need more coffee. Lambda expressions
> and closures just about killed me in my second semester of CS when we were
> being taught Lisp.

That's very interesting. One of the things I've found over the last 10
years is that LISP is almost uniformly badly taught when it's not
core. Some CS courses use it as a foundation and they are normally
pretty good.

 
> I've always regretted that I never was able to go back and do more work with
> Lisp and I'm afraid now that I would have to struggle again until I hit that
> moment of epiphany...

You wouldn't. It's like riding a bike.

Do you never use anonymous inner classes?

Recently there has been some talk about introducing proper lexical
scope (and therefore closures) into Java . I'm not sure it will happen
but then I never believed auto-boxing would happen either.

Perl, Python and Ruby all have good lexical closure implementations,
though IMHO Ruby's is best.

Thin (my programming language) is a Scheme implementation which is a
sort of LISP. Maybe you'll try it when I've finished it.


> > In the last two years I've had to explain how a
> > call stack works and what tail recursion is. I've
> > recently explained memory protection, memory
> > allocation, etc, etc, etc...
> 
> And I thought my life was difficult having to explain to people that when
> you are using SAX or DOM directly that you have to check *all* of the text
> and CDATA nodes because the API allows implementors to split text into more
> than one of them as they see fit...

I was really shocked by a friend of mine recently. He's about 25, a
team leader, very much a science/techie geek. We were talking about
memory allocation and he asked how it was possible to see into the
memory of another process. When I said that it wasn't possible, that's
what memory protection was all about it became clear that he had no
idea what a buffer overflow attack really was, or how operating system
memory protection worked, what a page fault was, etc...

He's a really smart guy who has done CS at college and worked in the
industry doing good valuable work. But he just didn't know the basics.

It may be possible to say that he clearly doesn't need to know the
basics; if he's done ok so far without them he can carry on. But I
don't believe that's true. He would be better if he knew what the
machine and the operating system were doing.

-- 
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk


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