I may not be the most qualified person to answer this, but I always thought private methods and variables were for internal use inside of a class while the public methods were what one would actually call with their objects. For example your object had a method foo() which would be better defined as smaller methods which are combined together. Those smaller functions serve no other purpose and therefore do not need to be called by the object directly.
Yes, I thought about it as I was writing the post. But what I'm interested in finding out is how (and if) it is any different today (2010) than it was when the essay was written. In other words, has anything changed that would make another language a close alternative to Lisp? Or is Lisp still at the top of the continuum ?
Well, you might want to look at other declarative language paradigms (which you can of course be neatly programed in Lisp) such logic programming (e.g. Prolog) and defining functions through pattern matching (e.g. Haskell, Qi).
There's some serious power there and in the latter case it's general purpose.
The idea of the language continuum was probably made up for rhetorical reasons. Its not actually a strait line, with machine language at one end, and lisp at the other, its more like a tree, or a graph. Lisp happens to be a good language in a lot of cases, but not in all.
I would love to respond to everyone but I think a follow up would be better. I never expected getting this much feedback! Just wanted to start off with a big thanks!
I've decided that the university route is the way to go. I was stressing over getting a job or doing a startup so much that I forgot about how much I want to learn. I think I will do whatever interests me and allow that to lead me, instead of having a pre-determined mndset of what I think I'm supposed to be. I won't stress out about grades or jobs and make the most of the next four years.
And just to clarify, I've been going to the community college for two years full time, not high school. I know the uni is a great place to meet girls but, and I REALLY don't want to sound cocky, I've never had problems with girls. I'm not lacking in social skills and I'm sure many here on HN aren't either.
I also never expected there to be so many people from UW here! The next four years should be exciting, and I'm really looking forward to them and also being more active in this community. Thanks again.
Because of my college credits, I will be entering the University as a Jr. What I'm afraid of is that I will not have enough time to sharpen my skills in a year or two, which is why I've had graduate school in the back of my mind. And also why I feel like I should be coding as much as can now.
This gives you a couple of advantages over your peers. Take advantage of your extra credits to take a light course load; enough to qualify as a full-time student but with a bit more free time than others to work on pet projects or take advantage of all of the other great things that you will be surrounded with.
Not to freak you out or anything, but that may not work out as planned. I have a good friend who had an Associate's in CS from a community college, and got into the Cornell School of Engineering. He flunked out, applied to get back in, flunked out again, applied to get back in, and was rejected. He then got his B.A. in history from Ithaca College.
University of Washington is a good school, and tough. I'm not saying this is going to happen to you, but community college can be a very different place from a top 4 year university.
Also, will your transfer credits count towards your major, or as prerequisites? In many cases, they do not. You may find that despite having enough credits to be a junior, in order to satisfy the requirements of your major you may have to stay at least 3 years (i.e. having a set of 6 mandatory courses to take in which 5 have the previous semester's course as a prerequisite).
> And also why I feel like I should be coding as much as can now.
Yes. DO it. It's important. Code for fun, code for interest, code code code. Just remember that the main objective right now is to learn things and sharpen your skills, so don't get too hung up on external validation/objectives for your coding projects.
You can learn a lot of stuff at university, but the prescribed path isn't going to do it for you. You need to seek out the interesting people, interesting projects, and interesting opportunities to really learn stuff.
I'm already fluent in Russian, and I am learning my native language, Armenian, at the moment.
And I wouldn't say that I'm under challenged. College seems like a lot of work, but that thrill of a challenge is missing. It's also a tough time for my family, so I'm also working as much as I can. I guess my main dilemma is the lack of free time. It might have been unclear in my post, but I was thinking that my time would be better spent coding than trying to be an overachiever in school.
It still sounds to me like you might not be studying the right stuff. If your classes remind you of a tedious treadmill leading toward the Blub Factory you need better classes.
Or a better major. Perhaps you're making the mistake of letting your chosen career dictate your choice of classes. The universal secret to school is: Take the best classes you can find, from the best people, regardless of subject. If the local comp sci offerings remind you of Javaschool, do something else. I have lots and lots of colleagues who can attest that you don't need a major in comp sci, or even a single class, to spend your career working on software.
The best bang for the buck in college is the stuff that you can't get anywhere else. Stuff that requires expensive facilities or hardware, for example. Take lab courses -- unlike programming, these are things that are hard to self-study. Biology, physics, chemistry, electronics, mechanical engineering, even art and design (which I suspect is best done with physical materials and a live teacher). Or be a productive dilettante: As I said above, find the best professors in the university and take their courses, regardless of the field. I discovered linguistics that way, and it turns out that intro-level linguistics is a really nice thing to know if you're going to work with languages all the time.
If I were to go back I'd probably still take a lot of physics and electronics, which is what I did before, but I'd also be all over the biology and biochemistry. Molecular biology is the ultimate machine language. And I wouldn't neglect statistics: Study as much stats as you can stand.
Of course, nontechnical subjects are also important, because they make you write essays. You'd be surprised how useful a skill essay-writing can be. I had a minor in history, and I don't regret it.
U Dub has one of the best Comp. Sci. departments in the nation, especially when it comes to Operating Systems. I would sell half my soul to be 18 and going to UW.
Well, you are you, I am myself, and the OP is the OP. Everyone has different tastes!
The good news is that if the OP finds that he doesn't enjoy comp sci, at least he'll know that it isn't because the local department is objectively terrible.
>Or a better major. Perhaps you're making the mistake of letting your chosen career dictate your choice of classes. The universal secret to school is: Take the best classes you can find, from the best people, regardless of subject.
I think this is great advice. If I had the opportunity to do college now I would probably try to major in my second (or third!) career choice. Having mobility in where you could have a career could turn out important.
1- College can be good. Patio11 makes some very valuable points and there are plenty of other ways and reasons to make or conclude that it's valuable.
2- Social License - The first paragraph of Patio11s response, subsidy, is incredibly important. For the time and cost of attending college it is possible to take a huge number of alternatives . Buy & run a Jakuzzi installation business, start & run a preschool in a developing country. I have a feeling this is the line of thinking inspiring your question.
The problem is that you (and the vast majority of other people) probably won't do that. That's mostly because of this social license. Only an extremely radical parent would give their child a hard earned $100k and 4 years room & board to go buy a Jacuzzi business that will most likely go bust but amount to a tremendous learning opportunity. Everyone would think that they're nuts. Nevermind financial support, you are unlikely to find moral support. Not from society. Not anywhere near the support you receive for bumming through the most meaningless of University degrees.
I'm not advocating the easiest option. I actually think there is no excuse not to learn a lot at University. I'm also not advocating going where social norms dictate. Far from it. Just pick you battles and be realistic about opportunity costs. Most of the people who don't do the incredible things that you could be doing instead of College aren't not doing them because they went to college instead.
You sound somewhat like me. I coded a huge amount before college. So much so that like you I felt it would be a waste of time to be a CS major. So I took Mechanical Engineering. It is far harder than CS and will certainly give you a challenge. There are complimentary majors (econ, bio, finance, chem E, electrical E, physics, math) you could choose from. Either way you will come out knowing far more math and science that will allow you to do some really cool CS stuff after if thats what you want to do.
I minored in CS and so just took some of the more advanced classes, a graduate class on computer graphics, a grad class on computer vision, one on mechatronics, one on Lisp. I don't think I would have been able to learn that stuff as rigorously without a professor. The other courses I would recommend - Operating Systems and Compilers will teach you a LOT. I passed on them but I know people who took them and got a lot out of them.
Also about your free time, I know it seems like you are pressed for it right now but college is only 4 years. You wil graduate at 22 and have 43+ years of a career. I work 60-80 hours a week on school stuff and find plenty of time for my own side projects, partying, I was even on a sports team for 3 years. You can do it (you don't sleep much though unlike in the movies where everyone sleeps until 3pm). After graduation I'm going to be working exactly 40, max 50, with a 5 minute commute. Thats it. I'm going to have so much free time to do my side projects that I don't mind missing out on them for the last 4 years when I learned so many other things.
I really enjoyed this excellent resource. However, I've noticed that some of the posts are over 900 days old.
I know many things still hold true, but would that make a difference in the quality of information? For example, some of the posts about technology might be a bit outdated because things change so quickly.
Nevertheless, this is something that really helped me out.
The early days here produced some of the most interesting and informative conversations I've run across online. Signal to noise ratio was particularly high, as were mutual respect and consideration.
I was going to recommend this book to my younger brother. However, I changed my mind shortly after discovering that this book does not cover classes! I might not be an expert, but almost every Python program I've read uses classes, and I think it would be difficult for a beginner to read the code of others after finishing this book.
Yeah, I heard the UK was an awesome place to live. And personally, I am a firm believer in bootstrapping startups, so venture capital isn't the first thing on my mind. It's good to know that London is not far behind. And good luck with your startup!
there is an american startup in Cambridge that are considering moving here permanently for their startup. They moved here because of the Red Gate Springboard programme.
Let me know if you wanna pick their brains about USA vs UK, and I'll intro you.
