Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 40

@tiphra So this is the difficulty of teaching more powerful languages to beginners. The powerful languages are harder to get started with, and that's probably because most people who use them are already at an advanced level, so nobody thinks of making things simple for the beginners. That's my theory anyway.

@tiphra With something like ECMAScript 9 (a.k.a. modern JavaScript), getting a little web app or web server running only takes a few minutes, and that's how it should be. It's not quite as easy in Lisp or Haskell.

Compare this Haskell web server tutorial...

http://snapframework.com/docs/tutorials/snaplets-tutorial

...to this node.js web server tutorial...

https://expressjs.com/en/starter/hello-world.html

...and you see what I mean.

@tiphra What I didn't mention in my original post, but which an experienced programmer would understand, is that better languages than the mainstream ones don't see as much use because their communities don't exactly go out of their way in trying to make their development tools easy to use for beginners. The mainstream languages are really good at that, which is how they became mainstream in the first place.

@tiphra Scheme and Common Lisp don't have very up-to-date libraries and you'll be pushed into editing your code in Emacs in order to use Slime, a tool for interactive programming, which puts up an additional barrier of entry. They really need to work on their development tools, but that's not very likely to happen, since the citizens of the Land of Lisp seem content with the status quo.

@tiphra If you want purely functional, learn Haskell. If you want an extremely simple but powerful syntax that also happens to work well for functional code, learn a Lisp. Clorjure is the newest dialect and is opinionated toward functional code, but runs in the Java VM and talks to Java libraries for most practical things, so it's not very self-containing. Scheme and Common Lisp are older dialects which are self-containing, but aren't opinionated toward a functional style.

I have updated the "About me" section on my portfolio website:

https://polymorph.no/about/

If you're wondering what I've been doing since about 1991, or want to know what you could have a meaningful conversation with me about, go and have a look.

I once commissioned Pat Fleet, the "voice of AT&T", to record an old joke about imaginary numbers. The result was epic:

https://thj.no/public/imaginary_phone.mp3

She sent a high quality recording, but, naturally, I had to apply some EQ filters to make it sound like a phone call.

"Computer engineering is a branch of engineering that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers usually have training in electronic engineering (or electrical engineering), software design, and hardware-software integration instead of only software engineering or electronic engineering."

I'm this in every way except two: Formal training and professional experience. I have none.

If you have a QAM demodulator, you can actually demodulate most signals. FM will look like a vector that rotates with the signal amplitude. AM will look like a vector that grows or shrinks with the signal amplitude. PSK will look similar to FM but with discrete phase steps. If you have a whole bank of QAM detectors, you can demodulate OFDM, which is basically a stack of QAM carriers spaced apart just enough to avoid crosstalk. It's used in the high-speed modes of WiFi and 4G.

QAM is a good example of a practical application of complex numbers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation

Basically, if you have a carrier wave, you can encode a vector in it as A = x cos(phi) + y sin(phi). To encode data, you assign different symbols to different vectors. Since the rotation of your vector will depend on the phase angle of your carrier wave, you typically include a phase reference along with it, for example, an unmodulated carrier wave to serve as a pilot tone for phase alignment.

We should be teaching our most advanced programming languages to novices. A functional language would probably make more sense to the average person than a procedural one due to familiarity with mathematical functions, for example.

We should also start businesses that develop software in these languages, to create demand for them in the market.

If no one is willing to do this, the world will continue to write software in the same old and ugly ways.

While hardware platforms, operating systems and languages are released at a break-neck pace, programming as a discipline moves very slowly.

The vast majority of concepts we use in programming languages today were invented 40-60 years ago, and we're still playing catch-up with Lisp from 1958.

We're stuck in a world of procedural OOP software and can't change course. Our best languages gather dust in a corner and hardly anyone learns them or uses them.

It makes no sense.

The Microphone Array Simulator now has a slider for testing the proximity effect:

https://thj.no/public/mas/

Signs that you're getting close to the edge of the software development map:

* You see severe deficiencies in every popular programming language and wish there was something better out there.

* You learn functional programming and begin to question OOP.

* You like Lisp, but have objections to every dialect you've seen, so you'd have to write your own to be happy.

* You wonder if you've lost your edge with age, but your code is actually too abstract to follow for junior developers.

Web Microphone Array Simulator:

https://thj.no/public/mas/

You can't see or edit the microphones themselves yet, but you can explore the characteristics of the included hardcoded array of 4 omnidirectional microphones and their associated EQ filters.

#CardioidMEMSMicrophoneArray

Huh, yeah, I've noticed that. A lot of studies do use data from Scandinavia.

This one hits too close to home.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/real-life

This SMBC comic is sooo wrong...

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unicorns-3

This SMBC comic is sooo wrong...

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unicorns-3