2010/12/20 Ken Wesson <kwess...@gmail.com> > On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Tim Daly <d...@axiom-developer.org> > wrote: > > On 12/19/2010 10:53 PM, Ken Wesson wrote: > >> Ah. So, like the confused situations you get with Java's mutable > >> collections. Two lists are equal if they have the same contents in the > >> same order -- but then you use one as a key in a hashmap, and then add > >> an item to it, and boom! Clojure separates this stuff out because the > >> Clojure vector's immutability makes its value stable given its > >> identity. Refs and atoms and agents can encapsulate mutable state, but > >> their identity (as defined by = and hash) is fixed rather than > >> changing with its state. And some objects (keywords and symbols) exist > >> to be almost pure identity, used to label other things. > >> > >> Something like that? > > > > Ummm. no. You're approaching the question in an OO mindset. > > Excuse me? How rude. In the future if you'd like to offer a criticism > of my mindset you can do it off-list! > > > Rich spent the better part of an hour trying to explain the > > insights that he got from what must certainly be months of > > reading and thinking. > > I don't have the better part of an hour, let alone months.
Ken, with all the respect which is due to you, if you're out of ideas to find some time reading the linked material, you could probably re-focus *some* of the time you spend sometimes debating (arguing) at lengths (lots of brower pages in my 1024x768 laptop) in this list to see/read/watch the material you're critical about. And if you don't like videos or pdfs, you can certainly find a way to say so without being rude to the people which (still) take the time to answer you. Cheers, -- Laurent > If you'd > like to effectively convey what you have been trying to convey to > various people in this thread, please find some way to condense it. If > a single bullet point doesn't suffice to convey it that is hardly my > fault. You may have erred too far the other way, condensing it too > much. Surely there is a middle ground? > > > @mike, Yes, a video isn't "documentation". But the MVCC paper > > certainly is. Open source software doesn't seem to "do" documentation > > (which annoys me also since I'm a literate programming fanatic). > > For the most part this project's documentation has been pretty good -- > the api page, the other clojure.org and clojure.github.com pages, etc. > > But some of this underlying-philosophy stuff still seems to be locked > up in videos and presentations in disparate places, invisible to > Google's search and not even all linked from one place (the closest to > "one place" being scattered posts to this list). And apparently these > are generally quite long. Videos have several disadvantages over text: > > * Google can't see inside of them. > * You cannot search inside of them. > * Tools for bookmarking specific places inside of them are primitive. > * You can't read at your own pace, nor skim at all. > * Videos tend to mix the meaty information in with jokes, anecdotes, > people moving around, and other filler that takes up not only space > but time. Much of this wouldn't exist in text and what remained > could easily be skimmed or scrolled past by people in a hurry. > * Video is bandwidth-intensive. In particular, a talk on video is > a staggeringly inefficient use of bandwidth: the textual content, > besides being effectively hidden from google and control-F search, > takes the form of an audio track of several tens of megabytes in > which it is inevitably mixed with some amount of extraneous noise, > rather than being a few tens of KB of HTML or a few KB of plain > text; what could be a handful of few-KB-each jpegs (e.g. slides > presented) embedded in the text via <img> tags bloats up into a > multi-gigabyte video stream where each slide is partly obscured > by a talking head. Or perhaps only a couple of hundred megabytes, > accompanied by massive quality degradation. Line art slides become > blurs at those compression levels. Compare a jerky, stuttery, > expensive-if-you're-on-mobile, blurry image of mostly a talking > head with somewhat-indistinct and somewhat-noisy audio to a clean > page design with text and inline still images that conveys the > same information. And can be searched for text, etc. > * If animation is really necessary to convey some point, animated > gifs and, if you really must resort to it, Flash can be employed. > > I'm not saying there isn't a place for videos, but they are not > *substitutes* for text and if they convey anything we should be > referring to commonly (and especially if we should sometimes be > referring to a small subset of the information in one, rather than the > whole thing at one time) there should be an HTML presentation (text > with perhaps inline images, perhaps some of them animated) of the core > content as well somewhere. > > Right now the Clojure documentation-cloud seems to contain several of > these indigestible lumps masquerading as proper documentation. That > seems like it should be addressed; and the sooner the better. The > longer, the more of these non-text resources will accumulate and, > worse, the more users will be expected to be familiar with some > growing subset of their contents. In the worst case, it would require > the equivalent of a week-long training seminar to brush up on it all. > Right now Clojure has the great property that with a bit of > familiarity with Java and at least one Java IDE you can get started > hacking in it within minutes, and even do something useful within > hours. I'd hate to see that change or get bogged down in hundreds of > minutes and tens of gigabytes of video downloads. :) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<clojure%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. 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