[geeks] I want this....

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 22 May 2002, Joshua D Boyd wrote:

> Hey, watch your mouth.  Scheme is one of the greatest languages ever.  

Scheme is a good language, yes.  But, using it for problems where
imperative languages like C would be a natural choice is just silly.
There's a mindset by some that all pointers are evil, all compiled code is
evil, and the notion of a "machine" is a broken abstraction.  All the
world is not a nail.

The same goes for Java and C, of course, even if I do everything in C,
anyway. :)

> If only would get some darn bindings for it.  For starters, I'd like
> to see scheme48 to wxwindows/fltk/tk/whatever bindings for every
> platform that both packages exist on (windows, linux, other unix,
> probably not Mac, unfortunately).

DrScheme has wxwindows bindings on Unix, Windows, MacOS, Linux, and *BSD.
If I'm going to pimp Scheme, I might as well recommend my own school's
Scheme.  It's also available under the LGPL.

> Oooh, MIPS assembly.  Never got to learning it.  Here one professors teach
> SPARC ASM, but the rest just do Intel, if they even really do that.

MIPS assembly is flat-out beautiful.  SPARC isn't particularly ugly,
either, but MIPS has none of that register-windowing voodoo.  x86 assembly
isn't even in the same galaxy, even if it does have neat hacks involving
recursive jumps to the middle of instruction words.

> Yeah, you have to put up with that in gened classes here, but not the
> CS classes.

That's good.  Regurgitated CS is about as much fun as an MCSE training
course.  Regurgitated is par for the course in just about anything that
isn't engineering, architecture, or art.

> MIT is approximately a 7 hour drive from me.  10 hour drive from
> pittsburg, only 5.5 hours from philly.  For those types of driving
> times you could do it monthly.

Yeah, but for anything over about three hours, I'd rather take the train.
Those are N hours that I could be reading, coding, or sleeping, rather
than dealing with New England traffic.

> Well, if it were me I would probably be doing it monthly.  Other people
> might not be able to take it.

I plan on never driving in Cambridge.  I hate even walking in Cambridge
because watching the traffic makes me nervous.  Well, that and the fact
that it's nigh-impossible to breathe, but Houston's not much better in
some areas.

> I think the on campus fees here are estimated at around $11k, but I've
> never really checked since I've never lived on campus.  I thought of
> going toMIT, but I don't think I would have survived there.

I wouldn't have survived.  The coursework doesn't seem to be that much
harder than Rice, but the overall mindset would've driven me insane. There
are really good, really bright people there, but they're drowned out by
the "I go to MIT, so I must be l337!  X11 is the best example of
well-written code out there!  Athena Unix[1] can beat up your Unix any
day!" crowd.

I actually was talking with an MIT student once while visiting Teresa, and
he commented on how beautiful the X11 code was, and how the Athena widgets
package blew GTK+ out of the water.  How do you respond to something like
that?  Especially when all your favorite LARTs are at home?

--Jonathan
[1] If you don't know, you don't want to.  Trust me on this one.  I'd
    rather use Cygwin on Windows 95 than that pile of shit.  Thank your
    favorite diety that it's remained in academia and hasn't escaped to
    the real world.