Right now Amazon is showing two kinds of recommendations: 1) "the customers that bought this also bought…". That one can show you books that are totally unrelated to the book you are buying or even to your actual interests. 2) the "Sponsored products related to this item". I don't see why they couldn't substitute one of them for "books the author of this book recommends", or something like that.
Honestly I can't tell sometimes if HN is all just satirical internet comments. I read the article, chuckled at the exchange with Joe Armstrong, then opened the HN comments to look at all the grumbling.
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." - Robert Firth
That's some deep theosophical kung-fu you bring there, grasshopper. But seeing as the words of the Torah existed before the creation of the world, it might just be that you are correct.
It's a category error to conflate article titles and website names, but I'll play along.
Misleading? Arguably, but I don't think it's much of a stretch from "Hacker News" to "news for hackers" to "anything that good hackers would find interesting", which is the mandate of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I know all that. Long time Erlang dev, former RabbitMQ core dev, so yeah, I've heard already about the Prolog story. Interesting you talk about the Actor Model, since even Robert Virding has said that when they created Erlang they had no idea there was a thing called "Actor Model".
Wow! Ok. Well yes, as far as I know both Joe and Rob agree on that it is accident that Erlang have implemented 'actor model' thing. Also its interesting to note that functional nature of Erlang is very different to ML-family languages.
Authors used all these functional stuff because of pragmatics in the first place and not because of solid theory underpinnings.
Go get your break, while you are at it, get a laugh or two, because that's what this article is supposed to be about. nobody is so silly to pretend Knuth was describing Erlang on his book.
>For me what's striking about Erlang syntax is the meaning of the semi-colon and the period, as function clause separator. Most of the rest is just vanilla FP lang syntax.
It's strikes me that everybody notices the pattern matching part, but not the way the clauses are separated, which AFAIK, it's something used by Erlang Syntax only.
And yeah, after working in Erlang and other FP langs for the past 6 years I kinda know this is called pattern matching ;-)
Well... and English syntax. In English, you can specify a list of things by separating each thing with a semicolon and then a sentence is terminated by a period. Example:
> Today I would like you to buy coffee; talk to Sarah about the party if you can, otherwise send her a text; drop off the kids; meet me at soccer practise.
You see how the sentence is terminated with a period, each individual item in the list is separated by a semicolon, and the comma is free to use inside each item to indicate related clauses. I've changed nothing about the structure of that list, except replaced the items with function definitions.
> Today I would like you to define f(m, n, r, 1) as f(m, n, remainder of m divided by n, 2); f(m, n, r, 2) as n if r is 0, otherwise as f (m, n, r, 3); f(m, n, p, 3) as f(n, p, p, 1).
It's the same thing, only we've replaced the mundane everyday tasks with function definitions. Now reformat the thing and we get
Today I would like you to define
f(m, n, r, 1) = f(m, n, remainder of m divided by n, 2);
f(m, n, r, 2) = n if r is 0,
f (m, n, r, 3) otherwise;
f(m, n, p, 3) = f(n, p, p, 1).
Sure, Erlang syntax happens to coincide with the syntax of English, and I'm not sure whether this was intentional or not, but it certainly has nothing to do with Knuth.
Really you can use semi-colons on a sentence and then end the sentence with a period? And I thought I had learned something during all my years studying linguistics and grammar.
BTW, newsflash: many languages use semi-colons inside sentences. Spanish for example, which could be argued to be older than English. So did Erlang copy Knuth, or Erlang actually copied El Cid Campeador? I think Erlang comes from El Cantar del Cid.
Semicolon has two uses in English. First, to separate two related sentences in a way weaker than a period. Second, in place of commas separating items in a list where at least one list item contains commas.
It's a poor mind that can only conceive of two uses for a punctuation mark. Sure, those are the two conventional uses for semicolons, but it's far from all the ways a semicolon can be used. Try combining it with reported speech; consider deploying it in lists which don't contain commas (like this one); use it to jam together sentence fragments in poetry; use it to notate interruption in a screenplay; use it to make your smileys wink ;)...
With "verbose syntax" F# (just like OCaml) uses ";" as a generic separator and ";;" for ending top-level definitions. It uses "." for attribute (of modules, objects...) selection.
