Comments for (b)logophile

Comment on Prologophile by tikitu

tikitu — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:10:16 +0000

Thanks, yeah, I’m excited about it!

Comment on Prologophile by Marieke

Marieke — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:04:27 +0000

Congratulations!! That’s really excellent news!

Comment on Prologophile by tikitu

tikitu — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:04:42 +0000

(I've added The Craft of Prolog to my wishlist. I can well imagine it's darn difficult, and enlightening.)

Comment on Prologophile by tikitu

tikitu — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:59:47 +0000

He's an incredibly smart guy, and very knowledgeable. Unfortunately he doesn't have much patience for less smart and knowledgeable people (i.e., most of us), which can be pretty intimidating when you're a clueless student. I wish I could resit his courses now, I'd get an enormous amount more out of them.

C#: the cool thing is that it's slowly incorporating more and more functional techniques and technology. LINQ is Haskell list comprehension, and to get that working type-checked you need functions as first-class objects, &c. &c. Nice to see that kind of idea finally making its way into a commercial language.

Comment on Prologophile by Ryszard Szopa

Ryszard Szopa — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:46:52 +0000

"...nearly every code fragment gave you the “aha!” feeling..." I meant, of course.

Comment on Prologophile by Ryszard Szopa

Ryszard Szopa — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:45:35 +0000

You were taught by O'Keefe?! Ohmygawd...! (Squeaking sound) I mean, lucky you. Right, you're both from NZ. I've read parts of his Craft of Prolog and it is one of the most illuminating programming (or at least, Prolog programming) books I've ever read. It was darn difficult, of course, but nearly every code gave you the "aha!" feeling when you finally got it. And Bratko is... Well, kinda nice. It is nice that it tries to teach Prolog and AI at the same time. But I don't consider its code to be really elegant.

As for the job market... Yeah, not being from the EU may complicate your life a little bit. Though, if it makes you feel better, I know at least one person from the US who was able to successfully obtain a Dutch work permit. And for some reasons his case was a bit more difficult than yours.

As for C#, I've read some articles about LINQ and I was very positively surprised. Though I will stay with my Python for now, thank-you-very-much ;)

Comment on Prologophile by Robert Anton Reese

Robert Anton Reese — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:24:39 +0000

Congratulations Mr D. You’ll be pleased to continuing your path up the ivory tower.

Comment on Prologophile by tikitu

tikitu — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:34:08 +0000

Richard O'Keefe? Hah, he taught me way-back-when (functional, maybe? I don't remember). No, we're using Bratko.

The job market is made much trickier when you're not from the EU. Outside of university work I would have to draw an unrealistically large salary to convince the Dutch government to give me a work permit. (And, of course, I was thinking mainly of somewhat esoteric languages... Although I was looking into C# for a while, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.)

Comment on Prologophile by Ryszard Szopa

Ryszard Szopa — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:11:27 +0000

Congratulations! Sounds seriously cool. Do you plan hitting students in the back of the head with a copy of O'Keeffe's The Craft of Prolog to facilitate illumination?

As for the job market, it is in reality a lot less depressed than the impression you would get from reading the news... Unless you are thinking exclusively of Haskell, Lisp or Prolog programming, but then you shouldn't be very surprised :-)

Comment on A weekend in Stockholm by tikitu

tikitu — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:10:19 +0000

The place we went to had nice cups for quaffing too, but disappointingly enough they were moulded not turned — lifeless lunks, although I suppose they stack very efficiently.