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Messages - doomchild

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91
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: April 02, 2016, 12:17:43 am »
I haven't read any of the games with crazy role setups, so the Jailer seemed like a weird one to me, but I could definitely see how it could affect the game's pace and outcome.

92
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: April 01, 2016, 03:19:23 pm »
Quote from: AbstractTraitorHero on April 01, 2016, 02:59:34 pm
I will respond to that at 3pm when I have time to properly think up a plan and am finished with my schoolwork as I am in class at the moment.

Think up a plan, or consult with your partner?

93
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: April 01, 2016, 03:18:23 pm »
Quote from: Gentlefish on April 01, 2016, 02:51:37 pm
Doomchild, you're attacking lurkers. That's easy. How come you're not asking anyone else anything? Are you afraid of giving up your role on accident and want to play it safe?

Yeah, you're right.  I am going after lurkers.  I suppose a lot of that would be that it seems (after reading previous games) that lurkers tend to do way more harm than good to town, and since I want to win, we need to get them to talk, right?

But in the spirit of trying to be more proactive (sometimes I have a bad habit of becoming too passive), what role (Doctor, Cop, etc) would you, Gentlefish, most like to have in this game, and why?

Quote from: Elephant Parade on April 01, 2016, 02:49:33 pm
Quote from: doomchild on April 01, 2016, 01:50:42 pm
Quote from: fillipk on April 01, 2016, 01:40:05 pm
Replacement requested sorry I've been sick since Tuesday and don't have as much time as I thought I would.

Well, alright.  I'll unvote you and focus on someone else until your replacement arrives.

TinFoilTopHat, we haven't seen anything out of you, yet.  Are you too busy plotting with your scumbuddy to post with the rest of us Townies?
You're not really one to talk—all you've done is bug lurkers. While you're waiting on Tinfoil to post, you should be pursuing some other avenue, rather than sitting around doing nothing.

An excellent point.  Who would you, Elephant Parade, least like to see as the scumteam in this game, and why?

94
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: April 01, 2016, 01:50:42 pm »
Quote from: fillipk on April 01, 2016, 01:40:05 pm
Replacement requested sorry I've been sick since Tuesday and don't have as much time as I thought I would.

Well, alright.  I'll unvote you and focus on someone else until your replacement arrives.

TinFoilTopHat, we haven't seen anything out of you, yet.  Are you too busy plotting with your scumbuddy to post with the rest of us Townies?

95
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: April 01, 2016, 12:17:33 am »
Quote from: Vector on April 01, 2016, 12:13:46 am
Quote from: Gentlefish on April 01, 2016, 12:09:47 am
Vector, how come you're so excited to play?

Mostly because I haven't been able to play for something like 5 years due to PTSD, which has finally cleared up enough that I can deal with the tensions of the game without flipping out--and I love this game. It's possibly my favorite.

Man, I'm sorry to hear that.  I've been reading games on the forums for several years now, and I definitely know your name.  I was frankly terrified of playing a game where you and webadict might be playing, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

96
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train - And we're off!
« on: March 31, 2016, 11:59:06 pm »
fillipk, why haven't you posted yet?  You're plotting with your scumbuddy, aren't you?

97
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train [7/7, 2/2, 1/1]: Let's get this train rollin'!
« on: March 28, 2016, 02:45:15 am »
Quote from: webadict on March 27, 2016, 04:04:20 pm
Ughhhhh... Do I do it, Vector?

Do eeeeeeeeeeeeeet...

98
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train [6/7, 2/2, 1/1]: Player Wanted!
« on: March 27, 2016, 11:52:31 am »
Confirmed.

99
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 15, 2016, 06:32:02 am »
If I decide to teach myself a functional language, it'll probably be either F# or some variant of ML (OCaml being the most likely).  I've dabbled briefly with F# before, and since I already know the .NET platform pretty well, it's not too hard to get used to.  OCaml looks interesting largely because it's so different, but I could very well get frustrated with it, too.  I'm rather mercurial that way.

100
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 15, 2016, 06:18:09 am »
Haskell just makes me angry.  As a developer who is significantly weaker in math than others, it feels like its syntax was built from day one to be completely incomprehensible to someone without a PhD in tensor mechanics, or some other specific branch of mathematics whose teaching requires extra janitorial staff just to clean up the brains splattered on the walls after class.  On top of which, a lot of the documentation seemed to require a deep knowledge of what I would consider to be fairly esoteric concepts (anytime a document contains the word "ergofunctor", I immediately begin looking for the hidden camera).  I take full responsibility for the fact that this all might be insecurity on my part.

On the topic of parenthesis management (emacs does a good job for me), have you looked at Parinfer?  It seems like an interesting way to automate the task of keeping things in sync properly.

101
Mafia / Re: Beginner's Mafia LIX: The Train [2/7, 0/2, 1/1]
« on: February 14, 2016, 09:53:02 pm »
So in.

102
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 13, 2016, 03:25:40 am »
Quote from: i2amroy on February 12, 2016, 10:28:41 pm
Quote from: doomchild on February 12, 2016, 07:01:58 pm
I don't think it's the right language for every level of development.  But I think it would be pretty well-suited for a lot of the stuff I do, which is largely data curation, routing, and filtering.
Sure, if it's good for what you commonly do than more power to you. Languages are tools and all that jazz, and you shouldn't be trying to nail screws in with a hammer. But for "expressivity" (Note:, there are a lot of definitions about what exactly it means for a language to "expressive", so pardon me if I'm using a different one here), I think I'm gonna have to say that in the vast majority of cases the human mind when thinking of a step by step process thinks in a way that is much more similar to a language like C++ with it's step and state focused paradigm than that of recursive functional languages. The proof of this can be observed simply by opening up a nearby cookbook, or by googling "instructions to do X" on google where X is anything that you want. I can almost assure you that the instructions you find there will be much more likely to be based around sequential steps with iteration than recursive calls.
Code: [Select]
mix butter
mix sugar
for(i = 0; i <3; i++)
    crack egg[i]
    put egg in bowl
    beat egg into mixture
add sugar
add flour
mix
So while LISP's power let's it be extremely expressive in the small number of cases that I have to think in a way that fits it's paradigm, in the other 90% of cases a language like C++ is actually going to be closer to my thinking than LISP is. (If on the other hand you're talking about "expressivity"as a language's ability to say just what it needs to then yeah, it takes a lot more work to get C++ there than it does in LISP. :P)

I think that's the underlying feeling that a lot of people have, and it's perfectly understandable and valid.  But I think there's a reason why Lisp still beats other languages for expressivity, and that is the fact that it allows you to not actually care how the machine is operating underneath.  There are plenty of scenarios where you need to know exactly how things are lined up in memory, exactly how much memory you're using, or if you're being optimal in cache usage, but I posit that those situations are actually far fewer than most developers think.  Unless you're writing airplane navigation systems, medical monitoring devices, large-format printers with giant lamps on either side that can start fires in less than three seconds (guess which one I used to do), I don't think it actually matters all that much if your program runs a particular function in 200 milliseconds or 400 milliseconds.

The introduction to SICP has a line that says "Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute," and I think that holds true today.  So if I can express a program's actual point without a lot of jumping through bare metal hoops, that program is, all other things being equal, going to be easier for another person to pick up and look at.

I don't think Lisp is the end-all, be-all of languages.  But I feel like the fact that modern languages keep pulling features from it implies that it's, at the very least, an incredibly useful object lesson into what a program should look like.

103
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 12, 2016, 07:19:55 pm »
I refuse to look inside that thing.  I would love a better-performing, less awful version of SS13, but apparently it's just not in the cards.

104
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 12, 2016, 07:01:58 pm »
I don't think it's the right language for every level of development.  But I think it would be pretty well-suited for a lot of the stuff I do, which is largely data curation, routing, and filtering.

105
General Discussion / Re: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread
« on: February 12, 2016, 06:57:07 pm »
Quote from: i2amroy on February 11, 2016, 11:53:39 pm
So one of my classes (Principles of Languages) is done in a version of Scheme (specifically Racket, more specifically the legacy Racket language "Pretty Big"). While (being forced into) doing everything recursively is an interesting way of thinking, the lack of the program data divide is being pretty cool, and experiencing the great satisfaction being gained when a 3 line program solves your whole program is pretty awesome; it's horriblefying. I mean I don't particularly enjoy the idea of having to take multiple hours to come up with 4-line simple programs that I could crank out non-recursive versions (that probably work faster due to the C++ compiler) for in like 5 minutes. :P It's not helped by the fact that normal Racket has several very helpful functions that our legacy version doesn't support either. :-\

And ye gods the parenthesis. I can't imaging how normal coders in similar languages survive; it's already gotten bad enough that I've pretty much said "Screw the 'recommended' official coding style, C's 1TBS style here I come!", since at least it wrassles the parenthesis beast enough to make stuff somewhat intelligible, albeit only a little.
*i2amroy goes and cries into his drink

(It is kinda funny that my professor for the class is one of those hardcore LISP guys who never really gave up on the idea that LISP is "the future of programming". :P I mean don't get me wrong, LISP-related languages have their uses in places like pioneering new research algorithms and other specific types of work that benefit from it's advantages [though even in some of those fields they're starting to be beat out by things like Python for similar benefits or C++ for speed requirements], but they aren't exactly the language the vast majority of people reach for when they think "I want to code X to do Y", even when said people have been exposed to the benefits of LISP-y languages. Is it a nice tool that you should definitely learn? Yeah, even if only for the practice in a very different way of thinking. But as for "the future of programming", it's almost certainly never going to be the generic language that people grab first when they just need to code a generic something up.)

I freaking love Lisp.  I hated it in college, because it didn't click, but the longer I go on developing, the more I wish I could use it professionally.  As far as the parentheses go, using a good editor can help a lot of that stop being so painful.  Emacs did it for me, I've seen other people successfully use vim, and I'm pretty sure there's a good paren-tracking plugin for Sublime, too.

The length of time it takes to more or less craft a program in any Lisp isn't terribly surprising, when you think about it.  If you tried to write a program of equivalent expressivity in something like C++ (which I hate) or C# (which I love), you'd either go insane before you managed it, or it would take you significantly longer to find cruel ways to subvert the various bits of boilerplate the languages impose on you.  I've found lately that if I can reduce a problem down to things that can be solved with map, filter, and other standard functional mainstays, my code winds up being shorter and so much less error-prone.  That's a lot of what makes me think that Lisp had it right all along.

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