Long Live Indices

Reblog if you’re a student actively ignoring an assignment

You know how there are a lot of programming languages that people say are “really powerful if you know how to use them”? And how usually those languages aren’t at all worth the time? I think Haskell might actually be worth the time. After a hiatus I’ve come back to it and love it. I hardly know how to use it, but at least I can perceive how it might be really powerful.

Prolog is still the worst, though.

C is a shot of American Rye (100 proof, bottled-in-bond)

Python is a Ramos Gin Fizz

Javascript is a bone-dry, dirty, vodka martini

React a Cosmopolitan

Angular an Appletini

Express an Espressotini (yea I say that instead of “espresso martini” because I find it more fun this way)

C# is a Sazerac with equal parts cognac and whiskey, and the person making it will HAVE to tell you how “a lot of people say it’s the first cocktail, but that’s not really true”

if i were a drink i’d be cherry vanilla coke

It’s high time I dip my toes into Rust

and an unholy amount of linear algebra

CSS, the most toxic lover

Oh CSS,

I have not a single guess

how one can hope to ever

with you win success.

Sweet CSS, 

you leave my sanity a mess

and my div tags all in shambles

while I trudge on with hopelessness.

Bitter CSS,

though you display indifference

as you treat me miserably

to you I will always return, nonetheless.

Hey! Computer Science B.S. passing by. CS, like the last reply mentioned, is a science. A lot of schools will lump it in with the college of engineering (e.g. the one I went to), which isn’t necessarily wrong, but ultimately the discipline is a natural science.

In fact one could argue that hardware computers aren’t even necessary to perform the activities of pure computer science: people like Leonhard Euler were discovering its principles long before the first transistor had been made. Heck, even if your laundry-sorting process is rigid enough you could call it computer science.

I think of computer science as the study of the ways to move and store data. The best way to accomplish those activities happens to be with computers, so we concern ourselves with applications on the creations of our computer engineering friends.

hey! could you help me with the difference between computer science and computer engineering?

hi! my background is experimental physics, so you might be better off asking someone who is actually from one of those disciplines. but my understanding is that computer science focuses on software (eg data structures, coming up with algorithms) while computer engineering is a marriage of cs and electrical engineering, which involves more work on the electronics/hardware side of things. because of this, you'd need to learn a lot more physics for a computer engineering degree.

For those of you who are worried about AI taking over the world, this is the sentence produced by a “neural network” (a fancy name for my relative frequency matrix) after I had it read Beowulf, Galen, Guinea, Little Women, Mansfield Park, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Call of the Wild. (All are freely available on Project Gutenberg in many filetypes including plain text, btw).

You’d think after all the time I’ve spent on front-end dev I’d be able to at least write efficient CSS. You’d think. 

CSS art terrifies me to the point that I don’t even have the courage to try it. Tremendous respect to people who can make it.

I don’t want to come off negative… but you know how these things go.