Have you ever wondered how it could be that Lisp is so powerful, and yet C is so much more successful and ubiquitous? How is it that so many brilliant coders know Lisp, and yet we so rarely hear from any of them other than Paul Graham? This is a great article that tries to explain it: the bipolar Lisp programmer.
In his keynote at PyCon, Eben Upton, the Executive Director of the Rasberry Pi Foundation, mentioned that not only has Minecraft been ported to the Rasberry Pi, but you can even control it with Python . Since four of my kids are avid Minecraft fans, I figured this might be a good time to teach them to program using Python. So I started yesterday with the goal of programming something cool for Minecraft and then showing it off at the San Francisco Python Meetup in the evening. The first problem that I faced was that I didn't have a Rasberry Pi. You can't hack Minecraft by just installing the Minecraft client. Speaking of which, I didn't have the Minecraft client installed either ;) My kids always play it on their Nexus 7s. I found an open source Minecraft server called Bukkit that "provides the means to extend the popular Minecraft multiplayer server." Then I found a plugin called RaspberryJuice that implements a subset of the Minecraft Pi modding API for B
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At least I'm not alone.
Nope, you're not. If you (or anyone else reading this) ever really gets down, give me a call. On of my friends recently committed suicide. He never gave me a chance to help him out. I don't want that to ever happen again. (925) 209-6439.
I appreciate you posting your number, and will probably be adding it and the suicide prevention hotline to my phone contacts tomorrow.
College has turned out to be a huge disappointment, and I've hit quite a few low points this past year. I don't want you to feel like you have to wait around for a call that will never come, so I was hesitant to tell you this, but if nothing else I appreciate your kindness.
Take care.
Welcome back!
> I appreciate you posting your number, and will probably be adding it and the suicide prevention hotline to my phone contacts tomorrow.
Good. I was thinking of my friend just yesterday, and I was really angry. People who commit suicide don't realize how much the rest of us really do care about them and how much it hurts the rest of us when they leave on such vicious terms.
> College has turned out to be a huge disappointment,
Here are a couple points of advice: 1) Don't expect your professors to be amazing and intelligent. College has more to do with determination than with actually learning anything. When the world hires a college graduate, they're hiring him because he was able to finish something, not because he learned anything in particular. That's especially true of Ph.D's. 2) Find friends. Do whatever you need to do to enjoy being on campus. If you enjoy being on campus, hanging out with friends, you'll do better in your classes. 3) College is a great time to exercise. You probably have some free time, and the gym on campus is probably free.
> and I've hit quite a few low points this past year. I don't want you to feel like you have to wait around for a call that will never come, so I was hesitant to tell you this, but if nothing else I appreciate your kindness.
Glad to hear from you.
Best of Luck,
-jj
But yeah, the writer of that article is a skillful pusher of buttons in people as well as machines.