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by muuh-gnu 5862 days ago
Homo sapiens is pretty cool too, but I wonder how many walking talking apes we really need... Random mutation + diversity + natural selection isnt yielding working, practical results only for biological organisms.

You sound like we should simply take the first best anything we run into and than stick with it unconditionally for the sole purpose of not having to spend time looking over the wall.

Do you at least remember the day back then when you lost your adventuresomeness?
2 comments
ryanwaggoner 5862 days ago
Do you at least remember the day back then when you lost your adventuresomeness?

You could have easily made the point without being snarky and insulting.

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jheriko 5862 days ago
Human evolution is more like looking at revisions of a single programming language. The basic elements remained consistent, but changed subtly over millions of years in an iterative fashion... if you pick life as a whole though I agree with your analogy, but this is very much a small cautious, iterative improvement and it offers me nothing I can't already get.

I enjoy the rational argument you give here, but I think you went too far by attacking my personality and misconstruing my words. The opposite of many is few, not one, and that was the impetus for my comment - right now "we" all seem to be focused on developing a tiny little area of programming instead of the whole and the effects are obvious if you have to work with it - towering technology stacks of crumbly code that are unstable through bad design and a lack of low-level mentality at the high-level - so bad they give Apple a pretty solid excuse to ban Flash on iPhone.

As for my "adventuresomeness" I'm comfortable with all the major paradigms and languages and work at every level, from encoded instruction bytes up to things like SQL/XSLT with C/Haskell/Fortran/Java/Ruby/Python/whatever inbetween and a wide variety of platforms (phones/games consoles/PDAs/calculators/PCs). I learned three languages in the last month - only two of which were through necessity at work and I am happy to make radical comments which express my opinions and not turn away from them when they clash with flavour of the month/year/decade... and thats just programming. I dunno what you call adventuresome but from your comment, I'd imagine its probably a lot less adventurous than me... but then I might be misconstruing words and attacking your personality then. :P

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