The very reason that I became interested in programming is the ability to eliminate repetition. Instead of solving math problems, I could make a calculator program. Instead of typing something out many times, the computer would do it for me. Type once, run forever. That was an amazing revalation.
If I had learned programming through mindless repetition, through typing the same thing over and over again (As codecademy has students doing here), I would have quit early on.
Instead, I learned through solving problems. Diverse problems forced me to apply my newfound bits and pieces of knowledge in different ways. I always focused on eliminating repetition whenever I could. I had no interest in typing a lot.
There are different kinds of repetition. Practicing the elimination of repetition is the best repetition there is.
Finally, of all the computer-related tools out there, the command line is perhaps the best at aiding users in the elimination of repetition. With the ease of adding new commands, with programs like vi and cron at one's fingertips, there is so much even a beginning user can do to start eliminating his/her repetition. So to TEACH this tool as one of mindless typing is utterly abominable.
Everyone seems to be missing this bit - it is about those fundamentals first. The end goal is eliminating repetition. But it takes repetition to get to that point because that's how the human brain works.
I observe this with students who use IDEs in the beginning. Some "experienced" developer tells them they need to use an IDE because it "saves time."
Then the students tab-complete their way through code and don't really understand, or remember, what it is. The connections, the pathways to memory, aren't as great.
And not everyone learns this way. If your first program out of the gate was a program to do math for you, before previously learning anything about programming, then based on my experience you are an outlier, someone with a gift and natural affinity for this field.
Bottom line: if this was too repetitive for you, you weren't the target audience.
I'd say eliminating repetition is meta-programming, rather than programming. It is one of the things that set experienced programmers apart from beginners.
Perhaps you should have a "Trie of stories" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie). Every possible sequence of letters, and thus every story, is simply a path down this trie, where each node has children containing the letters of the alphabet and punctuation. Users could mark down notable places on the trie where there is a story.
That reminds me of Borges' story, The Library of Babel. It concerns a library which contains every possible book. Many great books would be contained within, but it would be impossible to differentiate them from books that devolve into pure noise halfway through.
Magic previously had a serif font (Times?) and it was just a plain 10 digit phone number. The page was actually really off-putting to users [citation needed] until they eventually fixed it.
(Yeah, I don't remember the article outlining that it did. But I remember that it did. Magic started off as a kind of hack or whatever.)
There was another service that appeared on HN shortly after this did offering a similar service but for small coding projects. Does anyone remember the name?
Just as a sidenote, the Rabbis determine that a fetal calf does not count as meat, so one could actually cook a calf in its mother's milk, according to Jewish law.
A fetal calf is meat. But it does not require ritual slaughter - the slaughter of the mother is considered sufficient. (This rule actually has implications for the abortion debate.)
You have it reversed.
If you find milk inside the udder of the cow after slaughter that milk is considered meat, not milk. However it's prohibited rabbinically because it looks like milk and can lead to confusion.
Consider the Odyssey, a classic example of a Greek text.
The Odyssey was codified and passed down through generations in Greece. People write about the Odyssey, but almost no one has writted linear commentaries for it.
Lets compare that to the Talmud. The Mishnah is the core of the Talmud, and it is a collection of oral law written down (in about 200 C.E.) by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. Like the Odyssey, it is unchanged and has been transmitted through the generations.
However, its story does not end there. The next generation of Rabbis writes the Gemara. The Gemara is a collections of more oral law from the generation of the Mishnaic Rabbis, along with debate about the laws in the Mishnah, trying to find proofs for laws, trying to deal with problematic laws, clarify vague laws, and so on. The Mishnah and the Gemara make up the Talmud. (Note that there are actually two versions of the Talmud, the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. They have the same Mishnah but the Gemara is different. The Babylonian Talmud is more complete and therefore more widely studied).
Skipping forward a few years, the Rabbis of the middle ages start to comment on the Talmud. Rashi commented on the entire (Babylonian) Talmud, and so did the Rabbis of his grandchildrens' generation. Meanwhile, other Rabbis, such as Maimonadies (I'm sure I spelled that wrong), were trying to extract the laws from the Talmud (a daunting task because not all discussions were resolved). Even very recently, Rabbi Steinsaltz wrote his commentary on the entire Talmud. The cycle of commentary never ends.
Are you really saying that the Talmud is comparable to the Odyssey, but not to Plato? I'd expect, since you're talking about a philosophical tradition, that the reverse would be more accurate. Philosophical commentary abounds in the Greek tradition:
Commentaries were also written on Homer, but as the Iliad and the Odyssey are literary rather than philosophical works the commentary takes a different form. Here are a few selections from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_scholarship#Classical_... :
> Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the "Poetics", with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Aristotle’s main study of Homer did not survive. It is listed in Diogenes Laertius' "Life of Aristotle" as "Six books of Homeric problems."
> Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals: (1) Analyzing internal inconsistencies within the epics; (2) Producing editions of the epics' authentic text, free of interpolations and errors; [and] (3) Interpretation: both explaining archaic words, and exegetical interpretation of the epics as literature.
> there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics. The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g., Apollo is opposed to Poseidon because fire is opposed to water.
The difference is that with the Odyssey and Plato, commentaries on the work are not considered part of the work. The commentaries on the Talmud are considered part of the Talmud, including inheriting the Talmud's status as law -- making the Talmud very much a living document.
I've noticed that Go seems to be fairly popular for emulators / simple VMs as well. I'm currently working on a SID emulator in Go, and I'm finding it quite fun! (unfortunately, it means that I then need to write a proof of concept synth-like API to the SID, then a proof of concept sequencer to control the synth...)
