SearchYC.com

The field of artificial intelligence has been always something I wanted to take a peek on, but never really had the chance. Could people here recommend me some good books to start my journey on this field?

I know Lisp is interpreted (and this is one of its greatest advantages with its eval loop and all it brings), but is there any tool to compile Lisp code? Or to translate it into C++ code to be compiled with a C++ compiler?

A long time ago, someone posted here a link to a book on lisp that went out of press and thus was being offered for free as pdf. I downloaded it, but I lost it, and I can't seem to find it again. Could someone please point me to the book again?

Company's willing to refactor heavily some main software of ours. We want to port all Delphi code to .NET so we can abandon a lot of legacy code. We've been planing said new software (suposed to do the same the actual does) for nearly two weeks already. Every module we cross is like trying to find the cure for cancer, and right now, I left the meeting because the main module of the project is being fully rewritten since it is prone to failure in some expected error condition and I don't want to have anythind to do with the mess they are designing (we work with hardware that wears out after a while and starts malfunctioning). Sorry about the whole rambling. My question is kind of simple. Do you start planing by the most complicated module to the simplest one, or the opposite? How do you design / plan your softwares at all?

I noticed a trend on my company, and I wish to know if this is standard all around. I am a unexperienced coder, I have a tad more than an year on software development field as a professional. I noticed that people that are far more experienced than I am are quite resistant to change or to try anything new. Not many months ago I had a discussion with my manager about being allowed to use .NET 3.5 because the company was still using .NET 1.1 due to the fact that "the company" did not have enough time to analyze how .NET 2.0 "worked" and couldn't understand the impact of the change, much less .NET 2.5. I would still be developping in .NET 1.1 wasn't for the WCF that comes as part of .NET 3.5 and would cut a lot of development time because the company decided to make the software using SOA. Is it always like this? Why is it that the ones that could learn quicker due to their greater experience are the ones less willing to learn?

This is NSFW. I guess I should forewarn people.

Well, was it fixed? Why is it that that script still works?

I know this has probably been over debated lately. Everyone's saying the Cuil is a fail as a search engine. Am I the only one that noticed the detail that it seems to bring more results the more specific is the query?

I mean, I've read on a blog somewhere that Cuil doesn't bring any results for "Cobol". They even had a link. And it's true, it doesn't, BUT they offer those tabs with more specific queries like "cobol compiler", "cobol jobs" and such. And they DO bring results. While I don't know cobol and am unable to assert the relevance of the results, I am biased to believe that we've been using Cuil wrongly.

People have been wanting so badly for someone to beat Google at being Google that they pick very candidate and try to use it like they use Google. And this new search engine is bringing something new to us, a new way of search, and we are so locked into and used to the "way of Google" that we are blocking ourselves from trying new ways of doing things.

We are coders. We all know how is it like when we move from one language to another that has a totally different way of doing things. We complain, we curse, we swear to go back to our old language, but we bear it and then we 'get it'. And when we get it we can see the advantages, the disadvantages and understand when use one and when use other.

Maybe we should first try to learn the 'way of Cuil' before we dismiss it as another failure? I don't know, am I sounding too weird, or does it click into someone else like it did on me?

I know this is not the best place to be asking lisp questions so if someone opposes to it, I make this once the single time I do it.

I've been reading PG's ACL book, and since coders are restless beings, of course I don't want to read the whole book to understand what went wrong with what I did. See, here at page 15 he defines this nice 'SUM-GREATER' function. It takes 3 arguments and returns true if the sum of the first two is greater than the third. Here it goes:

(defun sum-greater (x y z) (> (+ x y) z))

Not that hard. NOW, I know that the + function can accept any ammount of parameters so I was trying to figure out how to pass a list as one of the first two parameters (or both) and do not crash the function. Passing another sum doesn't count as a solution. What I am looking for is more on the lines of a C "..." parameter type.

Now, if I haven't annoyed enough yet, I know there is a mirc channel about lisp somewhere, but on which mirc net? I think I should ask future questions there.