mjdominus

Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective

Original text from http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/iwe/2005-July/000130.html

Content

From: Mark Jason Dominus <mjd@plover.com> 
Date: Jul 28, 2005 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: HOP -vs- SICP

To: hop-discuss@plover.com

mjdominus

Mathematics: What do grad students in math do all day?

by Yasha Berchenko-Kogan

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

mjdominus

#!/bin/bash
set -e

# Send a private message to someone on slack
# from the command line.

# Print a usage message and exit.
usage(){
	local name=$(basename "$0")