There's a guy on Israeli TV named גיא פינס--pronounced "Guy Penis." How's that for a name?

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.

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.

The word "expericne" somehow got into the Markov chain. Perhaps the words themselves are being generated by an algorithm?

I like the simplicity of http://getmagicnow.com, which appeared on HN semi-recently.

Thank you for the correction

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.

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.

Compile? I don't think Mel would do anything past assemble.

Don't forget John von Neumann

Reminds me of this: https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/status/372156022913122304

I, too, did not find this very understandable when I was trying to learn Lambda Calculus for the first time. Even now, it is still quite baffling how alligators eating aligators makes more intuitive sense than the regular notation (well, at least it's recursive). In the end, I was only really able to grasp Lambda Calculus from reading a hard book.