

Paul Buchheit: We all have tunnel vision - toffer
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/11/we-all-have-tunnel-vision.html

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henning
Suggestion: stay the fuck away from reddit, at least anything besides the
science and programming subreddits.

Even frequenting programming.reddit you might get the idea that functional
programming is poised to break into the mainstream any day now. Don't hold
your breath.

~~~
SwellJoe
"Even frequenting programming.reddit you might get the idea that functional
programming is poised to break into the mainstream any day now. Don't hold
your breath."

I think you're wrong on this one. In the Perl community (a mainstream
community if ever there was one), Haskell is very popular, and a rather large
swath of interesting work around Perl is in functional techniques and tools.
Functional programming is definitely going mainstream.

Not to mention that Simon Peyton-Jones works for Microsoft and F# is getting
quite a push.

~~~
davidw
My bet is to see someone "steal" a lot of FP ideas and integrate them into
something aimed at being a more mainstream language, rather than Haskell or
something of its ilk becoming popular. That seems to be the trend with things
like Lisp and Smalltalk.

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Harj
one way to avoid this is deliberately trying to find non-corroborative
evidence for every idea/opinion you form.

it's talked about in the Black Swan and is surprisingly difficult to do.

~~~
aston
I actually have no idea what "non-corroborative evidence for an idea" means.
Does that mean try to prove yourself wrong? Or to try to find evidence for the
idea that, due to its difference from your original evidence, doesn't actually
corroborate? Or ...?

~~~
pc
"I actually have no idea what "non-corroborative evidence for an idea" means."

It's the opposite of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corroborating_evidence>

~~~
tokipin
not to be technical, but i believe "non" means "absense of," not "inverse of."
so for a given statement there's a lot of non-corroborating evidence that is
irrelevant

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myoung8
I think YC gives us tunnel vision too...

Maybe it's not such a bad thing, though.

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downer
> _Supposedly people can hold about seven "items" in their mind at any one
> time. I was never sure what that meant -- what qualifies as an "item"?_

This urban legend PB refers to actually originated with studies of short-term
memory and remembering sequences of digits.

See
[http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:PP_hzY7PqKgJ:www.knosof....](http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:PP_hzY7PqKgJ:www.knosof.co.uk/cbook/misart.pdf)

