Dude Taylor Swift is awesome. I can relate.

But good eye on that. ;)

He's been a controversial figure in many forums but his emacs lisp tutorial is the best out there. I gave him a donation through Paypal (for approximately the price of an O'Reilly book) and he personally sent me an email thanking me.

unfortunately his knowledge of basic Lisp is relatively small and his Lisp style is also quite bad.

He does imperative programming in Lisp:

   (let (a b result)
     (setq a 1)
     (setq b 2)
     (setq result (+ a b))
     result)

code which is more than four lines is often from different sources.

Well, looks like he's got ads on his site now which I suppose takes place of the donation button.

Not sure but I think it's an emergency measure to sustain income.

This is regularly done in R using the MASS library.

If it wasn't offered under the auspices of UW, I would have thought it a scam...

Me too at first, but that's because the link goes to a 3rd party blogger, not the actual program being offered.

Which, by the way, is http://www.pce.uw.edu/certificates/data-science.html

I agree with you, but I'm assuming technical questions are asked too. But given several candidates who seem to do well on that portion (which is more of an academic exercise), you have to differentiate them on metrics which you have not (or possibly would have a difficult time) capturing. Hence a set of heuristics which rely on the observation that correlations between practical developer quality (or possibly just the archetype the poster prefers) and seemingly meaningless series of choices exist, you can (hopefully, favorably) bias your decision based on the latter. Choices to speak a lot about the person, especially when it deals with something you work with for such a large fraction of your professional life (e.g., OS, go-to language, sources of information). Sure, you could be selecting mostly mainstream developers and denying potentially stellar candidates, but there is also risk in taking chances with people who fall outside the norm (or what might be the norm for "solid" developers) too. Having said that, I guess I just want to make the statement that while the premise of the post sounds appalling, I'm not entirely against it.

And sorted() and reversed() behave differently (return different object classes) while mylist.sort() and mylist.reverse() do. In that way it's also confusing.

The modify-in-place method does seems more natural when you do want the destructive updating case.

Ah, so this is the value-added proposition.

The authors seem very receptive to feedback -- which is encouraging. Maybe I missed if they addressed this, but I wish they'd consider the IDE to be an important part of the language ecosystem. A web REPL is good... but I suspect that (despite Steve Yegge's prediction that the browser is the next IDE) that programmers will expect a serious language/environment to be called interactively through emacs as can R, matlab, and python/ipython (I heard vim can also do this with R?). Or, possibly through an IDE like Rstudio with optional local/server access.

I expect the Web REPL will ultimately evolve into something like RStudio (which itself is web-based, even in local mode).

There is already an emacs mode for Julia: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/contrib/julia...

Emacs mode already? They're doin it right. :)

I was not aware RStudio was web-based. News to me...

Yep, RStudio is GWT driven (https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/) and uses some very particular configuration tricks to keep you from accessing it with a browser in local mode.

Well explained by chimeracoder. Data-table centric operations are much more natural in R while sequential objects (lists, tuples, and strings) are quickly manipulated in Python (there are more string/regex methods there).

I am a heavy Python user, but when I use Numpy/Scipy I don't feel like I'm using Python much anymore so at that point I either switch to R (or Fortran)... though I'm quite optimistic that at some point the pandas DataFrame can become my default storage structure from which I can parse out R tasks through Rpy, SQLite, HDF5, or possibly Reddis.

matplotlib is very verbose though; I almost prefer Matlab's graphics model... though less so than R's basic and lattice graphics.

Whups, that did not even occur to me. But shouldn't you make an attempt to talk about your common interests? ;)