Ruby Conf 12 - Y Not- Adventures in Functional Programming by Jim Weirich

Finally made an account to post in this thread. I'm rather early in my career doing mostly Ruby, Python and JavaScript things. As you might expect, I consume mainly Ruby, Python and JavaScript related talks. The first two talks that really blew my mind are: - K Lars Lohn's PyCon Keynote from 2016: [link] - Jim Weirich's (RIP) "Y Not" talk from RubyConf 2012: [this video] There are many other presenters who I have a good opinion of: - Raymond Hettinger: his presentation/teaching style is something I'd like to model my own after, also he gave the first talk on writing proper threaded/concurrent python that I was able to understand and make use of. - Brandon Rhoades: another speaker with a presentation style that I've found easy to follow, also he takes a little shot at the dd utility about 18 minutes into [link] ) - Sandi Metz: I started out in Python land and moved to Ruby land, where I was introduced to Sandi's talks. She doesn't talk about incredibly complex topics, but she's got insight into some really basic things that's helpful to new people who can't see the forest through the trees. - Robert Martin: I gather that his OO principles are not universally revered, but I find his talks useful. - Gary Bernhardt: his talks are interesting and entertaining in ways that most are not The list goes on, but I can't think of them all right now.

I mean, sure, it's going to be turtles the whole way down if you're looking to define the universe without resorting to physical quantities (that is, dimensioned units). We don't have anything like a Grand Unified Theory yet, wherein we define Physics by means of some elemental mathematics (in the form that we can bootstrap computation from lambda calculus via things like the Y Combinator [0]). Besides, we occasionally give dimensional names to dimensionless quantities (my favorite being the engineering unit the inverse radian) [1]. It's a useful abstraction, and it seems confusing to complain about it. So we resort to what we know, which is what we see. We can't see more than the surrounding universe, but we can try extrapolating from what seems to work. Attempting to stifle that inquiry seems a bit... I dunno, pointlessly antagonistic. This article shows science in action, doing what it does best: taking observations and reconciling them with other observations via theory, and then fixing theory to match. It seems our universe follows certain equations which are themselves dimensionful, so I'm not sure why we wouldn't attempt to benchmark the universe against itself - we don't have much else to use. Even dimensionless numbers are only marginally useful, like alpha; it may "exist" and manifest as our universe, but it's not especially predictive. [0] [this video] (one of my favorite videos - I still don't grok it, but I'm getting closer!) [1] [link]