Scrap the scare quotes, it is obviously false. Less code in the small does imply less code in the large. It doesn't need any justification, it is a tautology: if it takes less code to write all the small things in your program, the program itself will have less code overall.
Or did I misunderstood the meaning of "less code"?
'Homo sapiens' is a very rough category. If you would call a 250,000 year-old animal a homo sapiens, you'd probably call its grandparents one too. Time-frames used this way are only really applicable to talking about some static history, not active evolutionary processes.
Humans will still be Homo Sapiens in 1 million years as long as we still call them that. In other words, "how old" homo sapiens is is a rather arbitrary matter of convention, so it doesn't make a good argument.
> If you would call a 250,000 year-old animal a homo sapiens, you'd probably call its grandparents one too.
Sure, and conditional on that I'd probably call their grandparents H. sapiens too, and conditional on that, probably also their grandparents. But it doesn't take that many generations before all these "probably"s multiply out to a "probably not".
I don't think the distinction between homo sapiens and not-homo sapiens is so fuzzy that we can't distinguish between evolution working on 250,000 and 1,000,000 year timescales.
My point is that we distinguish species based upon their features, not timescale. So you cannot use this timescale-based differentiation to make a good argument to counter a feature-based differentiation.
How many generations would it take for some evolved feature to become part of homo sapiens has nothing to do with how many features are needed to not be homo sapiens anymore. Other than the fact that they both take time and are statements about evolution, there is no relation between the two.
> you cannot use this timescale-based differentiation to make a good argument to counter a feature-based differentiation.
I don't know what you mean by this. I don't know what feature-based differentiation I'm supposedly countering, and I don't know what it would mean to counter it.
What argument do you think I'm trying to make, exactly? Because all I'm saying is, "evolution makes significant changes on timescales significantly less than millions of years".
This thread isn't actually particularly interesting to me, so I may tap out now.
> I'd go with "foundational parts of the human experience"
But not necessarily professions. The notion of "professional artist" is fairly recent. Most of the great artists, pre-20th century, had day jobs: from Chaucer (diplomat, astronomer) to Lewis Carroll (Mathematician).
And, if anything, I'd think that art not being a profession only made their art better. I mean, how much can someone who all he does is write all day can possibly have to say?
Take Asimov, for example. I wonder how interesting his science fiction would have turned out had he not been, first and foremost, an actual scientist?
Thanks! That's an invaluable addition to the conversation.
For my purposes and for the purposes of the people building this site, I was taking "complete beginner" to mean "never played chess, ever." If you think about it there are many things I know that such a person doesn't, e.g., what it's like to make an ill-considered move.
I knew what pinning and skewering were, for example, although I didn't have a name for them. Learning about pinning for me is putting a name to something I've experienced. A "complete beginner" doesn't have access to that and will be incrementally harder to teach.
That's what I meant, not that 50 games is substantial experience or that I am not a beginner.
teaching to a broad audience means balancing the likelihood that the learner will be in over their head (too much information) with the likelihood that they will have a negative experience stemming from lack of information (bug due to missing semicolon). given javascript and its many bad parts I believe the first scenario to be much more likely than the second, especially for an introductory text.
that doesn't necessarily follow