DonaldPShimoda

10 ms·

91.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
In this case specifically, two separate aspects are being referred to with regard to "formal verification". The first is that the translation function (from C to Rust) has itself been formally verified. In other words: if you give
92.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
> Instead of throwing an exception, we’ve decided that this function should always return something, even if it’s not in the haystack The right move at this point would be to use an optional type, surely...
93.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
The Sufficiently Smart Compiler is a hypothetical argument used in advocating for a programming language whose naive implementations might tend towards inefficient designs, whereas the aliasing argument is not itself hypothetical but it may
94.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
I am also a fan of Illusions. :)
95.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
> for many pages For those who do not know, this is an understatement. The monologue is some 60 pages long.
96.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
No, the FP community at large is definitely not moving toward dependent types. However, much more of the FP research community is now focused on dependent types, but a good chunk of that research is concerned with questions like "How
97.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
Translating LaTeX to HTML is not a straightforward process, unfortunately. Many people have tried to implement automated translation systems, but nothing has really worked out yet. I think it's unfair to expect the research team to inv
98.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
> There's a blog post by Matthew Flatt of Racket fame describing how Racket's scope system works. For clarity, I would specify that Matthew is the lone conceiver and implementer of the original sets-of-scopes system, as evidenc
99.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
FWIW, the Patrick Cousot* perspective on abstract interpretation is that literally everything is an application of abstract interpretation. It's kind of a meme in the PL community at this point, but he's really all-in on it and ev
100.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
Personally, I'm a fan of when he has argued with academics on Twitter about things that he is actually ill-equipped to discuss, but he refuses to budge because their (factually correct) statements don't align with his limited worl
101.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
But the parent comment is about CO2 decaffeination specifically, not decaffeination in general.
102.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
SIGPLAN is my only ACM membership; I figure I can support my primary publishing organization at $25/year or whatever. So your 1978 issue sounds like a pretty cool piece of history to have to me!
103.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
> I loved his articles in the ACM. This is a super minor correction on my part, but this is a weird phrasing because "the ACM" is a huge organization that publishes proceedings for a great range of interests --- it isn't a
104.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
No; I think in this context, "research skills" specifically means "skills in the service of conducting publishable research", not "skills that involve some quantity of exploration" or something like that. (To b
105.
by DonaldPShimoda 2y ago
The "utility" of the lambda calculus, in my opinion, comes down to Church's original choice of terminology. He did not call the things denoted by lambda "functions"; rather, they were abstractions . What makes the
106.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> Never really understood why not all strings were f-strings in python. Sometimes you don't want interpolation, and it seems more reasonable to default to a version without such a feature than to default to a version with it and hav
107.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
Yes! Another well-known program reducer is C-Reduce [0]. When Csmith [1] started churning out very large programs that exhibited errors in C compilers, the compiler maintainers asked the researchers to please reduce the ~81KB files to a mor
108.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
Unless the AI's training data was 100% your own material, yes, obviously .
109.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> write-only languages Lisps are not write-only. They're easy to read precisely because there is no inscrutable syntax. Every pair of parentheses has a first element, which tells you what they're doing. The parentheses denote
110.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
I'm just waiting for people to catch on that using an inherently unreliable tool that cannot gauge its own reliability to generate code or answer fact-based queries is a fool's errand. But I expect we'll spend a lot of effo
111.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
It's not completely clear to me (maybe I skimmed too much), but I don't think the drug is meant to be administered during the early years of the dog's life. They let it grow to the normal size, but then begin reducing the e
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by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
I think you wanted to include the word "reducing" at the beginning of that quote. As it is, it's kind of hard to make sense of!
113.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
I haven't looked enough into Smalltalk's history — thank you for the pointer! Although the "language levels" I'd mentioned previously are implemented with macros, the underlying concept is a little deeper than that
114.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> But starting out with something that is not Python, with the goal of ending up doing Python, seems like a funny way to approach things. Another project in this space is Pyret [0]. The Pyret language has been developed with the express
115.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
Perhaps a small use case, but nasm is used in UMD's compilers course ( https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2023/cmsc430/ ). And while that in itself is maybe not particularly exciting, I think the underlying
116.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
I'd like to point out that Betteridge's Law is, like any other such "law", kind of tongue-in-cheek. It's not serious. The real point of my earlier comment was that I was voicing an opinion that it is not the case th
117.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines will answer your reformulated post title accurately: no.
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by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> I was hoping more for "Living" as in "active, uncertain, will grow over time". This is, I think, the very antithesis of what research papers are for. The point of a publication is that at some point in time, you wro
119.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
No, you are wrong. Some theorem provers, such as Coq, are not Turing-complete. This means you cannot write some programs, and in particular you cannot write infinite loops in Coq. Infinite loops are a common pattern (e.g., a REPL or a GUI d
120.
by DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
Theorem provers' type systems are not necessarily stronger than SML's or Haskell's; they are more expressive , which is a separate thing entirely. That said, your position is also just weird to me. Yes, theorem provers hav

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