StefanKarpinski

9 ms·

31.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
On UNIX, paths are UTF-8 by convention, but not forced to be valid. Treating paths as UTF-8 works very well as long as you hadn't also make the mistake of requiring your UTF-8 strings to be valid (which Python did, unfortunately). On W
32.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
Absolutely right. Deprecating direct string indexing would have been the right move. Require writing `str.chars()` to get something that lets you slice by Unicode characters (i.e. code points); provide `str.graphemes()` and `str.grapheme_cl
33.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
It was cobbled together from msun and other sources to make a complete, portable, open source, liberally licensed libm, which—shockingly enough—did not exist in 2010 when we put it all together.
34.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
I’m curious about the choice to call this Idris 2 v0.6.0 rather than the more obvious and semver-compatible Idris 2.6.0. Anyone know if Edwin had written about this anywhere?
35.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
The Julia ecosystem (BinaryBuilder specifically) forbids libraries built with -ffast-math for exactly this kind of reason.
36.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
From this description this is fairly obviously the LightGraphs situation, and that's a pretty misleading account of what happened. The person was not kicked out of anything—they were not blocked or banned from any platforms or forums.
37.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
An arrangement that would make sense would be to separate data collection from publication and make the academic success of data collectors predicated on how many publications use their data. That would incentivize data collectors to make t
38.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
This press release is so vague and hypey as to be unintelligible. The paper itself (linked from the article) is much clearer: "Practically Correct, Just-in-Time Shell Script Parallelization" https://nikos.vasilak.is&#x2
39.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
Inspired by this I wrote a post on the Julia discourse forum about the arbitrariness of truthiness in programming languages: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/on-the-arbitrariness-of-tr... . Julia requires actual `true`
40.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
Here's a post I wrote on Julia discourse about why one-based indexing is not the culprit here, no matter what people may feel about it aesthetically: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/offsetarrays-inbounds-and-...
41.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
I guess that’s pragmatic but having native arrays and “scientific arrays” be totally different incompatible things is just so unsatisfying.
42.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
I’m curious if anyone knows what approach Owl takes to making sure float arrays, complex arrays, etc. are unboxed. (Or if it leaves them boxed.)
43.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
Offset arrays aren't a kludge and the package would exist regardless of whether zero or one has been chosen as a default base for indexing. Having arbitrary index ranges in different dimensions is extremely useful in many application d
44.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
In particular, not a single issue mentioned in this article would have been prevented by static type checking.
45.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
That's why interfaces are useful—they save you from that. But they don't actually solve the problem of checking that an abstraction has been implemented correctly, just that you've implemented the entire API surface area, pos
46.
by StefanKarpinski 4y ago
The big language design problem that I think this post highlights is that the flip side of Julia's composability is that composing generic code with types that implement abstractions can easily expose bugs when the caller and the calle
47.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process whe
48.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Good idea! One problem is that some people will swipe right on everything in one or both categories. Limiting the number/fraction of right swipes might help.
49.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Startup time for Teams is hilariously bad. If I start trying to join a Teams meeting when it starts I have to warn people I’m going to be a few minutes late. My computer is not especially slow. I’m sure everyone at Microsoft has it running
50.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
This post is a really good illustration of UTF-8. Very clear! The key brilliance of the design is not only the embedding of ASCII in UTF-8, but the fact that nothing in ASCII can appear anywhere else UTF-8, and more generally that no UTF-8
51.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Your argument is that “Python can call fast code written in other languages”? That is true, of course, but if that’s your definition of Python being fast, then it makes the notion of one language being faster than another meaningless.
52.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Eagerly awaiting matrix libraries written in pure Python that outperform BLAS.
53.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Sometimes I would imagine (I’m no expert in Rust but do know a bit about compilers), Rust’s ability to guarantee unshared access to memory can probably enable optimizations that are hard to coax out of a C compiler. Many libc functions are
54.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Awful but plausible.
55.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
An interesting aspect of this effort is that it undoubtesly makes modifying these tools much easier. While GNU and the FSF are all about legally ensuring the ability to read and modify their code, they have, in practice, made it almost impo
56.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Tip: the first move when trying to write a macro is doing `Meta.@dump` on examples of argument expressions you want your macro to consume and produce. Then write code that transforms the inputs to the outputs.
57.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
This is such a bad and US-centric example: for anyone who lives in a place where it is easy to get around without a car, hiring a car only when you need it is a no-brainer financially and owning a car is a totally waste of money.
58.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Is the concept that UTC would become "detached" from a particular location on Earth and the offset of time zones relative to UTC would change over time (very infrequently since it would take on the order of a millenium for a time
59.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
If I've learned one thing about dealing with exceptional events, it's that the less often they happen, the less likely you are to handle them well. Switching from leap seconds every few years to leap minutes every century, pretty
60.
by StefanKarpinski 5y ago
Fully agree with this, although one case where Java’s lack of unsigned integers is a quite bad is in representing binary data because the byte type is signed. I recently had cause to write some Java code that did a lot of modular arithmetic

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