WilliamLP

8 ms·

31.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Does World of Warcraft count?:)
32.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> is preferable ... > or creates a new global variable You're the first person I read who actually defends this feature of JavaScript. (Crockford lists it in his "terrible parts" I believe.)
33.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
If there are many more examples of bad than good, and for JS apps, this is a dramatic understatement, this is a great pragmatic definition of it not being good for apps. For example, I've never played a JS/Canvas game for the sake of it bei
34.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> First, it's good to get more people realizing that HTML is already pretty damn good at creating app-style experiences, That would be good if it were true. It's not.
35.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
... a custodian who actually cares to improve it, along with the insight and ability to say "no" to enough features that it has sharp unified direction and doesn't become a typical example of open source feature creep. Unfortunately, I have
36.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Why would the performance of recursion not be very context-dependent? I would expect it to be extremely context dependent depending on how much memory is being put on the stack, cache hits and misses, and so forth. I can easily imagine opti
37.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
It should crunch doubles in a way typical to what a real-world program would. I'm fine with a ray tracer or something like that. The point is I don't care about the performance of recursion for its own sake in a context for which there is n
38.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> What do you propose as an alternative? Something useful that uses recursion, perhaps. A DFS comes to mind, or countless other common real-world algorithms. When do you ever care about recursion performance in the context of a function
39.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> Another funny anecdote was when Doug Lea pointed out that if you use fibonacci to test performance against yourself or others, ... then it means you're completely disconnected from reality? Edit: Can a down-modder make a convincing ar
40.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Has Paul Graham ever addressed in writing the disconnect between the amount of hype Arc got before it was released versus nearly instantly vanishing almost completely from public mind-share?
41.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
I don't actually see a trend in the last 2-3 years of people getting more excited about Haskell, Clojure, Scala, and F#. Two years ago, people on forums like this one were extremely excited about these languages. Outside of the forum scen
42.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
For me, having tried to use Vim in the past, the pain point is never the editing itself. It's the fact that I need visual step-through debugging, adding breakpoints and watch points, and intuitive navigation through a large file hierarchy i
43.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Thank you for the post, it was interesting and made me think. I especially liked this point: "but rather that this factor needs to have a seat at the table before we have a chance of working out a balanced approach." I agree that I would li
44.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Yes, very cute and concise, and you know Python and I don't:) My point is to ask why to devote yourself to "rules" and optimizing conciseness of a trivial problem here. I don't think "readability" is a defense, because I believe my program
45.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Are you really going to defend that this isn't trivial to read: str = "abcaaabcccaabrrcb" dict = {} for ch in str: if ch not in dict.keys(): dict[ch] = 0 dict[ch] = dict[ch] + 1 sortedItems =
46.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Can someone convince me what is gained by stressing out over making an easy solution to a trivial problem concise and elegant like this? You have a perfectly good imperative solution which is the way almost any child would do it (go through
47.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
I'm with you that I found the social implications of this many times more interesting than the technical ones!
48.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
I think he's getting ready to release something similar in five years, say he invented it, and sue Frink's author.
49.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Does this offer anything that Wolfram Alpha doesn't? http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+a+...
50.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> I'd rather read the analysis of someone who's written a decent-sized program in it. The more I read about Haskell, the more I become convinced that the set of people solving decently sized real programs in the language numbers somewhe
51.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
That's fine as long as it's either Vim or Emacs.
52.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Wouldn't "hyperbole" imply that the statement isn't literally true?
53.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
I don't think it's any coincidence at all that the most successful open source effort ever is the same one where there is the greatest force of personality in charge, who insists on maintaining top-down control. I'm not convinced that later
54.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> Javascript's notion of logical truthiness is extremely difficult to hold in my head. So it isn't intuitive to you that an empty object and array should both evaluate to true, but neither are equal to true, the empty array is equal to
55.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
> I left my job for a tech company and took a job as a barista at a Starbucks. I can second this, although I don't know if I could make the choice to do it voluntarily. I was unemployed a couple of years ago and working full time hours
56.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
If productivity is measured by Erdos number, they moved math forward immensely.
57.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
With JavaScript, there is an interesting contrast between what its fans say are its strengths and what battle-hardened experience actually requires you to do. For example: - Prototype object systems are great... except don't actually use th
58.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
Aside from the claim that there have thousands of equally impactful mathematicians (have there been 100?) that doesn't invalidate the claim that illegal drug use has had a positive effect on mathematical knowledge, even if Erdos has been th
59.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
What comes to mind is Paul Erdos being jacked up on Benzedrine and Ritalin nearly every day for the last 25 years of his life and undoubtedly contributing a massive amount to modern mathematics. (There was a life hacker in every possible se
60.
by WilliamLP 16y ago
That's awesome! I laughed a lot at Steve "Butterbean" Ballmer and the Google brothers! I thought John McCarthy was going to be John McCarthy. Yukihiro Matsumoto -> Kazushi Sakuraba Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike -> Royce, Ri

More ›