arnsholt

8 ms·

61.
by arnsholt 2y ago
I worked on a system implemented in Smalltalk for a few years, and the truly integrated development process possible in a ST is a high I've been chasing ever since. And this was in a setting that had so many things going against it: I
62.
by arnsholt 2y ago
This is basically how Smalltalks work. In addition to the application, an image will generally include a development environment and all the sources to your application. I think Lisp machine Lisps were a lot closer to this too.
63.
by arnsholt 2y ago
The corollary to Greenspun’s rule is that any sufficiently complicated Common Lisp program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Prolog.
64.
by arnsholt 2y ago
In this context, it's not terribly hard to divine that they probably mean EPSG:4326 coordinates. I was going to comment that one of the ETRS89 UTM zones might be easier to work with, but on second thought the data almost certainly incl
65.
by arnsholt 2y ago
I’m not convinced it’s cheaper to surveil the entire country than to simply assess claims when they are reported and dismiss those that are due to lack of maintenance.
66.
by arnsholt 2y ago
I think the details around this vary a lot from country to country. I work for a Norwegian insurer, and I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t cancel a contract like this short of something like fraud. OTOH, contracts are renewed annually, and I
67.
by arnsholt 2y ago
The genius of TeX is that it’s a programming language for document production, that can mostly look like markup. The further genius(?) is that the language works in such a way that you can do more or less arbitrarily complex things, while s
68.
by arnsholt 2y ago
Gnuplot is fantastic. And with the epslatex terminal, it sets the graphics in EPS and the text elements in TeXsobtgat you can get everything typeset juuuuuust right.
69.
by arnsholt 2y ago
This is neat, but it does seem like a lot of work to get part of the way to what a Smalltalk already gives you.
70.
by arnsholt 2y ago
Or simply building fire insurance, so you’re not massively in the hole with no collateral if your house burns down. Which is why lenders require a house to at least be fire insured in my market, as a condition of the mortgage.
71.
by arnsholt 2y ago
What is it about the story that puts you off? I might agree it’s not a masterpiece of interactive storytelling, but given the subject matter I’m hard press to find a different kind of story you could tell with it.
72.
by arnsholt 2y ago
In syntactic problem, this is called the PP attachment problem. Basically, should the sentence read (get into the problem) (with the GH team) or (get into (the problem with the GH team)). Turns out to be a very hard thing to do correctly.
73.
by arnsholt 3y ago
I mean, in some sense it's never too late to change? But I do think that as technical people our profession has a strong tendency to underestimate (and undervalue!) the social component of this kind of change. If you have agreement on
74.
by arnsholt 3y ago
I'm sure there are lots and lots of options in the design space here that would have been viable, but for better or worse this is the one we got. I dunno why Pascal didn't happen (but large portions of developers scoffing at the l
75.
by arnsholt 3y ago
I reread John Regehr's "The Problem with Friendly C" [0] a while back, and a comment towards the end made me think of the Rust in Linux effort. He speculates that "an influential group such as the Android team could crea
76.
by arnsholt 3y ago
As I read it, these physicists came across the notion of windkessel in some medical/physiological literature and realized that this is an understudied physical phenomenon. So I think the claim is less that they’re doing something revol
77.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Normally they do, but some implementations (notably GNU SmallTalk) are so afraid of the SmallTalk way of doing things that they use source files instead, which IMO removes a large part of the attraction of using SmallTalk at all.
78.
by arnsholt 3y ago
It is. In this case though, we're talking the wholesale lifting of entire passages of text from other people's theses. I think the tally is up to 22% currently of her thesis being copied without attribution from other sources.
79.
by arnsholt 3y ago
The problem for Python with type checking is that the language has essentially no compile-time constructs at all, just a bunch of assignment operators with different syntax: `def` assigns a function object to a variable when it's execu
80.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Smalltalk works this way: an object's instance variables can only be accessed directly in methods called on that object (and not in methods defined in subclasses either). And method calls aren't magical function calls, if mostly b
81.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Code as data is interesting, but mostly orthogonal to S expressions. For example, Prolog code has the same property without S expressions, and more esoterically TeX (which is succinctly explained to a lisper as programming with defmacro but
82.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Python does actually have a single instance of sub-function scopes: When you say `try: ... except Exception as e: ...` the `e` variable is deleted at the end of the `except` clause. I think this is because the exception object, via the trac
83.
by arnsholt 3y ago
The mechanism, as I understand it, is that higher temperatures drives increased evaporation which leads to increased droughts. But the evaporated water in the atmosphere has to come back down again, which it will tend to do in a great big s
84.
by arnsholt 3y ago
That’s called an intrusive r: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R Originally comes from a final r being pronounced before a word starting with a vowel, and then that cropping up in places with no fi
85.
by arnsholt 3y ago
At a guess (this is kinda far away from my own linguistics education), it serves some kind of pragmatic/discourse function. Basically, it means something along the lines of "I am now going to tell a story", which is probably
86.
by arnsholt 3y ago
I will add that the inclusion of ego is kind of unusual for Latin, which makes me personally inclined to translate it as "I will personally etc etc".
87.
by arnsholt 3y ago
With a background in linguistics and a descent understanding of Unicode, I thought I had something of a grip on the complexities of text. But then I read Text rendering hates you [0] and realized I had no idea how hard rendering text reall
88.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Oh, even Icelandic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvítis_fokking_fokk
89.
by arnsholt 3y ago
The same thing happened with the Epic implementation in Copenhagen (which might have been before Finland? I forget). But it also happened in Trondheim in Norway at the end of last year: everyone said it was a terrible idea, both technical a
90.
by arnsholt 3y ago
Both the EU and Iceland have proportional electoral systems, with districts having several seats. But the way seats are allocated to the districts in both systems isn't strictly proportional, with less populous districts having fewer e

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