astrobe_

42 ms·

601.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
One has to find that somebody because some insurance will have to pay something. Our society is not less tolerant for accidents; it's less tolerant for their cost.
602.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
I think Git benefited from Linux, but not from Linus' fame (which was next to null outside of the Linux circles at that time, it took off a little when Linux started to power phones when it became the kernel for Android, I believe). By
603.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
> she pretty much lives the way she learned This is for me one key to understand this effect. I was a small kid in the 70ies, I didn't have any idea about gas prices and how much a driving license costs - I didn't even know tha
604.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
My feelings exactly. Plus, in some languages "We" can be used in place of "I" by royals (and other people with a high opinion of themselves) - as in the famous "We are not amused" |1]. That's true in my na
605.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
To me, that would certainly be less irritating than the artificially friendly, helpful, engaging tone of the current product.
606.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
> That's what drives picking boring technology is the ecosystem surrounding that tech ... And a "pinch" of risk aversion too.
607.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
The problem is that it is a self-amplifying logic, a self-fulfilling prophecy of disaster: you pick Linux because it's easier to hire, so there's less job offers for FreeBSD, so job seekers (and schools) focus on Linux, so it&#x27
608.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Designs these days try to hide the distinction between volatile memory ("RAM") and mass storage ("disk"), so buffers can only be more and more an alien concept for common users, if not a design defect. However, I think i
609.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Actually, shell/unix pipes bring to the table a bunch of features: a convenient syntax to connect processes, I/O buffering (usually done by the programs themselves but still), and concurrency. Languages are an (often) unique combi
610.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Don't play dumb. When you can describe the function with one simple sentence, it is likely that it does one thing. Cars transport their passengers. The fact that performing this action involves complex processes doesn't matter. Ju
611.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
For this profile, a fully integrated environment like Squeak/Pharo or Racket would be a better option. Perhaps even just Emacs! :-) I won't disagree with you about the needless complexity, but OTOH programming does have a certain
612.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
OTOH an application does have its own language. Someone said "When you devised an application you wrote a hundred words [(functions)] or so that discussed the application and you used those hundred words to write a one line definition
613.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Agreed, except avoid the term "abstraction". When one starts to talk about abstractions, one stops thinking. The right word is "generalization", and that's what you are actually doing: you start with a down-to-earth
614.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Flags are misused if their meaning is entangled, e.g. flag A is meaningless when flag B is set. In this case, you don't need flags but states, as TFA points out (with far too many words, IMO); in C lingo, when this happens you should s
615.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
And that opinion would probably turn grey on HN. At best, it's a not-so-funny joke.
616.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Feel free. I somehow got the mistaken idea that you were asking questions, but it turns out that your were stating opinions that should not be questioned.
617.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
I've made a Forth dialect and uses it for somewhat specific stuff. I have a program that works for me 24/7 and that I have tweaked and adapted to the evolution of my needs for a decade. It would be a PITA to strip it from its busi
618.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
When I see "Forth" weirdly capitalized like that, I remember that it is also an English word.
619.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Certainly the real embedded world, which is beyond embedded "toys" [1], can be a cultural shock when you come from general CS. And indeed, just like "making games" can be attractive for young people but far less so as an
620.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Maybe it's a first step to the simulation space-time continuum deformation, or gravitational waves.
621.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
They said grammatically correct, not typographically correct ;-)
622.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
Your pushing it a bit too far if you say that JIT is interpreted. To answer OP, if you replace "dynamic" by "untyped", Forth qualifies. And it actually can go where there's no JIT to save your A from the "just
623.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
It's actually entirely my mistake. Non-native speakers say funny things sometimes ;-)
624.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
As for safety, always look left and right when you cross, just like how your were probably taught as a child, really . Because of today's rise of mostly silent electric vehicles, and because of drivers distracted by phones sometimes,
625.
by astrobe_ 4y ago
So basically, they are "thought experiments".
626.
by astrobe_ 5y ago
The language Forth ("fourth" but that's one of these stories where the filesystems of the seventies didn't allow free naming) also refers to hardware evolution, but in the mind of its author it was about hard disks, whic
627.
by astrobe_ 5y ago
For those learning French who might be puzzled by the spelling, the correct french word for something underground is "souterrain" (it is also a noun for an underground tunnel). Probably they chose that spelling to suggest that it
628.
by astrobe_ 5y ago
Perhaps related or not, I was wondering about the energy loss of AC/DC converters that are often used to power the device. This clearly happens when the device is switched on - the converter is a bit warm - but maybe it also happens wh
629.
by astrobe_ 5y ago
From a 30.000ft view, this "no-code" thing looks like those "4th generation" RAD languages. They let you do what they were designed to do easy and quick, but the barrier around their scope was tall, specially for the &qu
630.
by astrobe_ 5y ago
Maybe it's time to use those search bookmarklets again. When I think about it, many times I already know where the answer could be.

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