bborud

78 ms·

811.
by bborud 4y ago
If someone doesn't know how to address an audience you can hardly blame the audience for not responding. Academic papers are written to further academic careers. Their audience is not developers, but other people who are also not deve
812.
by bborud 4y ago
While something may be well understood in an academic sense doesn't mean that the application of that understanding to implementation humans will take a liking to is well understood. If you look at the programming language landscape I
813.
by bborud 4y ago
"Shit show" is a bit imprecise. What would you say are the major shortcomings in Go and how do they manifest as problems in practical reality? Also, it would be interesting to hear your take on why you think languages that are, a
814.
by bborud 4y ago
Some time in 1994 I had a part time job at the local university helping them figure out how to make use of Gopher and WWW. I wrote a 40ish page booklet on HTML, the university printed them and placed boxes of the booklets in the lobby of h
815.
by bborud 4y ago
I didn't read all of the article. There is something to be said about being able to get your piece across without it becoming story-time. I think the author could have benefitted from getting their point across with fewer words. I thi
816.
by bborud 4y ago
I think that's a very important point: if you invest time in writing software to solve domain-specific problems, it is a lot better if you can do that in languages that have a hope of making it out of the lab and into software you can
817.
by bborud 4y ago
> As a result, almost every office uses Excel. I'll have to disagree with your conclusion. Excel has been the de facto standard for spreadsheets for a couple of decades so its user base is not because of how the office suite is pric
818.
by bborud 4y ago
Well, then let's look at some indicators of success. In terms of adoption Mathematica is even less of a success than if you measure financially. And adoption is a key factor when evaluating whether or not you want to use a programming
819.
by bborud 4y ago
Reading through the comments two things stand out: - People disagree on whether it is appropriate to focus on growth or profitability at this stage in Atlassian's lifecycle. - I suspect people project their misgivings with the products
820.
by bborud 4y ago
In terms of price: a price point that means a significant portion of my peers will also pay for Mathematica without too much hesitation. The value proposition changes radically when a tool is something "everyone" runs or which ev
821.
by bborud 4y ago
Yes, I think you are right.
822.
by bborud 4y ago
Python ended up at the core of data science because it was capable of serving a community. A community that produced comprehensive computational libraries, which, combined with the low threshold for getting started, made it more accessible
823.
by bborud 4y ago
Wasted as in not fulfilling its potential even a little bit. Mathematica is a very niche product. It isn't even very relevant in academia or in engineering. But it could have been if Wolfram hadn't hobbled it with unproductive r
824.
by bborud 4y ago
I wouldn't lump Mathematica and Matlab together. Not least because Matlab is almost ubiquitous in academia and in engineering while Mathematica is extremely rare.
825.
by bborud 4y ago
The first time I encountered Mathematica was 30 years ago, and I genuinely thought that within a decade this would be a tool that everyone would learn in college. A few years later, when working at the university I was a bit puzzled to find
826.
by bborud 4y ago
This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and misused quotes I know of. It doesn't mean what people think it means, yet I hear it misapplied at least a few times every year. (The quote has to be understood in its original context.
827.
by bborud 4y ago
I've been on the other end of that story quite a few times - being the person having to point out that "this isn't going to work even for normal loads", and having people argue that caring about performance is "prem
828.
by bborud 4y ago
The longer it lives, the more your investment in learning thoroughly it pays off. But languages also have a tendency to accumulate features until taking on a cancer-ridden look. I probably stick to a given "main workhorse" langu
829.
by bborud 4y ago
Choice of programming language is almost always a decision of whether you want to stand alone, or whether you want to stand on the shoulders of the multitudes. Some of which are indeed geniuses. Standing alone is always a poor choice. Not u
830.
by bborud 4y ago
Why have a patent system when it doesn't even take any responsibility for ensuring the patent is valid? Whether or not this patent is allowed to remain depends entirely on how much money the open source guys would be able to put up to
831.
by bborud 4y ago
I should have been a bit more precise. There are essentialy two ways to approach DRY in OO. One is to inherit implementation, which isn't the best way to go about things since it leads to more brittle code. The other way is to make
832.
by bborud 4y ago
The book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" has an initial chapter that provides one of the most concise introductions to OO I've read. Its main focus is on polymorphism and it provides some eas
833.
by bborud 4y ago
DRY is also not the goal.
834.
by bborud 4y ago
Resolution is just one factor. What processing you do to an image can easily make a lower resolution image look better than a high resolution image with horrible colors, bad contrast, poor tone curves etc. I'd describe the output on M
835.
by bborud 4y ago
I've done a fair number of technical due diligence projects on acquisitions and potential partnerships, and on some project I've hired outside firms to analyze the code and figure out its origins and what licenses apply. There are
836.
by bborud 4y ago
My personal reasons for not using copilot are a bit simpler. I believe the act of researching which solutions to use for a given problem is not so much about time, or the code you end up with, but about developing a better understanding o
837.
by bborud 4y ago
Well, this does invite an interesting comparison. If we imagine something like Copilot applied to music I believe the chances of ending up in court would be pretty high. There are a lot of examples of plagiarism lawsuits in popular music a
838.
by bborud 4y ago
It is inevitable that the technology will mature. It is not inevitable that it will play the role people think it will play. I think I'd be more enthusiastic if: - VR headsets weren't still so bad. Merely good VR devices is
839.
by bborud 4y ago
...and yet, my macbook pro camera produces a better image than my external webcam even though it is lower resolution.
840.
by bborud 4y ago
I wish webcam manufacturers would focus on sensors and optics instead of rubbing lipstick all over low quality hardware with an undeniable porcine quality. Fixing it with AI is nonsense. Fashionable nonsense but still nonsense. I have spent

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