bradrn

63 ms·

751.
by bradrn 5y ago
I like using GADTs in Haskell. However, I find the explanation in the article nearly impossible to understand. This annoys me, so I will attempt to give my own explanation of what GADTs are. (Because everyone else explains it incorrectly an
752.
by bradrn 5y ago
> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [
753.
by bradrn 5y ago
I’ve used these sorts of tests before, but under the name of ‘golden’ rather than ‘expect tests’. To complement the post’s OCaml example, here’s an article on how to use them in Haskell: https://ro-che.info/articles/201
754.
by bradrn 5y ago
My native-speaker intuition tells me the opposite — I’m probably more likely to use such constructions in colloquial speech than in formal written text. My second sentence does seem more formal to me though.
755.
by bradrn 5y ago
Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right. (And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences
756.
by bradrn 5y ago
> in English, while you can rearrange constituents up to a point … I would argue that it can often sound slightly archaic This I don’t agree with.† The rest of your post, however, I agree with entirely, and how I forgot the examples yo
757.
by bradrn 5y ago
> Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduri
758.
by bradrn 5y ago
> linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately. Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright? (My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology : ‘Lingu
759.
by bradrn 5y ago
You’re completely right — indeed, Latin would have been a much better example than the ones I chose. (But I had been reading about Yimas a few hours before posting and it was on my mind.) > There's a difference between "free or
760.
by bradrn 5y ago
I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list: • Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set
761.
by bradrn 5y ago
I mentioned in another comment that I once read a book which mentioned this paradox. That book gave the example of a major street in Manhattan which was closed for a while; this surprisingly made traffic generally better. Unfortunately, I c
762.
by bradrn 5y ago
I’ve known about this phenomenon for a long time, ever since I read a book in primary school which mentioned it, but I completely forgot the name and have been unable to read more about it. Thank you for submitting this!
763.
by bradrn 5y ago
> I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. I agree; GP didn’
764.
by bradrn 5y ago
> several-hundred-gender languages I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be
765.
by bradrn 5y ago
> we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expre
766.
by bradrn 5y ago
That’s basically because Standard Indonesian has been artificially Europeanicised, or so I hear: > In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfil the functions of
767.
by bradrn 5y ago
Thanks for sharing! I always dismissed the ‘cockatoos opening zips’ thing as a myth… perhaps it was true after all.
768.
by bradrn 5y ago
> The Australian Magpie is also extremely intelligent, surprisingly they're not part of the Corvus family but they are very, very similar. I agree — they’re more intelligent than cockatoos, though it’s not as obvious. At the same un
769.
by bradrn 5y ago
Hah, yes, that is exactly what our cockatoos are like!
770.
by bradrn 5y ago
I live in Australia, in an area where Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos are common. Those things are amazingly intelligent, curious and fearless, traits which serve them well in their continuous hunt for food (preferably ours). Three anecdotes: •
771.
by bradrn 5y ago
It already was in that category: natural plutonium has previously been found in Oklo, Gabon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo ).
772.
by bradrn 5y ago
I had a chemistry practical class just a couple of hours ago in which I asked about the sensitivity of mass spectrometry. I was amazed when I was told that it is sensitive enough to detect individual atoms. Modern analytical techniques real
773.
by bradrn 5y ago
English went through plenty of similar changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis... . The full list is pretty interesting to read!
774.
by bradrn 5y ago
I already have WSL installed, so maybe I will give this a try if I get time. > Linux, where you can actually write programs entirely in assembly because the system call API is stable I didn’t know this — is it not stable on Windows?
775.
by bradrn 5y ago
Of course I understand TI calculators don’t run x86 assembly! That’s not what I want to do — I just want to get a better understanding of assembly, preferably x86 so I can run it on my own Windows computer. (I don’t even have a TI calculato
776.
by bradrn 5y ago
> Honestly though I think this could still be a great way to get into assembly. There's a myriad of emulators out there for TI calculators, so you could still use the links I posted. Good points — I’ll save those articles for future
777.
by bradrn 5y ago
> First off I want to note TI calculators are not anything special when it comes to assembler. It was more of a limitation of the platform (in order to get games that are fast, you had to write them in assembler because TI-BASIC was too
778.
by bradrn 5y ago
Hmm… but how useful will these be if I don’t have a TI calculator?
779.
by bradrn 5y ago
I’ve recently been thinking of learning assembly, but I’m struggling to find resources. For those of us who don’t have an old TI calculator lying around, can you recommend anything? (Honestly, what everyone’s saying about programming with t
780.
by bradrn 5y ago
The best maths book I’ve ever read was Measurement by Paul Lockhart (yes, the one of Lockhart’s Lament [0] fame). It’s been a long time since I read it in primary school, and I can’t remember exactly why I loved it so much, but there is o

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