chaganated

28 ms·

181.
by chaganated 6y ago
I went from Turbo Pascal at home to C++ in college, and it felt like a huge downgrade--especially on strings: https://borlandpascal.fandom.com/wiki/String_operations And I did a lot of low-level stuff in in too! It wa
182.
by chaganated 6y ago
Did I say embedded LISP or APL? No, I didn't. I did suggest that C could have learned a thing or two from them. A higher semantic level does not imply reduced performance. In many cases, a richer language can give the compiler more
183.
by chaganated 6y ago
Those are all good pragmatic reasons to use C. Doesn't make C any less of a mistake. A slightly higher semantic level would have spared us so many headaches. To make the choices C made, after LISP, Algol, APL, Pascal... was a very c
184.
by chaganated 6y ago
I've been doing industrial systems in C for 20 years. It stopped being a good model of how computers work around the same time we stopped hooking them up to TVs with RF splitters. I would rather not inflict that brain damage upon the
185.
by chaganated 6y ago
That's moving from one VAX-like 32-bit register machine to another, and the target is bi-endian. Migrate to a different word size, or a different endianness, and things get very ugly.
186.
by chaganated 6y ago
For a language with richer semantics (i.e. a string type with built-in operators instead add-on libraries implemented at a lower semantic level), the compiler has a better idea of what we are trying to do. If we only have a minimal RISC in
187.
by chaganated 6y ago
Specifically addressing his "portable assembly" claim. I made no claim that Pascal was portable assembly. C is only portable assembly when every machine is roughly a VAX of the same generation.
188.
by chaganated 6y ago
Take map/reduce for example. Totally do-able as a hardware implementation. Added bonus being that branch prediction would be greatly simplified (from a heuristic and/or dual-execution scenario down to a simple counter). That we
189.
by chaganated 6y ago
It is an overly-primitive metaphor for a computer--one that has pulled most hardware down to its level. The B5000 people understood this before the mistake was made. The PARC and Symbolics people understood this during/after the mist
190.
by chaganated 6y ago
In other words, if your target has something other than 16/32/64 bit words, or lots of cool SIMD instructions, C has all of the fiddlyness of assembly, and an added impedance mismatch, but none of the performance.
191.
by chaganated 6y ago
C definitely isn't portable assembly. For the most part, it has locked computing into the late-70s VAX ISA, then C++ just dug the hole deeper. And last I checked, Pascal has both PChar and PByte. Much better than C where both are cal
192.
by chaganated 6y ago
C was the mistake we made before we knew the problem space. C++ is the mistake we made afterwards. Which is worse? I say the latter. Start teaching Pascal!
193.
by chaganated 6y ago
Try running wireshark on windows 10 calculator.
194.
by chaganated 6y ago
This is a sociology op-ed by a journalist for an ideologically-charged stats rag (538) being published in a science magazine. I would appreciate it if tree people would stick to their trees, and stop (erroneously) extrapolating every minusc
195.
by chaganated 6y ago
yoichi shimatsu made a compelling argument that "the intercept" is basically a honeypot for catching usgov whistleblowers. yoichi is a little out there, but given the track record--snowden, manning, winner--perhaps he's on t
196.
by chaganated 6y ago
Gab is a non-entity, and McInness is a bad joke. PayPal has just given both of them 10,000x more credibility than they ever had. The Streisandining continues.
197.
by chaganated 6y ago
overall, very good comment. one small contention would be that IQ has its limits. as a high-iq plebe, i've known many patricians. i could crush all of them on school-work, yet most of them would easily best me when it comes to wisdom
198.
by chaganated 6y ago
explosives don't really jive with the social credit system's API
199.
by chaganated 6y ago
Interesting subject, but the experiment is a rube-goldberg mess--a cartesian product of frequencies, intensities, durations, and a rather complex targeting system. Not looking forward to the same kind of rig being attached to high-power las
200.
by chaganated 6y ago
Why condescend to an audience which can be safely categorized as both literate and numerate?
201.
by chaganated 6y ago
Firefox aside, I think anyone who took that joke as a serious product idea needs to brush-up on how computers work, how software works, and wha good engineering looks like.
202.
by chaganated 6y ago
It is a joke, yet it is being debated seriously here. This strongly suggests, to me anyway, that our field is becoming a joke.
203.
by chaganated 6y ago
They'd do better to kill posts where the comment-to-upvote ratio goes too high. The best posts tend to have relatively few comments.
204.
by chaganated 6y ago
don't forget the lead and the ionizing radiation!
205.
by chaganated 6y ago
Not a TRS-80 expert, but leaking/failed capacitors are a very common problem in old (and new!) machines.
206.
by chaganated 6y ago
these days, and at that age, what you exclude is probably more important than what you teach. so many overdeveloped, hyper-real, dopamine-avalanches fighting for their attention--good luck getting them to pay attention to mere reality after