cmontella

9 ms·

61.
by cmontella 4y ago
This is the amazing evolutionary advantage of albatrosses; they fly using a technique called dynamic soaring, which allows them to extract kinetic energy from the wind. It's the same concept really as moving sidewalks in the airport, s
62.
by cmontella 4y ago
It can work but it depends on the system. One field in which it's very useful is game development. I'm working on a language that has time travel debugging as a feature, so you can rewind a game back to a previous state. I've
63.
by cmontella 4y ago
Looking at the commit history of the Zig repo, the first commit was in 2016, so that can’t be right; Go hit 1.0 in 2012. Unless maybe it was just being talked about in 2012. Either way, that’s still pretty new as far as languages go these d
64.
by cmontella 4y ago
Building a new language in a new language (zig) is quite the choice. Usually you choose your host language to leverage some aspect of its ecosystem — whether that be a VM like JVM, or a standard library, or something else. The other reason
65.
by cmontella 4y ago
Best use I've found for this is to make sure borrowed a Rc is dropped when you want it to be. Otherwise I've run into "this thing is already borrowed" errors when the runtime decided the thing should still be borrowed by
66.
by cmontella 4y ago
See my comment about the moon ladder. Progress is nice, and I’m not saying there hasn’t been progress. But there is no indication that the methods of today that work to make taxi cabs in SF drivable will lead to a general-case self driving
67.
by cmontella 4y ago
> a large system where the logic just makes itself up as it goes. What you describe is known as a “bureaucracy”, and indeed, it’s one of the seven levels of hell, and a primary weapon of vogons, next to poetry. That we aspire to put thes
68.
by cmontella 4y ago
Yes, I do. The point is we didn’t solve the general case, we just learned how to scale the specific case that was demoed in 2007. This is like building a ladder to the moon; it’ll get you closer, but it’ll never get you to the moon.
69.
by cmontella 4y ago
There’s a parallel with self driving cars. We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007, and so a lot of people were thinking “how much harder could it be to get this driving anywhere? We will have these everywhere in 5 years!”
70.
by cmontella 4y ago
> Bret Victor has himself been working on the problem for ten years tbf, he measures the timescale of the Dynamicland project in decades, and marks 2022 as the first time "Dynamicland meets the world" [1]. Seems like he's
71.
by cmontella 4y ago
Hi Nick, thank for sharing that project, it hadn't been on my radar. I think it is a project squarely in the Eve ethos! Sadly I can't find any code on their GitHub accounts, so they must be doing development in private.
72.
by cmontella 4y ago
I'd start here for a quick 10 minute overview: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/i-tried-rubbing-a-database-on...
73.
by cmontella 4y ago
Yeah, it does. We can have cycles in data and do recursion (although not in functions yet), but it is admittedly a little strange compare to imperative world; there's a recursion limit set that will short-circuit a computation if it ne
74.
by cmontella 4y ago
I interpreted the title of this submission to mean "Has anyone exhaustively tried out Bret Victor's ideas?" With respect to Eve, the answer is that although we tried many things he demoed, we didn't try them all, and the
75.
by cmontella 4y ago
I helped with the Eve language, which was a VC funded attempt down this path ( https://witheve.com ). This was cut short when the money ran out, so it wasn’t a full attempt. After that project ended I started working on my own att
76.
by cmontella 4y ago
Do you have a link to your thesis? I'd really like to read it! GPU/FPGA Mech has been my dream since like... forever. I started taking a crack at it here: https://gitlab.com/mech-lang/core/-/blob&#x2
77.
by cmontella 4y ago
Hey, thanks! That's one of the main and crucial differences between Mech and Eve, actually. The main reason I went with tables in Mech is because of the robotics domain. Robotics has a lot of linear algebra and much of the math can be
78.
by cmontella 4y ago
They all have their own laptops and prefer to use them. We also don’t have enough money to provide a computer for everyone. But I mean the setup is just one part of the issue, as you note. What I’ve found is I’ve had way more success teachi
79.
by cmontella 4y ago
Indeed, ROS set out to create an ecosystem of reusable robot software infrastructure, but a monoculture has grown instead. I started building a ROS alternative called Mech (see my profile) after becoming frustrated with ROS. It’s getting th
80.
by cmontella 4y ago
> you're only going to invent RSA or blind signatures or zero knowledge once. Well, maybe. Sometimes things that are discovered are lost or go completely unnoticed, so progress is not always monotonic. For example, for a long time i
81.
by cmontella 4y ago
You would only have no idea those variables are connected if the tooling for the language can't help you figure that out. Ideally, in such a language you could just query the program state to determine everything that would be influenc
82.
by cmontella 4y ago
I helped build a language like this called Eve: https://github.com/witheve/Eve It's defunct now, but it was indeed a Turing-complete SQL (but actually relational) with Prolog-like syntax and set semantics. We supp
83.
by cmontella 4y ago
I'm attempting to build such a language (you can find a link in my profile if you're interested. I don't want too much attention yet since I'm planning on a first release later in the year). You're right it can beco
84.
by cmontella 4y ago
What are your major gripes? I’m trying to launch a ROS alternative called Mech (github.com/mech-lang). Would be interested to hear what you find lacking in ROS.
85.
by cmontella 5y ago
> HN readers - do you have an "up and coming" language that you think has better structured the fundamentals from R, that you hope will someday have enough capabilities you can use it instead of R? Hope is the operative word he
86.
by cmontella 5y ago
Yes that’s the one! It was Chris Granger’s project that Jamie worked on for a while (along with Josh Rob and Eric and myself). Eve came around at a time when Bret Victor’s videos were very popular and a lot of people were unhappy with the s
87.
by cmontella 5y ago
Sounds like Jamie is starting a conference that would be a good venue for Eves. I think the ethos of Eve was really about rubbing databases on everything and seeing what happened. This conference really seems to be a future of programming c
88.
by cmontella 8y ago
Very cool! We ran a competition like this once for undergrads: https://vaderlab.wordpress.com/roscar-robot-stock-car-autono... It had to be a little more complex than line following, because at one point in the track there
89.
by cmontella 8y ago
That's a good suggestion. I'll do a little makeshift one here :) Blog posts are mostly here: http://incidentalcomplexity.com and a couple here: http://www.chris-granger.com Talks: https://www.you
90.
by cmontella 8y ago
Ha touche. Although I would say my ceiling is just the inside part of my roof :P I guess it depends on how your house is made.

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