gchpaco

43 ms·

331.
by gchpaco 17y ago
In partial defense of Texinfo, manpages are terrible at the kind of documents the FSF is trying to write with Texinfo. (man zshall, for example, is spastically organized and tries to be reference and tutorial at once, which doesn't work we
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by gchpaco 17y ago
One of the things that Yossi Kreinin points out over and over again in his FQA is that C++ is full of features that you cannot ignore. Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts is made significantly simpler by the fact that Javascript doesn
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by gchpaco 17y ago
One of the odd things about C, historically speaking, is actually how impoverished it was compared to macro assemblers written at around the same time. Those didn't have much of a type system either, but you could get all kinds of power wi
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The chief problem with the idea that C "accurately models how the computer actually works", as you allude to but don't go into detail, is that modern CPUs work nothing like the CPUs that C is accustomed to. Between out of order execution
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by gchpaco 17y ago
A lot of modern graph theory is connected to Ramsey theory which is not particularly practical at this time nor do I anticipate it becoming so within, say, a decade. There's a lot of important stuff on the subject, but because most nontriv
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by gchpaco 17y ago
There is actually a subtle difference, which is why even non-scientists can see when Star Trek, for example, is BSing. The cadence of fake tech talk is all wrong. Apollo 13 was pretty good about this, actually; even though I don't know th
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Ward Cunningham has "never coded up any great software"? Ever used a Wiki? Hypercard? Kent Beck "never coded up any great software"? Ever used JUnit? Oh, but those are too small to be great, I'm sure. XP is not great for a lot of thing
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by gchpaco 17y ago
As you point out, there's a tension between a methodology that cannot fail--only be failed--because in practice it is impossible to use and yet the need to actually do things the methodology says if you want to really test it. XP, being
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I know they removed a lot of crufty older code around that time, but I don't remember if it corresponded exactly.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
That thread was full of knee jerk reactions and deficient in sound reasoning for a good while. I think Roman Shaposhnik had the best point when he noted that you could do something like Cilk (not exactly the same, but similar) as a library
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Postgres defaults to READ COMMITTED transaction isolation, where it is possible that if you perform the same SELECT twice you will get different answers due to a transaction committing in between. This can affect updates in some circumstan
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by gchpaco 17y ago
One of the things that's nice about Common Lisp style conditions is that they do not automatically force a stack unroll. You can, and people do, signal conditions like "I don't know what to do with this" that can be handled inline (say,
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The key error inexperienced liars make is usually inventing too much; you ask them about different parts of it and the parts don't add up right. A good lie is short and simple. This is a technique for forcing more detail out of people.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Not necessarily, even on a uniform memory access machine; perhaps you pass around a reference to an object that is located close to the data you want. On a non-uniform memory access machine (which is to say all of them these days when you
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I think the model we use is wrong. My current belief is that the probability of races and deadlocks occurring is a function of the amount of shared data and that conventional shared-everything threading implementations make this far more c
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The chief problem with this is that most programmers' intuitions are calibrated for single threaded processes; when they think of "what could happen" race conditions and deadlocks aren't there. This, I think, is because they are usually em
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by gchpaco 17y ago
It seems to me that part of the problem here is that the Scala solution misuses mailboxes--not terribly surprising. I've been unable to find an idiomatic Erlang solution, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that one a) exists and
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by gchpaco 17y ago
It doesn't do a whole lot for that, but C can be quite verbose and the standard Xlib bindings don't help at all.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
It should be noted that "joined-up" writing, as the Brits put it, is much more attractive when using a fountain pen. You don't have to go full-on Palmer (in fact I recommend against it; capital Q and both Zs are particularly obtuse), but s
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by gchpaco 17y ago
It's actually easier to get an attractive slant with the Palmer method writing left handed with an overhook. Conceded that writing from underneath is tricky with the left hand, which is why I never learned to do it.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I know in a lot of Smalltalks _ was the assignment operator, because in an old prerelease version of ASCII the symbol in that position was ←. I suppose it's possible S had this confusion too, although it's pretty obscure.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
I am accustomed to something like the GNU style for method calls, which is foo.bar (baz) One of the things about Ruby that drives me nuts is that I can't always do this any more because of the complex lexical rules; in particular foo[4] a
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by gchpaco 17y ago
For some reason things with similar names land in the same hash bucket in my memory, and I say one when meaning the other. I usually catch myself about it, but man it's embarassing.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
In fact C++ is usually slower than C because parsing and comprehending it is so damned hard that compiler writers are satisfied when they can get that far.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Expert systems are everywhere, actually; it's just that nobody hypes them much any more.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
A pretty minimal introduction to the language; it doesn't much discuss why one would prefer programming in Prolog to writing the same things in Erlang or Scheme. But within its scope it's pretty fair.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
In theory if you're running on an embedded system you can have Scheme without the libraries--much like embedded C, which was C without the standard libraries, something blessed by the standard. But the ones you cite, especially #2, strike
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Tom Lord has pointed out elsewhere that the "large" language might, for example, mandate Unicode for characters whereas the "small" language might not, just to pick one difference. Partial continuations like shift/reset can be implemented
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by gchpaco 17y ago
The typography here is very interesting; I'm quite curious now how the final book will look after typesetting.
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by gchpaco 17y ago
Wiles is widely regarded as odd, to put it mildly, for that effort. And it still didn't work and he had to get a former student in to help fix the proof.

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