gchpaco

50 ms·

421.
by gchpaco 17y ago
A lot of folks seem to believe that this fundamentally screws over the professor. If it does, he's an idiot, and I speak as someone intimately involved with all this before. There are basically three kinds of CS assignments. The first is
422.
by gchpaco 17y ago
As a former TA, I would have instantly granted extension requests that had a real, legitimate excuse attached to them. The ones that irritated me were the ones who thought they were entitled to an extension "because, y'know, there was like
423.
by gchpaco 17y ago
This encourages a very different style of multicore programming than is common on desktops today, closer to that of grid systems. Very interesting to see how this develops.
424.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I'm guessing you're an American, because everybody else is very ill served by the C/POSIX locale. Locales are about something different than general text munging, and if setting the locale to something other than C (which, BTW, is done by
425.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Yes, that's right, for those just tuning in, this has been broken since at least 2006. Probably earlier. I'm just speechless.
426.
by gchpaco 17y ago
\u20ac specifies a code point, not an encoding. (specifically the code point 000020AC). The encoding of wchar_t in C89 is up to the implementor, and in particular GCC uses UCS4 on most platforms. But this is besides the point; C99 and C+
427.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Aha, I have uncovered it. There are two problems. One is that apparently std::locale is horribly, horribly broken in the C++ standard library for Mac OS X. You can work around this by using C, like Real Programmers. The other problem is
428.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I never said WebDAV was innovative, just that it was brand new and full of problems. And as for BDB, IIRC they were having issues with the database getting wedged constantly even when not using NFS. But this was long after I had stopped p
429.
by gchpaco 17y ago
My experience has been that the alternative to many small commits, occasionally batched (because who really wants to look at "cleaned up Checkstyle's warnings" endlessly?) is one big commit two or three times a day, which is significantly h
430.
by gchpaco 17y ago
A lot of the problems SVN ran into was trying to use cutting edge technology and standards before they were really ripe. WebDAV, for example, or the endless, endless iterations of Berkeley DB corruption. It is, in a lot of ways, an excell
431.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Genius exists, but is not a sufficiently good excuse for being an asshole.
432.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Well, you certainly don't need to log and rethrow them at every call site, because Java exceptions contain a stack trace. Sometimes rethrowing is necessary, because of Java checked exceptions. Sometimes exceptions are benign. The best ru
433.
by gchpaco 17y ago
This is a bit of a diversion from Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman's talk, but I run into this belief a lot, and want to make a point. I see little evidence here that Collins-Sussman has finally understood DVCS as a social entity, although h
434.
by gchpaco 17y ago
There's a flaw in the video around 27:55 that is obnoxious, but it seems to just be local corruption.
435.
by gchpaco 17y ago
That's not quite what I was expecting--widening stairs and lowering the slope would actually improve safety, as well. I've seen enough against-code stairs that were a positive hazard to everybody involved to get automatically antsy wheneve
436.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I'm apparently too opinionated to survive long in insane environments, but I did intern for a company that, in Java, did a couple of really disturbing things: 1. Every Java exception that can possibly be thrown from a method must be caught,
437.
by gchpaco 17y ago
The only one with his name on it that comes to mind is KMP, the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm for text searching, which is actually a fairly big deal in that community. But most of the typesetting algorithms in TeX were totally novel at the
438.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Nothing, if you know exactly what you're doing. But it's not very good about explaining why e.g. throwing error messages is bad. It's sort of like a toolbox full of really sharp, pointy things with the implicit understanding that sticki
439.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Old article, but I love it so.
440.
by gchpaco 17y ago
I have to admit, I really like Tcl's syntax. Some issues, but it was something you could programmatically manipulate without huge pains. And the C interface was quite pleasant, particularly if you had ever dealt with contemporary Perl mod
441.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Hypothetically, what would it take for you to believe that static analysis doesn't work? Because, as lame as C's typechecking is, this remark sounds to me a lot like the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. The sort of testing that the SQLite devel
442.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Agreed. Sadly, Shaw (ab)uses it fairly often.
443.
by gchpaco 17y ago
http://groups.google.com/group/perl.perl5.porters/msg/651b72... is a version of the article with the character encoding done correctly, not by monkeys. I dunno what that originally was supposed to be but perl.org's NNTP gateway horked it
444.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Once upon a time, I hacked a simulator and an assembler for the Pendulum chip. It was an interesting and fun project in a lot of ways, but fair warning: the example program that computes Fibonacci numbers, I think, is wrong, and correcting
445.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Without wanting to get into too much back and forth, a quick response to these: Parsing: hand writing lexers is an enormous PIA and the problem with a hand written recursive descent parser is if you want to change the grammar for whatever r
446.
by gchpaco 17y ago
It's not inconceivable that PyPy could grow into some of what I'm talking about, although there's so much pushback from the Python community that I doubt it. However, as far as I can tell, PyPy doesn't have a parser generator written as pa
447.
by gchpaco 17y ago
It's hard to quantify the benefits of system-qua-language without pointing you at Maxima or something (a computer algebra system well integrated with the underlying programming language). But here's a small example of the sort of thing I w
448.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Python as a language is so good that it becomes difficult to concisely describe why one wants metaprogramming. Generally speaking the reason one wants metaprogramming is to make the language of the domain you are thinking in and the langua
449.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Branches make miserable lumber; they're frequently called "reaction" wood because the strain of growing puts the limb under considerable tension. I've heard of it self destructing (quite literally) midway through planing from these tension
450.
by gchpaco 17y ago
Quite. The temptation is that those rain forest giants represent a significant one-time windfall; this is what led to the unsustainable forestry practices that denuded most of England of its forests and nearly did it in for the US. Interna

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