gdp

8 ms·

31.
by gdp 15y ago
I clicked this link. The first paragraph claims there is something special about Go. I read until the end of the article, and I was still left wondering what was special about Go and what the author thought about it.
32.
by gdp 15y ago
Well, the entire Green party opposed it. It was just Hughes that spoke. The sad part is that he proposed an amendment to remove the disconnection provision, and it was voted down by Labour and National. What happened to having an oppositi
33.
by gdp 15y ago
I believe that the National party in NZ believe that by implementing ACTA (that's essentially what this is) that they will curry favor in terms of a potential US free trade agreement. It's basically the US dictating intellectual property l
34.
by gdp 15y ago
Here's the letter I wrote to my local MP. People are welcome to appropriate any bits of it to form their own indignant letters to elected representatives, if they like: http://www.plsadventures.com/2011/04/i-dont-usually-post-non...
35.
"It's a hardware problem" is a programmer problem(plsadventures.com)
2 points by gdp 16y ago|0 comments
36.
by gdp 16y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the somewhat lax use of "semantics" here. It appears to be mixing notions from formal semantics with (not formally defined) ideas from linguistics. Also, it's a nitpick, but the frequently repeated phrase "HTML la
37.
by gdp 16y ago
Sure, they are art, but that's not mutually exclusive with pretentious self-importance.
38.
by gdp 16y ago
Allow me to quote a randomly-chosen comment from this thread: > _why's influence isn't only in code, but in thinking. And if you look around, for example on github, you will see a lot of people hacking away for fun, trying out new stuf
39.
by gdp 16y ago
Oh, dammit, you got me!
40.
by gdp 16y ago
Without knowing anything about you, on the basis of this comment, I suspect you are a much better programmer than most people who constantly talk about how difficult their programming work is.
41.
by gdp 16y ago
I agree that computing as an activity has manifestations that could be understood to be art, but that doesn't make _programming_ art. Glorifying programming as an art is like glorifying spelling as salient to the quality of Shakespeare's p
42.
by gdp 16y ago
No, I really don't. I'm suggesting that self-importance is a negative trait for programmers to hold. To me, cat pictures and silly songs are actually just another form of pretentious self-importance.
43.
by gdp 16y ago
I don't consider programming to be a much greater skill than the ability to install fixed wiring in a house or balance a budget. Are small business accountants "artists"? Accordingly, programming is not _currently_ a science. However, I t
44.
by gdp 16y ago
As opposed to thinking of yourself as Van Gogh or Warhol? Without any financial considerations, thinking of what you do as a scientific or engineering activity is much more conducive to the creation of good software. I'm suggesting that g
45.
by gdp 16y ago
Articles about _why on HN seem to always take on a particularly sycophantic quality. As a non-fan of Ruby, his contributions to programming outside of that community seem minimal. The ethic that people appear to ascribe to him ("programmi
46.
by gdp 17y ago
It's almost impossible to over-state his contributions to computer science, particularly within programming languages, theorem proving and concurrency theory. I never met him, but I have followed and admired his work for some time, and thi
47.
by gdp 17y ago
I agree that documentation is useful and important, but too much programming languages documentation really doesn't answer some fundamental questions about the semantics of a language. All too often, this is because the programming language
48.
by gdp 17y ago
greens?
49.
What are the semantics of your favourite programming language?(plsadventures.com)
17 points by gdp 17y ago|20 comments
50.
by gdp 17y ago
A wonderful example of how to blow open silly arguments in one paragraph or less.
51.
The state of the world (and why I still think it's a bad idea)(plsadventures.com)
1 points by gdp 17y ago|0 comments
52.
by gdp 17y ago
I'm not sure it's a particularly faithful port of ML, and particularly not SML. It doesn't really look anything like ML. It looks like a bit of a mishmash of syntaxes, if anything, so I'm really not sure what makes it "ML derived" any mor
53.
by gdp 17y ago
I'm not convinced that the answer is simply "functional programming". Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of functional programming, however I think that the bulk of evidence shows that the number of people willing to use functional langua
54.
by gdp 17y ago
If I were to believe in such a thing, it would not be because of a book. Things that are true by virtue of their truth are nonsensical. I'm also not sure about answering this at all, because I think it's pretty far off topic for HN.
55.
by gdp 17y ago
I'm with you on this one. It doesn't even seem to have even passing interest to the general HN audience as I understand it.
56.
by gdp 17y ago
An internet community of musicians that I frequent collectively played with Hit Song Science during their "free trial" period. Basically, we discovered that it doesn't do a very good job. For example, I had a track that was 1:57 long with a
57.
by gdp 17y ago
Alternatively, "The now over-appreciated art of duct tape programming". Seriously, if I see one more article which features "duct tape" in the title, I'm going to start extolling the virtues of the wood-glue programmer. I have no idea what
58.
by gdp 17y ago
I inherited a giant hideous stock-management system. It did a certain amount of automated ordering without manual intervention. Long story short: a nasty race condition meant that it was over-ordering duplicate products from the suppliers
59.
by gdp 17y ago
I have enormous respect for business people who have no technical knowledge, and behave accordingly. Conversely, if you know that you know nothing about parts of what I do, then why do you feel it's necessary to have input into it? I think
60.
by gdp 17y ago
From my own experience as a confirmed programmer with little interest in business, here's a couple of observations: Programmers end up knowing a heck of a lot about the business just by virtue of needing to know how it operates in order to

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