ggchappell

12 ms·

61.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Wow, so maybe the no-deadlock guarantee really does say something nontrivial. Thanks for the heads up.
62.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Actually, I think you've noted a significant issue: Pony looks to have been designed, at least in part, based on a sound theoretical foundation provided by modern type theory, semantics, etc. However, the documentation does not use the
63.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Yes, that's probably what is meant. So the point is that a program will never crash due to an exception.
64.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Yes, that's probably it. Or to put it more simply: an exception will never crash a program.
65.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Yes, but, as I noted, Pony has type unions ( http://tutorial.ponylang.org/types/type-expressions/ ). So you can roll your own Maybe types. From the page I linked above: > var x: (String | None) > Here we have
66.
by ggchappell 11y ago
That's a good point. But I do see where the claim is coming from. Pony is aimed at the same kind of compile-to-bare-metal that we do with C, C++, Fortran, etc. Furthermore, Pony's design explicitly deals with many of the issues th
67.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> ... there are no deadlocks by name (just other problems). Okay, supposing we have a definition of deadlock that agrees with your usage: sure. But then these "other problems" you mention will have exactly the same practical ef
68.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Ah, I guess I misunderstood. From the tutorial: > Pony often uses the primitive None to indicate that something has "no value". So that is not a special value that we can assign to any variable. "None" would seem to b
69.
by ggchappell 11y ago
I shall refer to a higher authority: > A set of processes is deadlocked if each process in the set is waiting for an event that only another process in the set can cause. That is from Modern Operating Systems , 4th ed. (2015), by A.S. T
70.
by ggchappell 11y ago
This looks interesting. There are a few things I wonder about. From the first page of the tutorial ( http://tutorial.ponylang.org/ ): > It's exception safe. There are no runtime exceptions. All exceptions have defined
71.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Strongly agree. The main webpage for any programming language should always include a bit of sample code -- generally a short but nontrivial complete program.
72.
by ggchappell 11y ago
That's kinda what an iPod Touch is, right? (The question mark is not rhetorical.)
73.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> So they don't know how blue lights do anything. It appears that they also don't know whether the blue lights prevent suicides, or merely relocate them to somewhere besides train stations. Regardless, reducing the number o
74.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Nope, not sarcasm. I couldn't figure out what to call it. Then you reminded me. Thanks. Really. :-) EDIT. We need a standard symbol for "I'm not being sarcastic". (Of course, then people may start using it sarcastically.
75.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Thanks! Note, FTA: > They changed one of the three male figures riding in an elevator to a female figure. In the link you posted, the three figures in the elevator are all Helvetica Man. OTOH, the "nursery" symbol is a baby, no
76.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> I would call it satire, i.e. putting a humourous spin on a serious subject. Ah, right. That's what it's called. Thanks for reminding us all about a sadly underused word.
77.
by ggchappell 11y ago
It's a humor piece that attempts to get us to think about the issue. The quote is invented. The product is not real. But the ideas are -- hopefully -- thought provoking one. EDIT. As user tremon noted, there is a word for this: the pie
78.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> I don't understand why as a society we would want a megacompany .... We probably wouldn't. But these are companies, not the government. They're allowed to do things we don't like. Yes, there is antitrust law. The U.
79.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Some nice thoughts. > All you need is a sewing kit and a set of repair instructions. Or, more practically for most of us, you pay some guy to repair your stuff. Look around. There are little shops all over offering services like zipper r
80.
by ggchappell 11y ago
I don't recall ever seeing a video clip quite like the one at the top of this article. (Aren't camera drones cool!)
81.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Footnote #3 is worth pointing out, I think: > The existence of people like Jessica is not just something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge, but something feminists need to learn to acknowledge as well. There are successf
82.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Watch out for that word "they". The students who were quoted sounded childish. Plenty of students don't sound that way. But maturity is boring. It doesn't sell. So those people don't get quoted.
83.
by ggchappell 11y ago
I'm a little worried about this article. It seems to me that it might be emphasizing certain aspects of the data that tend to support a conclusion that is relatively popular in many circles. (Indeed, I'd like to see the U.S. impri
84.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> It only becomes odorless at deadly concentrations. That is really strange. Because at non-deadly concentrations it seriously stinks. Do you know why it has this weird backwards smelliness property?
85.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> Looking through windows into homes, they saw dining tables with cups, saucers, and cutlery all laid out—but covered in years worth of dust. Why would this happen? I can understand it in -- say -- the towns around Chernobyl. When someon
86.
by ggchappell 11y ago
<ahem> My mother was a FORTRAN programmer in the early 1960s. :-P
87.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> In 2014, publishers sold just over 2.7 billion books domestically, .... Estimating the U.S. population at 320 million, that's about 8.4 books per person per year -- higher than I would have expected.
88.
by ggchappell 11y ago
> I spent a lot of last year urging people to work on stuff that matters. Is there some article/post where O'Reilly gives the background? In the article, the above sentence contains a link, but it is surprisingly unhelpful. It
89.
by ggchappell 11y ago
The article seems to confuse management's transparency to employees with a company's transparency to the public. These are very different things, and I think one can make a good case for pursuing the former assiduously, while bein
90.
by ggchappell 11y ago
Good point. As others have noted, the use of "than" might not be a problem at all. But the issue you bring up certainly is. EDIT. If you look carefully, you can see that the sentence is not actually ambiguous. The word "which

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