hhas01

13 ms·

91.
by hhas01 6y ago
“I can't imagine how he could start to learn programming at this age.” Don’t. Instead imagine a computing environment that facilitates the basic reading and math skills he’s now attempting to practise. Age 6 is a bit young, but by age
92.
by hhas01 6y ago
Fine article, and what it (tongue-in-cheek) calls “cheating” is just what us self-taught automators call “making the machine do all the crapwork for you”. It’s just unfortunate that the greater tooling and culture currently available is suc
93.
by hhas01 6y ago
And this is me caring not one jot how I look. I’ve probably invested 10,000 hours over 20 years, not just helping myself but on helping other users as well. And that all that’s down the drain thanks to some incompetent primadonna who does
94.
by hhas01 6y ago
“but I did have the BBC Advanced User Guide” Heh, I still have mine. https://www.dataserve-retro.co.uk/contents/en-uk/p92.html Yeah, assembler killed my early interest too. If only the Beeb’d shipped with Logo i
95.
by hhas01 6y ago
Mailed. (Messaging via my github also works.)
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by hhas01 6y ago
Papert’s problem was not realizing that most people, especially people in charge, like to put things into neat boxes, not break them out. Thus Logo got placed into the box labeled “How to Teach Programming”, when that was never its goal
97.
by hhas01 6y ago
Hagiographic nonsense. Sal Soghoian isn’t a programmer—I’ve seen his code, it’s embarrassingly amateur. Sal was not responsible for AppleScript of Apple event IPC; that was Cook and Harris, and that credit is theirs[1]. They walked out of
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by hhas01 6y ago
“Of course with FORTH you'd define a word to draw a square” With Logo you would do exactly the same. In fact, growing the language’s base vocabulary with your own words is the whole point of Logo and Forth. Why waste your entire lifet
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by hhas01 6y ago
Correlation confused for causation? Say it isn’t so! /s #APillForEveryIll -- “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H. L. Mencken
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by hhas01 6y ago
“it's really helpful to have one obvious way” Counterpoint: Python format strings. (I think there’s four or five different built-in ways to do those now.) Python’s “batteries included” may have helped it to win vital audience early on,
101.
by hhas01 6y ago
"I have previously hypothesised that all human chronic autoimmune diseases are caused by Epstein–Barr virus (EBV)" Obvious red flag is obvious, because once you start looking for something in particular you do start finding it eve
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by hhas01 6y ago
It’s not a study. It’s an opinion piece. And though IANAS, even I appreciate that publishing your ideas before you’ve even attempted to test them yourself is barely one step up from YouTube videos on the scale of Why Should Anyone Else Ca
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by hhas01 6y ago
https://youtu.be/rxgWHzMvXOY?t=17
104.
by hhas01 6y ago
“cliche examples” Well that’s certainly a perspective.
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by hhas01 6y ago
Let me guess: sky-high on OCD, paranoia, and narcissism quotients; rock-bottom on empathy and personal grooming? Ugh. Hope you picked up a gallon of eye bleach on your way out.
106.
by hhas01 6y ago
A better question would be, why yet another C knockoff on top of XML bloat? It just seems so uninspired. 3D drawing ought to be a slam-dunk for a dedicated DSL: pure functional composition (objects described in terms of relationships with e
107.
by hhas01 6y ago
“Millions will die because of University ethics committees.” Uh-huh. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
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by hhas01 6y ago
“Friday, April 24, 2020” “If all goes well, there will be millions of scanners deployed by this fall” Ageing well…
109.
by hhas01 6y ago
At least there’s something to be said for your honesty now. Though having both witnessed and perpetrated the very real human damage that dishonest/irrational/delusional belief systems can and will do, you’ll forgive me if I do n
110.
by hhas01 6y ago
“Ironically enough, a lot of the criticism of my tutorial was that we have plenty of compiler tutorials already and don’t need any new languages...” Change is Threat to the status quo.
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by hhas01 6y ago
”> The [PDF] format is intended and optimized for print. It’s inherently inaccessible, unpleasant to read, and cumbersome to navigate online.” PDF format is perfectly capable of holding structured text and other machine-readable/acc
112.
by hhas01 6y ago
Some of that is on developers, famous for overpromising and under-delivering and generally not managing expectations. There is a real skill to effectively explaining a job’s requirements to non-developers, and it’s something I think a lot o
113.
by hhas01 6y ago
Incidentally, your jq example is a perfect illustration of Zawinski’s Law† in action: “jq 1.5 released, including new datetime, math, and regexp functions, try/catch syntax, array and object destructuring, a streaming parser, and a mod
114.
by hhas01 6y ago
“UNIX descendants follow the pattern of encoding data types with filename endings.” An ad-hoc arrangement with little formal support at the GUI level and none at all at the shell level. `some_program --out_type=json | jq` to `some_program |
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by hhas01 6y ago
I find it slightly amusing that somebody downvoted this, considering I speak from hard-learned experience here.
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by hhas01 6y ago
“they pay a multimillion recurring contract” That’s not a bad customer. They may be a tough and unpleasant one, but as long as they’re bringing in more money for your company than you’re paying out to support them, you’re solid†. The bad on
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by hhas01 6y ago
“A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you” Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It’s simple arithmetic. Maybe they don’t bother to pay their bills
118.
by hhas01 6y ago
“It doesn’t make sense to put these types in the operating system” The OS doesn’t need to hardcode individual types, and to do so would defeat growth. It only has to provide a standard mechanism by which files can declare the type of data t
119.
by hhas01 6y ago
What you want is tagged and/or typed pipes. Once a pipe declares how its data is encoded, you can build all kinds of modern tooling and high-level automation on top of that. The whole “But everything’s a text file!” is an outrageous li
120.
by hhas01 6y ago
“somewhat miss the point of the shell in the first place” This presupposes that the Unix shell is the way it is because of careful, considered, forward-thinking design, rather than being a haphazard heap of mouldering hacks upon lazy corner

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