hhas01

24 ms·

151.
by hhas01 6y ago
“(1) everything is text” LOL. What fantasy land are you living in? Pipes are great. Untyped , untagged pipes are not. They’re a frigging disaster in every way imaginable. “Unix is seriously uncool with young people at the moment.” Unix i
152.
by hhas01 6y ago
Nope. It’s not about “parsing”, it’s about representation . Languages such as Python and C draw clear distinction between literal values on one hand and flow control statements and operators on the other. Numbers, strings, arrays, structs
153.
by hhas01 6y ago
“CLIs shouldn’t be discoverable because they’re not supposed to be discoverable.” Imagine if we applied the same defeatist tautological thinking to our other written materials: books wouldn’t have TOCs or indexes, the Web wouldn’t have sear
154.
by hhas01 6y ago
More importantly, being syntactically invalid isn’t wrong, just incomplete; a work in progress. Any editor that fights the user over that won’t be used for long before it’s kicked to the kerb in disgust.
155.
by hhas01 6y ago
While I think that “paper” was probably funnier in its authors’ heads, there is some actual precedence: Atlas Autocode used underlining to distinguish user-defined identifiers from the language’s own keywords. https://en.wikipedi
156.
by hhas01 6y ago
I expect you’re familiar with Knuth’s literate programming and notebook-style programming interfaces of Jupyter and Mathematica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://jupyter.org/
157.
by hhas01 6y ago
Agreed. Swift is a language designed by and for compiler engineers; and it shows. Contrast Smalltalk which was designed by and for users and usability. Chalk and cheese at every level—especially user level. Alas, I think decades of C has
158.
by hhas01 6y ago
Nope. I think it periodically gets floated on Swift-Evolution, but someone would have to design and implement it… and I suspect the Swift codebase (which is C++; it isn’t even self-hosting) is already fearsomely complex as it is. Or, to bor
159.
by hhas01 6y ago
“I think they've done an incredible job with their ObjC interop, given said mismatch.” Which is to say, the Swift devs have done an incredible job of solving the wrong problem . Apple needed a modern language for faster, easier Cocoa
160.
by hhas01 6y ago
I recall digging into Python subinterpreters a decade ago. Abandoned it because the real killer wasn’t shared GIL, it was shared modules. If one subinterpreter imports a module and modifies that module’s state, then every other subinterpret
161.
by hhas01 6y ago
Swift is just C++ with rubberized corners. Distinctly “meh” as a language in its own right, embarrassingly knotty around its ObjC bridging (there’s a basic impedance mismatch between those two worlds), and certainly doesn’t have anything as
162.
by hhas01 6y ago
Where the heck are you getting that 490,000 number from? The oral polio vaccine (aka OPV/Sabin) uses a weakened form of the live virus, which known to revert occasionally to virulent form. Here’s what the WHO site says: “Since 2000,
163.
by hhas01 7y ago
Any monkey can write code. Writing the right code critically depends on communication.
164.
by hhas01 7y ago
“My director offered to toss some offshore resources my way to help.” Brooks’s Law in action. Mythical Man-Month should be required reading for all developers and managers.
165.
by hhas01 7y ago
HTML is based on SGML. XML is a subset of SGML. XHTML is HTML converted to valid XML. IANAE, but I suspect most problems originate with SGML, which was designed for flexibility and extensibility rather than security. That’s compounded by th
166.
by hhas01 7y ago
Something starting to really itch here, and, no, it’s not a tick bite. Is there a reliable scientific cite† for this PR piece’s statement that “antibiotics don't work for up to 20% of people with [Lyme disease]”? Because the only “20%”
167.
by hhas01 7y ago
But allowing unsafe planes onto the market will. Because this is not just about those people who are sick right now. It’s about the many, many more who will be sick in future: useless or harmful treatments released to market will negatively
168.
by hhas01 7y ago
“This is my least favorite part of discussing Lyme online. So many people are deeply convinced of their chosen narrative that they unquestioningly accept any papers that support their claims, while refusing to acknowledge any evidence to th
169.
by hhas01 7y ago
“As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated that Lyme spirochetes survive a course of standard antibiotics” QFT. While PTLDS is a real thing (being long-term sequelae to the original Lyme infection), be very wary of anything labeled “
170.
by hhas01 7y ago
Coupling. If any part of the program can touch a global variable, then the only way to understand how that global is used and when and why it changes is by understanding the entire program. Limiting the variable’s scope (e.g. to a module or
171.
by hhas01 7y ago
CBD is interesting but regularly overhyped; lots of “believed” and “may”, personal testimonials and pilot trials; not a lot of robust large-scale trials to really sift out the truth. PubMed is just an index of published research, not a meas
172.
by hhas01 7y ago
Exercise due caution with regard to CBD, megadose Vit C, “MMS” (aka industrial bleach), etc, etc. The people advancing these miracle claims are almost always either indulging, selling, or both. Ego and money corrupt even good science when w
173.
by hhas01 7y ago
By all means, steal ideas from math. (Great artists, etc.) Math has had a couple thousand years practice in learning how (and how not to) express abstract ideas as formal written text. But don’t abuse math. Like redefining summation to me
174.
by hhas01 7y ago
Bad example is bad example. Programmers are awful for using algebraic symbols to describe non-algebraic semantics. Algebra is already its own language; a lingua franca of math. If you’re abusing it for a different purpose then you’re doing
175.
by hhas01 7y ago
Surprised article didn’t include this in its comparison. Seems an obvious contender.
176.
by hhas01 7y ago
Indeed; true REST interactions tend to be quite coarse-grained; essentially requests to update a remote state machine to match the described state. Most of what gets called “REST” isn’t; it’s just ad-hoc RPC sent over HTTP with arguments en
177.
by hhas01 7y ago
This. Compromises are fine: real-world solutions make them all the time. What’s valuable to readers is displaying the reasoning behind them.
178.
by hhas01 7y ago
30-40%? Damn, you good. I’ve been reading LtU† for fifteen years now, and I’ve gone from getting one word in a hundred to maybe 1 in every 10.:) † lambda-the-ultimate.org
179.
by hhas01 7y ago
C made mediocrity and unreliability the accepted standard. As parent says, C’s a great choice for writing OS kernels. It should have stayed there. Imagine if upon purchasing an automobile you had to agree that if the wheels fly off and the
180.
by hhas01 7y ago
I think Xerox was pretty renowned for their “we’re a photocopier company; we make and sell photocopiers” attitude, or they’d never have given such golden opportunities away. Much as Kodak is a photographic film company that makes and sells

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