hhas01

27 ms·

181.
by hhas01 7y ago
Yeah, I’m not surprised (tell me about funding…); even so, seeing it in black&white is still a gut-punch. I mean, any one of FAANG alone could easily run a PARC or VPRI just off loose change in their kitchen kitty. And sure, it’s totall
182.
by hhas01 7y ago
BTW, I think you’ve misinterpreted “don’t know what they’re doing”†. I’m not talking about code, I’m talking about the business domain. (I thought it obvious from context, but clearly not.) And yes, a depressingly large number of working pr
183.
by hhas01 7y ago
(@Mr Robber: I don’t know who flagged you, but I LOLed. It was cheeky but fair comment: if only I had a language to express myself with less than a thousand words.:)
184.
by hhas01 7y ago
“Standard ML”? Exposure to Lisp is useful, not in that it’ll suddenly make you want to use Lisp yourself but in how it makes you realize just how crushingly, squalidly “Plato’s Cave” the entire Algol-descended language world really is. An
185.
by hhas01 7y ago
Srsly, I hate the complacent acceptance—even proud embrace—of unsafe unreliable irresponsible tools in this profession. It’s like a badge of pride, and very unhealthy. Because while you may get away with it when your programs are small
186.
by hhas01 7y ago
On my 0x00000000. Repeatedly.
187.
by hhas01 7y ago
Good Piumarta talk on the why of building new languages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGeN2IC7N0Q
188.
by hhas01 7y ago
Doh. Yes, you’re right: John Shutt . Homepage here: https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/work.html
189.
by hhas01 7y ago
Yep, sorry, you’re right. I got them backwards. Eh, too many edits, not enough checks.:)
190.
by hhas01 7y ago
Agreed. Kay &co’s lack of followthrough pains me something awful. Great ideas, promising experiments; but without taking it all the way to finished proven product, that’s all they’ll ever be. And definitely, if they don’t do it themselv
191.
by hhas01 7y ago
Algol languages give you a set of constructs that are the expressive equivalent of banging two rocks together. I would hope that good programmers, given grown-up building blocks, would use them to express concepts a bit more sophisticated
192.
by hhas01 7y ago
It’s not a recognized term, hence the air-quotes. The terms “Lisp 1” and “Lisp 2” do describe concrete implementations of Lisp (1 keeps functions and data in separate namespaces; 2 puts everything in a single namespace). Many consider Lisp-
193.
by hhas01 7y ago
C is not good. At least, not in the way parent means “good”. C is this brilliant awful crazy-successful hack, yak-shaved into existence just to bootstrap an entire brand new OS (UNIX) in record time; subsequently Peter-Principled into domai
194.
by hhas01 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_data_type
195.
by hhas01 7y ago
Try being visually impaired.
196.
by hhas01 7y ago
“PDF is good at what it's supposed to be good.” QFT. PDF should really have been called “Print Description Format”. At heart it’s really just a long list of non-linear drawing instructions for plotting font glyphs; a sort of cut-down P
197.
by hhas01 7y ago
That’s an excuse. Of course demands will increase over time—all the more reason to build a system that scales well! Unix Philosophy doesn’t demand much: just small simple composable tools, each of which does one thing well . So why doe
198.
by hhas01 7y ago
Never mind implementation; what about causality? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_(physics) Anyone who wants to build a warp drive has to start by proving Einstein wrong. Anything else is a scam.
199.
by hhas01 7y ago
Paranoid drivel. Why on Earth would these brave maverick scientists of yours choose to remain part of scientific and university communities that are so corrupt? Surely if they’ve any principles they’d be first out the door! It’s not like
200.
by hhas01 7y ago
Considering the nature of this forum and its inhabitants, in combination with the topic at hand, there is very rich irony in this. Nevertheless, it does prove the point: whether power user or punter, Poor Discovery Bad.
201.
by hhas01 7y ago
The obvious observation about Excel: spreadsheets are a highly specialized expert tool for highly specialized expert users (accountants). Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable p
202.
by hhas01 7y ago
Citation for that? I’m fairly sure they got rid of all those other buttons because for the majority of customers they created more confusion than power back then. Also, speaking as a power user who’s also a southpaw, I’ve got more than a fe
203.
by hhas01 7y ago
+1 Good product design is as much about what a product doesn’t do as what it does. Jobs was very good at that. The current design committee… not.
204.
by hhas01 7y ago
The Ribbon’s terrible because there’s no regularity in its structure. The eye can’t scan quickly: sometimes controls go horizontally, then they go vertically, then they run horizontally again. Old-school Apple menubar; yeah, that’s not exac
205.
by hhas01 7y ago
“c) they fired the AppleScript guy.” Dude got sacked because he was WORSE than useless. I mean, they gave him JavaScriptCore to turn into a full user product, right at the time Node.js was gaining desktop JavaScript a million-plus users, an
206.
by hhas01 7y ago
That’s static documentation, aka “AppleScript dictionaries”, which isn’t quite the same thing as true introspection. In combination with Script Debugger’s live object model browser it’s pretty powerful, but also all the more frustrating a
207.
by hhas01 7y ago
Linked website is nothing but religious apologetics. Very disingenuous, definitely not science. Shame on whoever posted it.
208.
by hhas01 7y ago
Misunderstood principle. Liberal does NOT mean Malformed. As you say, all behaviors should be fully specced, and inputs that violate that spec should rightly be rejected. It’s the spec itself that should be forgiving. e.g. Don’t require f
209.
by hhas01 7y ago
“a democratic system in which everyone is "required" to participate in the political process is desirable state of affairs” Citizens of a democratic nation have one job to do . If they’re not doing it, the question must be Why?
210.
by hhas01 7y ago
As I’ve noted above, this problem would go away if data streams were adequately tagged in the first place. Having that high-level knowledge of data structure enables all sorts of intelligent automation. In the event that the client uses a d

More ›