hwayne

49 ms·

571.
by hwayne 9y ago
That's one of the major reasons I think handwriting J is more interesting and understandable than typing it. You can more clearly mark which pieces are conjunctions and what they operate on, you can present the explicit expansion tree
572.
by hwayne 9y ago
> The proper way to critique these languages IMO is to do benchmarks. For example, the author of the blog post could state specifcially the problem he is trying to solve and then perform the solution in two languages or more languages, i
573.
by hwayne 9y ago
I thought about doing this, but 1) I have zero experience with neural networks, and 2) I think "convert handwriting to code" would work better with something like APL, which has more distinct symbols. That said, having an APL IDE
574.
by hwayne 9y ago
Most languages aren't LtR, either! For example, what's this in python? 2 + 2 * 4 / 1 + 1 In J, that's very obviously 6: as it's 2 + (2 * (4 / (1 + 1))). In Python, it's 11, as there's order o
575.
by hwayne 9y ago
QuickCheck is actually older than the TDD movement!
576.
by hwayne 9y ago
We have about ten engineers, so nowhere near the size where people consider formal methods "appropriate". Nonetheless it's still been incredibly useful for our work. I'm a pretty huge evangelist of TLA+, but I don't
577.
by hwayne 9y ago
How much TV do you watch?
578.
by hwayne 9y ago
> How much does the existing financial system cost to operate? How much do ATMs, Private financial networks, money security, transportation, staff, legal, etc, etc. Comparing per transaction cost does not even begin to account for the en
579.
by hwayne 9y ago
> The Interests have not been recommended, approved or disapproved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) or by the securities regulatory authority of any state or of any other U.S. or non-U.S. jurisdiction, nor has t
580.
by hwayne 9y ago
Wealthfront's fees are on top of the fees of whatever ETFs they bought you.
581.
by hwayne 9y ago
> Yes it's true that retrofitting better type systems into existing languages may not be low-hanging fruit. Disagree here, actually! Javascript (Typescript) and Python (mypy) are both seeing pretty big benefits from adding gradual t
582.
by hwayne 9y ago
PyCharm and VSCode are both pretty good.
583.
by hwayne 9y ago
There's a lot of great things our industry doesn't use: contracts, proper fuzz testing, cleanroom, formal specification, constraint solvers, _checklists_. We might (not necessarily, but _might_) be in a place where types are dimin
584.
by hwayne 9y ago
> So year, static typing doesn't buy you much, but in some languages it's at least cheap. I think this is key. The benefit of static typing isn't that they provide safety, it's that they provide _low-cost_ safety. For
585.
by hwayne 9y ago
> This "we can never be sure of anything, because the halting problem" meme is getting boring. Yes, you cannot write the Collatz function in Coq. No, that is not a limitation in the real world. How about, say, a video game? Tha
586.
by hwayne 9y ago
Sometimes I wonder if we're arguing the wrong thing, where we think we're arguing static vs dynamic typing but what we're _actually_ arguing is static vs no-static typing. Haskell is static and not dynamic. Ruby is dynamic bu
587.
by hwayne 9y ago
> The developer is encouraged to think of the invariants before trying to prove that their implementation satisfies them. This approach to software development asks the programmer to consider side-effects, error cases, and data transform
588.
by hwayne 9y ago
Have you tried it? It's usually pretty good for Python.
589.
by hwayne 9y ago
What are some good examples of complex system properties you've seen verified with sufficiently advanced types?
590.
by hwayne 9y ago
Yeah, TLA+ just verifies the spec, not the actual code. You still need to write tests and use code review and the like.
591.
by hwayne 9y ago
I definitely would! One thing a lot of people miss in these discussions is that this isn't an either-or, and we should be using multiple different correctness techniques to increase our confidence.
592.
by hwayne 9y ago
Coding isn't always the best blueprint. One example: what if you're writing a service that talks to two other internal services and a third-party API? Your code might capture what your specific service does, but it doesn't ca
593.
by hwayne 9y ago
My J skills will finally be worth something!
594.
by hwayne 9y ago
While there's plenty of room for improvement, I legitimately believe that TLA+ is now in a place where it's convenient enough to use in conjunction with Ionic/Swift.
595.
by hwayne 9y ago
How many software projects have to deal with gravity? Weather patterns? How many software projects need teams of construction workers to actually build? Different kinds of engineering have different requirements. Just because the challenges
596.
by hwayne 9y ago
It helps in two ways: 1) You have to specify your system, right? With TLA+, you can just wave you hands and say "okay this part does something, I guess." You have to force yourself to understand what, exactly, you want your system
597.
by hwayne 9y ago
Sure! I've written a quick demo here[1] and a longer-form piece here[2]: [1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/modeling-deployments/ [2] https://medium.com/espark-engineering-blog/formal-m
598.
by hwayne 9y ago
LabVIEW is the future
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by hwayne 9y ago
> He began collaborating with Gerard Berry, a computer scientist at INRIA, the French computing-research center, on a tool called Esterel INRIA is also maintains Coq, TLAPS, and much of TLA+. INRIA is a scary scary place.
600.
by hwayne 9y ago
> maybe it is something to look into for cars, airplanes, medicine, etc. For the rest of us, who still wrestle with complexity but probably would't accidentally kill someone, here are some simpler aids: TLA+ isn't perfect, but

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