jklowden

6 ms·

31.
by jklowden 2y ago
It’s unreliable on any network for good reason: SQLite relies on the kernel for state information on the file system. Two machines sharing one file over a network have two unsynchronized versions of that state. One machine’s write does not
32.
by jklowden 2y ago
Funny thing: during the pandemic, when no one was driving, New Delhi’s air cleared so much that the Himalayas could be seen for the first time in decades. If pollution is caused by "crop burning", why is it that the worst pollutio
33.
by jklowden 2y ago
www.cobolworx.com. Always on the lookout for places to talk about our work.
34.
by jklowden 2y ago
COBOL is still running where it’s running because those old applications 1) work and 2) are very expensive to rewrite. Unimportant programs were abandoned. Simple one were migrated to Java decades ago. The useful-and-complicated — and often
35.
by jklowden 2y ago
So bad is the performance of gcc std::regex that I reimplemented part of it using regex(3). Of course, I didn’t discover the problem until I’d committed to the interface, so I put mine in namespace dts, just in case one day the supplied im
36.
by jklowden 2y ago
Oh, please. Wordstar is nothing but an insignificant pre-GUI editor with roughly zero useful modern printer drivers. For a comparable but better experience, choose any text editor — emacs, for example — and groff. You get the control-keys o
37.
by jklowden 2y ago
The only reason we live with Sql in 2024 is that the industry has stagnated. Not only the vendors: the users, too. SQL was designed for a purpose it never fulfilled and never will: end user queries. The promise was that users would write th
38.
by jklowden 2y ago
You think your surrogate key will save you? It will not. The world has an external reality that needs to be reflected in your database. If the unique identifier for your object — VIN, CUSIP, whatever — if it changes, the world will hencefo
39.
by jklowden 2y ago
> It's just as easy to make your own surrogate key in the case where there aren't enough natural identifiers A row with no natural is misdesigned. Proof: what does the row _mean_ if its values don’t distinguish it uniquely in t
40.
by jklowden 2y ago
Three words: Communicating Sequential Processes.
41.
by jklowden 3y ago
The simple truth is that scaffolding commandeers a public good for private purpose. Developers may say scaffolding protects pedestrians, but it’s really there to protect the construction firm from liability. And what does the public get in
42.
by jklowden 5y ago
IBM did not spend the money it did to replace its premier database product, IMS, with another DBMS, DB2, just to enable "simple database queries". Yes, SQL was influenced by other "4th generation languages" of the era.
43.
by jklowden 5y ago
A lot can be said in favor of R, but "straightforward" is a debatable description. The semantics of R were never really designed, and were only recently "discovered", post hoc. See "Evaluating the Design of the R
44.
by jklowden 8y ago
In what sense does the citizen of the Central African Republic share any economic interest with the American? Legal system and political system are entirely separate. You seem to think that if some Americans are richer than sone Africans, t
45.
by jklowden 8y ago
No, that’s not “why” Silicon Valley got started. And you’ll note that neither taxes nor unions are especially rare in California. Silicon Valley owes its existence to Stanford University and the Department of Defense. Spending on research,
46.
by jklowden 9y ago
Finally? You don’t need a new shell. Write select(1). Job done.
47.
by jklowden 9y ago
No one stopped caring. What we stopped doing was pretending the civilian population could be protected against nuclear holocaust. The bomb that obliterated Hiroshima was a toy next to a thermonuclear bomb, which is 1000 times as powerful. I
48.
by jklowden 9y ago
The article attempts to make logical arguments from false premises. * What makes evaluating regulations so difficult is that the benefits are usually readily apparent ... but the costs are much more difficult to quantify Why should that
49.
by jklowden 9y ago
Before you decide nuclear power has any place in the future of producing electricity, consider two facts: 1. Worldwide, not a single nuclear plant was built with private funds. All were underwritten with public funds. 2. US law protects nuc
50.
by jklowden 9y ago
Oracle lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations. Protecting corporate databases from corruption and unauthorized access is crucial to any IT department. Incentive to change the DBMS vendor is nil
51.
by jklowden 10y ago
The problem with that theory is that it's wrong on the facts. The federal government has consistently been about 19% of GDP since the 1950s. Your wages are no more eaten up by bureaucracy than was your grandfather's. See epi.org.
52.
by jklowden 10y ago
Remember, Wirth designed Pascal as a teaching language. One-pass compilation, no forward declarations, built-in I/O. Turbo Pascal could compile to a .com file, 64KB max, 16-bit pointers. I'm not sure there was a linker; the first
53.
by jklowden 10y ago
We won't mention that our elected bureaucrats have an 18% approval rating.
54.
by jklowden 10y ago
Ah, but the facts contradict ye. Look at private school tuitions. Look at the cost of daycare. They're not publicly subsidized, and they've risen just as fast as private college tuition. You're also overlooking the rising val
55.
by jklowden 10y ago
That's one way of looking at. Another way of looking at is that Microsoft derives material value from MVP contributions, and rewards them with trinkets. Or are MVPs sometimes awarded stock? Maybe the MVP program partly explains Micro
56.
by jklowden 10y ago
Simplified: (no color, no grep) help: @awk -F ':.*##' '$$0 ~ FS \ {printf "%15s%s\n", $$1 ":", $$2}' \ $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | sort
57.
by jklowden 10y ago
struct { char name[30]; } tgt, src = { "Einstein" }; tgt = src; Since there are no strings, it cannot be true that strings are pointers. They can be arrays, and array sizes are known at compile time. It's jus
58.
by jklowden 10y ago
I have to agree with your assessment of SQL APIs. Funny how not a single one seems to have been designed by someone who'd seen printf & scanf. In their defense, your obvious use case is evidence of a database design problem and sh
59.
by jklowden 10y ago
> ('Gijs in \'t Veld') You might be interested to know your example doesn't escape that correctly. SQL syntax escapes quotes by doubling them: ('Gijs in ''t Veld') Correctness is not
60.
by jklowden 11y ago
I wrote to Kernighan a few years ago, when "D is for Digital" came out, to ask him, in effect, if troff had been made obsolete by TeX. At the time I had begun using it, and wondered if it was worth investing my time to learn. He

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