jmmcd

48 ms·

481.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> if success is defined as getting a fair approximation to a mass of chaotic unanalyzed data, then it's way better to do it this way than to do it the way the physicists do, you know, no thought experiments about frictionless planes and
482.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Sumit Gulwani of Microsoft Research has a non-genetic programming approach to this and similar problems, which is interesting to compare: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2240236.2240260
483.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> a river has memory Nice point... well, I'm all ears for a better definition :)
484.
by jmmcd 14y ago
The (American?) usage where colons end sentences (two following spaces, then a capital letter) is so very very wrong.
485.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> No, diff and merge algorithms are symbol-oriented. Point taken, and as soon as someone puts word-by-word merging into svn or git, I'll change my opinion. > I'd submit, though, that if a basic diff/merge program is being relied on
486.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> a list of items meant to appear as individual lines, that should not be merged. Do you literally mean a list, like LaTeX itemize, description, or enumerate? Then the markup (whatever it is) should indicate that. In plain text that was
487.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Diff and merge algorithms are line-oriented. If a whole paragraph is on one line, and I edit one word, then the diff consists of the whole paragraph, which is bad. Some tools are able to do word-by-word diffs, as mentioned below. But none a
488.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Diffs are only half the picture. Is git able to correctly merge two branches which each have single-word edits to a long-line sentence? I'm pretty sure it's not. I think the article is correctly arguing that we should continue to bend ove
489.
by jmmcd 14y ago
This is a topic that has often bothered me when collaborating with people on writing latex. I use Emacs with auto-fill-mode and Meta-Q to fill paragraphs. This usually works out ok in my own files because usually a re-fill of existing text
490.
by jmmcd 14y ago
If the merging isn't also word-aware, then surely this is only half a solution. I don't think the svn script you linked is able to merge (I only read the Readme, no further investigation).
491.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> But would you call it "an internal memory system" Well, it's not being used later on to make decisions, is it? I suppose I will go with that for my definition of memory: the agent makes a change to the state of the world (external) or
492.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Hmm. If you're just talking about the extra growth, then that's not even external. I don't think it's a good example.
493.
by jmmcd 14y ago
> Similarly, many plants "lean" to point towards the sun. Are they "remembering" where the sun is with the increased growth on the far side? If they had put the sun there first , then yeah, that would be external memory. That's the dif
494.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Yes, there most certainly is a type. It's dynamic, but not nonexistent. Now, of course you don't know the type for sure unless you run the code. I said so at the start. But I'm saying, can't you do a pretty good job in most cases? In th
495.
by jmmcd 14y ago
I think we have common ancestors with whales a lot more recently than proteins. It doesn't matter: we have common ancestors with them, therefore we've been evolving the same length of time. > btw you don't have to know me This is the
496.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Typescript has static type annotations. All those things are already easy in that context.
497.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Ok, if I understand you right, your point is that a tool like a linter will fail to warn about this error. I'm not sure what current (say) Python linters do in situations like that. But a tool like "go to definition" would work fine, wouldn
498.
by jmmcd 14y ago
YES! And I bet that a little bit of heuristics, a little bit of machine learning, and/or a little bit of user feedback (say, a button that tells the tool it went to the wrong function definition) would help such a tool cover a few more of t
499.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Yes, of course, we sacrifice accuracy. I said so at the very start. But imagine a "go to definition" tool that works correctly for 99% of cases and barfs or goes to the wrong place on the others. If the alternative is no tool at all, that s
500.
by jmmcd 14y ago
I'm not saying that tooling isn't nice. On the contrary. I'm asking why can't we have tooling even with dynamic types.
501.
by jmmcd 14y ago
This isn't exactly the right place, but I don't know where else to ask this. When people argue for static types (whether optional as in TypeScript or mandatory), one of the main reasons is "tooling". Why? I know that writing a "go to defini
502.
by jmmcd 14y ago
No outrage, sarc, or boggle in my comment. New names are all good if they name new concepts. But new names for old things just sound like buzzwords.
503.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Maybe, but double it again by calling it "analytics".
504.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Agreed, namespace clashes are an obvious problem. "My program that worked last week now crashes? Oh, it's because I apt-get installed something completely unrelated."
505.
by jmmcd 14y ago
When I read your comment I agreed. After reading the many comments down-thread which missed rather obvious sarcasm, I reluctantly disagree.
506.
by jmmcd 14y ago
I don't know about you, but my ancestors have been evolving for a lot longer than 4 million years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_descent
507.
by jmmcd 14y ago
A nitpick: you can use semicolons in Python. x = 3;
508.
by jmmcd 14y ago
Their 10million years of evolution far greater than the Man himself Nah. We've all had exactly the same length of evolution.
509.
by jmmcd 14y ago
The point is not that the these three languages are hard or obscure or that using all three is hard. The point is that maintaining the same code in parallel in three languages is a Wrong thing to do. DRY. Big companies can get away with it
510.
by jmmcd 14y ago
We don't have the right software. But if we had the right software, maybe current hardware would be plenty. There's no way to tell until we see the software.

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