kbp

19 ms·

121.
by kbp 8y ago
> I never failed any take home assignments, so this isn't about me. I am speaking more generally and not about me personally. It was generic "you", the hypothetical person who was having trouble with take home assignments
122.
by kbp 8y ago
> companies may discriminate against those candidates because they lack that industry specific skills (that otherwise could easily be picked up). What does "otherwise" mean, here? The context we were discussing is that they ask
123.
by kbp 8y ago
> Companies I've seen don't care if you have fundamental knowledge of algorithms and data structures. They are testing you on specific frameworks via interview questions and take home projects No, I got that. My point was that
124.
by kbp 8y ago
> But unfortunately my experience is industry tends to not agree with us. They are like 'cool you know fundamentals, now do this take home project that requires x programming language with m framework'. This isn't too nice
125.
by kbp 8y ago
Somewhat relatedly, a very common mistake in Lisp is modifying literals; a lot of people don't realise that there's a difference between writing '(a b c) and writing (list 'a 'b 'c), but QUOTE's descriptio
126.
by kbp 8y ago
This is a useful trick, but I don't see how it addresses the issue they talked about. As I understand it, they were saying that Firefox and Chrome's Javascript REPL's scroll up through expressions rather than lines. If you sa
127.
by kbp 8y ago
> AI winter is not "on its way". There is AI hype and anti-AI hype, and then there is actual practice. This article is anti-AI hype, just as bad as its opposite. In practice there are tons of useful applications. I don't t
128.
by kbp 8y ago
The longterm difference seems pretty minimal to me: they google his name and see reviews accusing him of fraud or they google his name and see tabloid articles about this story that say the same thing the reviews did, but add that the perso
129.
by kbp 8y ago
> Leave a single note, "We're sorry this patient wasn't satisfied with our service, and have refunded all fees. Since most of our patients are happy, we rarely need to do this." [0] Actually even that note is too conf
130.
by kbp 8y ago
> Or, as an old adage goes, "If it compiles, it works." This isn't said about the declarative nature of languages so much as it is about the benefits of powerful static type systems, in my experience. It's quite easy
131.
by kbp 8y ago
> and even Scheme is 'the ultimate imperative' https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5790 ! Scheme isn't, lambda is. That paper is about how lexical closures alone are enough to simulate a lot of
132.
by kbp 8y ago
One distinction between Lisp and Python's docstrings that he didn't mention is that in Lisp, you can (and it's normal to) give docstrings to variables; you can then look these up later with DOCUMENTATION or however else you r
133.
by kbp 8y ago
> Yeah, because people usually compile their programs before running them. The developers do, yes; with Javascript, they don't have to worry about compiling for multiple platforms like, say, a C developer would, they could even just
134.
by kbp 8y ago
> I'm not current on Node features, but that looks dangerous to do. Is that equivalent to reading the file and `eval()`ing it? No: > const fs = require('fs') undefined > fs.writeFileSync('file.js&#
135.
by kbp 8y ago
Sure, but the point is that that exact same code will throw a type error in SBCL. It at least complicates what you need to do before you can say "what implementation doesn't behave like that?".
136.
by kbp 8y ago
> what implementation really does that with SAFETY being 3? LispWorks: CL-USER 1 > (declaim (optimize safety)) NIL CL-USER 2 > (defun f (x) (declare (fixnum x)) x) F CL-USER 3 > (f "foo"
137.
by kbp 8y ago
> And there is no undefined behavior at all. Well, there is. Violating type declarations is UB in Common Lisp, the only thing the standard says about it is "the consequences are undefined". In SBCL, an error will be signalled,
138.
by kbp 8y ago
> What SBCL is doing to Common Lisp is similar to what C compiler vendors did to C. In order to win at benchmarks, C compiler vendors started to use UB as a license to miscompile optimized code, which got them better benchmarks. I sort o
139.
by kbp 8y ago
Interestingly, in PicoLisp, if the car of a list evaluates to a number (but isn't a literal), it's taken to be the address of an fsubr (this is how all of the builtins are implemented; if you evaluate their symbols, you'll se
140.
by kbp 8y ago
One thing about PicoLisp that might stick out for people coming from CL, Scheme, or Clojure is that it's dynamically scoped (like most Lisps, historically), so you can't make closures. Compare this Scheme session: #;1> (d
141.
by kbp 8y ago
> Taking recursion away seems like an unnecessary limitation Modern Cobol doesn't seem to have this limitation, eg http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/handhel... . When Cobol originally app
142.
by kbp 8y ago
> So no function calls? No recursive ones. If you forbid (direct or indirect) recursion, then a function's local variables can all be static rather than stack-allocated. Similarly, each function could have a hidden, static "ret
143.
by kbp 8y ago
> For my expander I actually implemented all let forms, for instance, as macros that reduced to lambda applications. > Now other lisps might have more forms that don't reduce quite nicely, I'm not sure, I still strongly beli
144.
by kbp 8y ago
Closely related are generators and gatherers: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node362.html The section in the preface that GLS' note refers to reads: "X3J13 expressed interes
145.
Common Lisp Series(cs.cmu.edu)
4 points by kbp 8y ago|1 comments
146.
by kbp 8y ago
It sounds like you're the kind of person who'd prefer DOTIMES[0], DOLIST[1], and so on. Lisp has a lot of different ways to handle iteration, it's the curse of flexibility when people have such varying tastes. Another great o
147.
by kbp 8y ago
Wasn't thinking when I wrote that Lisp example; obviously you don't use OPEN alongside WITH-OPEN-FILE, it just takes the filename.
148.
by kbp 8y ago
Here's a Javascript program: const x = 'lexically scoped'; const f = () => x; const g = () => { const x = 'dynamically scoped'; return f(); }; console.log(g()); It p
149.
by kbp 8y ago
> Saying C doesn't have functions would be more like saying Java doesn't have objects Your point was that that state of being able to have pointers to non-first-class values was a paradox, and my point was that C manages just f
150.
by kbp 8y ago
C++11 and 17 both added a lot of big new features, and there's more planned for C++20. For the language itself, I think it's completely comparable.

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