mgreenbe

13 ms·

61.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Scheme's dynamic-wind is a rather general form of this; PLT documents it pretty well http://download.plt-scheme.org/doc/103p1/html/mzscheme/node8... . It's designed for use with funny control structures, like continuations, so that sho
62.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Is your multicore webserver embedded? If not, I'm not sure this is for you. The embedded processor chip in mobile phones is small and not very powerful, so machine learning is more applicable to use in these devices in order to mak
63.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Idempotency is a property of mathematical functions: f : X -> X is idempotent iff f(f(x)) = f(x) for all x in X . Absolute value is an example of an idempotent function. Reentrancy is a property of computational functions: a fun
64.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
RE and FSM are equivalent . There are no problems handled better by regular expression than by FSM. Of course, this is for a very narrow definition of problem. And, by most accounts, a narrow definition of FSM. SCM calls its systems FS
65.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
SMC also seems more robust. If you look in the examples section of the manual, they describe an "FSM" that can identify palindromes on the alphabet { '0', '1', 'c' }, where 'c' indicates the center. This is not a regular language -- SMC h
66.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
This notion of "analogy" is formalized in category theory. At times this is done to great effect --- the generalizing power of category theory can help a mathematician see the forest for the trees. This has been done to great effect, e.g.
67.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Does Scala perform deforestation? If not, then separating construction and deconstruction is an abstraction win but a performance loss. A commenter, brandon, mentions this. That being said, I've always preferred to think in terms of separ
68.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Right -- like Haskell, for example. Mixed paradigm programming is surely the way to go; ideology is surely the wrong way. C and OCaml both support mixed programming, but Haskell supports it better: monads allow you to isolate the side-eff
69.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
I think he means "not a team player" in a very literal sense: if you are too lazy to organize and document your code, you are valuing a few minutes of your time as more important than much more of someone else's. That "someone else" is mos
70.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Building a mathematical model is also a process of trial and error. Which definitions are necessary? What are the invariants of the structures you build, and how must those structures interact? Particularly when modeling CS structures, ma
71.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Neal Stephenson has a fun depiction of wootz manufacture in The Baroque Cycle . I can't evaluate its accuracy, but it's certainly a fun scene!
72.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Indeed. And the age shows. In the section "Perl Wins the Comparison", they explain Perl's advantages: Good database connectivity gave Perl the nod over C++, and since Sandell and Johnson received project text files in various fo
73.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
That's not how constructivity works, though --- it's all or nothing. You can be careful about the points at which you use classical reasoning (or, here, probability), but then the whole proof is no longer constructive. The argument in fav
74.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Thankfully, it is just speculation. From their abstract: Virtually no evidence exists to test these theories or establish their relative magnitudes. PhD programs work on the mentor/apprentice setup, though the apprenticeship usua
75.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
One of their possible reasons: Faculty members like to do research. "Research could be a consumption good for faculty. If faculty enjoy engaging in research, then, faculty could be paid partially ‘in kind’ with research opportu
76.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Scala is definitely a rara avis , a serious engineering attempt by a PL academic. This doesn't happen often enough, though the effort involved makes it easy to understand why. Odersky should be applauded for his work, which is a contribu
77.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Parts two, three, and four of the interview: http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/goals_of_scala.html http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/scalas_type_system.... http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/pattern_matching.ht...
78.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Choosing whom to marry, what to buy or sell, and with whom/what to associate are, in fact, votes. Votes for a given lifestyle, place, thing, or idea. Or, even, person. School is valuable inasmuch as it civilizes us, though "houses of dete
79.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Incorrect. Consider a file test.py: print "hello" x = 1 + Note the syntax error. Running it, we see: $ python test.py File "test.py", line 2 x = 1 + ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax If syntax errors w
80.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
This is the worst bit: He added that he was being singled out for a paper that was a chore to write and brought him no added prestige. "Who cares? This is a review article," he says. "I'm never going to write another one, becau
81.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
I think using ++i instead of i++ everywhere is clearer, actually -- there's no need to think about temporaries, and the order of evaluation is (marginally) more transparent. Not that pre- and post-increment are ever that intuitive or transp
82.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Stack-orientation isn't a axis on this chart, nor is macro support. So: next to Pascal and C.
83.
by mgreenbe 17y ago
Not quite. A lens comprises three operations: get : C -> A put : A x C -> C create : A -> C And the GetPut, PutGet, CreateGet laws require of every lens that: put (get c) c = c get (put a c) = a get (create a
84.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
A corollary may be, "Don't assume something is wrong because you don't understand it." This is a trap I fall into all of the time. Certain things tend to elicit it broadly, such as the Hoare rule for assignment: {P[X/e]} X := e {P}
85.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
I don't think the tide is going to completely turn in the next three or four months. If this project meets its goals, I think CP2.6 -> US2.6 -> US3.0 is a more alluring migration path. If it truly succeeds, and CPython uses LLVM a
86.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
I agree; his next answer really hits dead on for me: "power is about what becomes palatable to the programmer". This reminds me of the "conciseness conjecture" from On the expressive power of programming languages by Matthias Felleisen (
87.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
Or that the current climate in the computer industry is similar to that of ten years ago. I'd be curious to see a serious breakdown of which schools are seeing increased enrollment, and in which subprograms of CS.
88.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
This is surprisingly approachable. It's fun (and flattering, I suppose) to see computability explained in a broader context. It makes me wonder: what is the lambda-calculus equivalent of the busy beaver? Number of normal-order steps befor
89.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
I don't understand how the contrast -- using category theory to derive notions of computation and something attempting to patch up Perl's object system -- relates to the rest of the essay. I don't mean to be coy, but what's the point? Is i
90.
by mgreenbe 18y ago
One can prove, ab initio, that 1+1=2 in less than ten lines in Coq. Algorithms are _meaningless_ without accompanying proofs. There should be --- and is --- a continuum of formality. The 20th Century has been unique in recognizing the fal

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