mschaef

78 ms·

721.
by mschaef 10y ago
I've wondered that too... When Jobs came back, he drew four quadrants along two axes: pro/consumer and laptop/desktop. The product line was then reduced to an offering in each quadrant. It was easy to understand what you shou
722.
by mschaef 10y ago
> I never wrote that macros are required to control evaluation. I think that came from me. My point was mainly that 1) control over evaluation is a significant reason to use macros 2) there are other ways to achieve that goal and 3) thos
723.
by mschaef 10y ago
> I do not agree that an if macro stands for some specific lambda-based utterance. That isn't historically true, or in any other sense. Huh? Are you saying the use of lambdas does NOT give if* the ability to control the execution of
724.
by mschaef 10y ago
Sure, functions can do that and more (borrowing a page from Smalltalk): (if* cond #'(lambda () then) #'(lambda () else)) All the macro does is eliminate the need to write out all the lambda syntax. (def
725.
by mschaef 10y ago
I can see that, but it doesn't feel quite right. The tree you get directly from deserialized source text is still a bit more fine grained than I'd expect a true AST to be. To see what I mean, consider this: (if condition 1 2
726.
by mschaef 10y ago
> a certain C macro might evaluate some expression twice. Everyone knows that this is dangerous...ISO C itself says that getc may evaluate its argument multiple times; ... Lisp macros do not have issues that are unfixable in this way. If
727.
by mschaef 10y ago
> I've heard this repeatedly over the years, but the explanation unfortunately always stops right there. Lisp macros are something like C macros, chainsaws, hydrochloric acid, or anything else that's powerful-but-dangerous. Thi
728.
by mschaef 10y ago
That whole blog is worth a good read through. Lots of interesting stuff, particularly if you care about dynamic language implementation.
729.
by mschaef 10y ago
> skipping the parse step entirely. Not strictly true... there is still parsing involved in reading Lisp data structures from a character stream. (It's just much less involved than in traditional infix languages.) The way to think
730.
by mschaef 10y ago
For me, the question would be why you cared about the performance metrics. Sometimes bad performance can be a sign that something is fundamentally broken, and fixing the metrics might be the solution to the stability problem. Sometimes, it&
731.
by mschaef 10y ago
I think another way to put many of the items on your list is that the code should read as a description of what it intends to do, rather than how it intends to do it. Breaking code into components and giving those components useful names go
732.
by mschaef 10y ago
> Consider the capabilities that the 16b machine ...instead of wining about lack of machine capabilities. ...the kind of programmer that want to write an unelegant and just working program in a short amount of time, I do hear you, but on
733.
by mschaef 10y ago
Are you thinking of a specific concrete 16-bit architecture where it's easy to access data objects larger than 64K? I'd be interested to hears... I really can't. Probably the most capable architecture I'm familiar with t
734.
by mschaef 10y ago
"One scheme is to consider the value of the used segment register as a pointer to a 16 byte block of memory and use the segment index to adress the specific byte in this block (with an option to increase the index "a little bit&qu
735.
by mschaef 10y ago
You could continue this argument out to 128 or 256 bits. Where it starts to fall down is when you map the size of those address spaces back to the data types people work with. In a 16-bit address space (64K), you hit the 16-bit limit _all t
736.
by mschaef 10y ago
If it takes 1008MB to seamlessly connect to a wireless network, something is clearly wrong.
737.
by mschaef 10y ago
> That said, I think he would have been within his rights to give you a C for overengineering it :p. Exactly.
738.
by mschaef 10y ago
I've created three instances of what I'd consider to be programming languages. The first was something I did in an intro to CS class. I asked the professor if I could use C++ rather than Pascal for the assignment, and was, of cou
739.
by mschaef 10y ago
Other people have covered Intel's TurboBoost feature, but this reminds me of something GM did with the Cadillac Northstar V8 back in the early 90's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northstar_engine_series When
740.
by mschaef 10y ago
He's also spearheaded Camlistore, which is intended to be a archival system for electronic data. Interesting both technically, and for the problem it attempts to solve. https://camlistore.org/
741.
by mschaef 10y ago
Seconded. This developer has an absolutely amazing output and corpus of works.
742.
by mschaef 10y ago
By taking such a sweeping view, you're glossing over a lot of individual suffering. Even if we're better off now than prior to WW2, the >50MM casualties of that war would probably disagree.
743.
by mschaef 10y ago
> a parent who has made some threat that they never intended to carry through, counting 1, 2, 2-and-a-half, 2-and-three-quarters... As a parent, I've taken this through as far as 2 and 255/256. (Although by that point it had ch
744.
by mschaef 10y ago
> what gives these people the right to do this? The first amendment.
745.
by mschaef 10y ago
> Can you give the approximate route? Philly to Atlanta. To be honest, I thought the Supercharger coverage along the route was excellent. I don't know what the individual sites are like (ie: would I really want to hang around an hou
746.
by mschaef 10y ago
> you're looking at a 10-20% time penalty Running the route I'm describing through a trip trip planning website, the travel time goes from 11:12 (h:m) to 15:52 (3:53 charging)... so more like a 40% penalty. In my particular sce
747.
by mschaef 10y ago
At least one or two of the calls were quite urgent - We got the call late in the evening and were in the car within an hour or two. Flying would've meant booking a last minute flight, waiting for whatever flight time, getting to the ai
748.
by mschaef 10y ago
Me too... I remember being excited when Solitare was running well under Linux. One area where I've found Wine personally very useful over the years is understanding the Windows API. Without access to Windows source, access to the Wine
749.
by mschaef 10y ago
> Other people don't buy a car with limited range because they might need to drive more than 4 hours without a long break once a year. This is an easy argument to make, and I've made it myself in other cases, but there are two
750.
by mschaef 10y ago
> I wonder if anyone has estimated the impact of "simple" engineering changes on the progress of electric cars. Many years ago, I was browsing through an old Hot Rodding guide to Harley Davidson motorcycles. (Don't ask why

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