patrec

44 ms·

421.
by patrec 6y ago
I never understood why C++ programmers like to make a big deal out of RAII (one of these purple acronyms only the C++ community can come up with). Object lifetime tied resource management seems like an utterly obvious idea, I mean how else
422.
by patrec 6y ago
You are an interesting person to have this discussion with, because you clearly have wide and deep exposure to programming languages. And although plenty of computing luminaries are not shy about their distaste for C++, you are in the good
423.
by patrec 6y ago
> I think the three greatest living language designers are Niklaus Wirth, Anders Hejlsberg, and Bjarne Stroustrup. Andrers Hejlsberg is an interesting choice because of how uniquely excellent and influential he has been at his particular
424.
by patrec 6y ago
What are those features out of reach of tree-sitter? I can see that you theoretically want something that's optimized for parsing well-formed code all at once, rather than potentially malformed code incrementally, but what trade-offs d
425.
by patrec 6y ago
Why would it not be appropriate? The only annoyance I see is that currently you will have to generate a good error message from it yourself, but a first pass at the problem shouldn't be too onerous.
426.
by patrec 6y ago
I have used tree-sitter, but only for a very simple use case. The main shortcoming I am aware of are error messages, see here: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/255 Tree sitter will basically
427.
by patrec 6y ago
> the same type of comment that blames ORM-s for ineffective SQL being used because people don't know how to write the queries in the first place. I don't think this blame is as unfair as you imply, even if if were the primary
428.
by patrec 6y ago
Would you mind expanding a bit more one one of the ideas you find novel and interesting, for example the stack as the source of truth for all computation? I had a look at the examples section on the bel post and read a few pages into the be
429.
by patrec 6y ago
> It's never the absolute best language for anything, but it's hard to improve it on any front (e.g., execution speed) without hindering it on other fronts (e.g., ad-hoc interactivity), This belief seems common, but I always wo
430.
by patrec 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_Twister#Alternatives https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/09/21/ I don't think better randomness than MT is as high a bar as you make it out
431.
by patrec 6y ago
Mersenne Twister is the MD5 of random number generators: it's neither secure nor fast (and unlikely md5 not space-efficient, or simple to implement either). You can have something that has better randomness, runs several times faster,
432.
by patrec 6y ago
I don't know -- Pico-8 seems to be the perfect answer to what the author is asking for: it's a great environment to learn about these things, and there is a large and useful community and pool of resources around it which will tel
433.
by patrec 6y ago
You make it almost sound like having a fractured eco system with two different incompatible async frameworks is a good thing! :P
434.
by patrec 6y ago
Of the many cows I've met in my life few seemed to be weighed down by the harsh conditions of their existence and burdened by foreknowledge of their early death. Maybe a cow contemplating your existence would similarly wonder how you
435.
by patrec 6y ago
5 years is still infinitely more than 0 which would soon become the natural life span of dairy cows if veganism won a complete victory and everyone suddenly lost all interest in beef, milk and leather. In terms of interesting things that ar
436.
by patrec 6y ago
Colin Percival is obviously a smart and very skilled guy but I am mystified why people on HN keep recommending tarsnap, it seems a terrible product for almost any imaginable audience. If I'm a normal end user, I will probably get a vas
437.
by patrec 6y ago
Carmack would have used it for Oculus, had management not said no. https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/807797812700348416
438.
by patrec 6y ago
The main thing that stood out to me is the only reason Sun could "profit" from this accidental disruption is because someone in management was a nice enough person to allow something which it sounds like they must have seen as a s
439.
by patrec 6y ago
Fascinating! So basically the only reason Java is a thing today is because some manager was moved to pity by the lack of job prospects of a bunch of soon-to-be-redundant engineers (because they had unwisely spent their last few years on th
440.
by patrec 6y ago
I was pleasantly suprised to see that many of these seem to have ok video quality (all I tried had a 720p option on youtube, although the actual quality is often much lower than that, sadly including His Girl Friday).
441.
by patrec 6y ago
How typical was that type of thing? Although on the whole I think Java is better than its reputation, I always thought it a bit underwhelming for the brainpower around at the time; one would kinda assume in addition to yourself people like
442.
by patrec 6y ago
I'm quite intrigued to hear that Java might almost have had a sane security model – what was the political problem that killed it? Anything from your work that you'd like to see used in new languages (those patents must have expir
443.
by patrec 6y ago
In extreme cases you might be able to emulate arena allocation by spawning an external process, create huge object, do some work on it, throw away the process. How viable this is depends on the programming language you are using. In erlang
444.
by patrec 6y ago
Well, I guess our inclinations differ. I wouldn't want to read a biography of Hitchcock written by a blind man, or a biography of Shakespeare by someone who can't speak a word of English, has read none of Shakespeare's works
445.
by patrec 6y ago
If you don't know who Claude Shannon is long before starting to write a biography about him, you are not competent to be his biographer. Unsurprisingly the article reads like run of the mill click-bait cant like Sun Tsu's 31 best
446.
by patrec 6y ago
Of course I agree that calling such data structures immutable is more precise, but it's still in contrast to both imperative programming and imperative data structures. In particular every single functional language (including the pur
447.
by patrec 6y ago
This has really not been true since python grew a ternary operator, syntactically you can write functional code perfectly fine in python -- the only significant syntactic shortcoming is lack of pattern matching. What actually hampers functi
448.
by patrec 6y ago
Yes, you can work around some of the defects I mentioned by defining your own wrapper classe(s) and doing something like this: f"Article: {fixformatting(somestr):20} Price: {fixformatting(price):5.3}" Apart from somewhat
449.
by patrec 6y ago
Does anyone know who had the bright idea to replace vi with nano as the standard text editor and why this became some sort of standard? I really don't get it. Vi is unintuitive and unfamiliar to unix newebies, but at some point every e
450.
by patrec 6y ago
I think you are right to prefer JS's backtick notation, but not in your reason. The main problem with python's f" syntax is that it's just a very complex, non-extensible hack whereas in javascript you can prefix a tag to

More ›