ppog

9 ms·

31.
by ppog 13y ago
It's news because we only just found out about it. If we'd known about it for the last 12 years, sure, it would be silly to report it as news. But I'm not comfortable with the implication that if something can be swept under the carpet fo
32.
by ppog 13y ago
Our process of making laws mostly listens to the people, but it it is contingent on the government's willingness to listen. The problem is the lack of rules around urgency ( http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/parliaments-urgency-provision-b... )
33.
by ppog 14y ago
I second rafaelj's recommendations, and there is also a good interactive tutorial from the F# team: http://www.tryfsharp.org/Learn . You may find it a bit slow paced given your FP experience but it may be a good way to actually try out th
34.
by ppog 14y ago
"Why not switch the kettle on during a commercial break?" The BBC doesn't have commercial breaks. Most UK stations that do have commercial breaks spread them out at about 20-minute intervals, so if you switched the kettle during a commerc
35.
by ppog 14y ago
Not to mention that they are also referring to functional programming being used within those existing languages. Even Visual Basic contains a pretty capable functional subsystem these days, with lambdas, higher order functions and so on
36.
by ppog 14y ago
Going that extra mile was necessary to make this a big story instead of having it brushed under the carpet. It seems that the leak was known about as much as a year ago ( http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&obj... ), M
37.
by ppog 15y ago
Related to points 2 and 3, Microsoft didn't just make it easier to get the Windows tools, they made a tool that made it easy to write Windows programs: Visual Basic. Everyone loves to hate VB, but it was a huge factor in enabling line of b
38.
by ppog 15y ago
In .NET, you can just do "new StackTrace()" to capture the current stack of the calling thread. One minor risk with this may be if an optimiser has elided function calls (e.g. converted to a tail recursion). I'm not sure how realistic thi
39.
by ppog 15y ago
By contrast, the Register is reporting Microsoft is talking to OnLive and is 'striking a conciliatory note.' http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/08/microsoft_office_ipa...
40.
by ppog 15y ago
They fixed that in Windows XP. (Although in Vista they made the Start button circular so it no longer appeared to occupy the corner pixel, the entire bottom left corner did remain hot, and remains so in Windows 7.)
41.
by ppog 15y ago
"Bottom line: If the main topic of conversation you have with your friends is not how you can better yourself, you need to get new friends." Thanks, but I'm happy with the friends I have and with the kind of conversations we have. If your
42.
by ppog 15y ago
Geoffrey K Pullum has a delightful article tearing Strunk and White's prescription and examples to pieces. While there's some truth to the advice, it is often simplistically presented and ludicrously overapplied (uh, I mean, "style guides
43.
by ppog 15y ago
But for a small function (which a lambda typically is), the syntactic overhead of "new Runnable() { public void run()" swamps the actual logic. When I read this version, it's hard for my eyes to find what work is actually being done becaus
44.
by ppog 15y ago
When I see people getting breathless about "awesome CSS-only buttons" or "cool CSS-only wallpaper," I am always reminded of the old proverb of the dancing bear: "The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all."
45.
by ppog 15y ago
"Impossible matter"? What's "impossible" about it? That we don't know what it is, and that it isn't predicted by our current models, doesn't make it "impossible." It means we're going to need to extend our models, which we've been doing
46.
by ppog 15y ago
Not OCaml per se, but at least one F# library makes liberal and very effective use of custom operators: FParsec, Stephan Tolksdorf's parser combinator library ( http://www.quanttec.com/fparsec/reference/primitives.html ). Of course, FParse
47.
by ppog 15y ago
Classes in C# are inheritable by default, as in Java, but can be marked sealed (final). Members (methods and properties) in C# are final by default, and must be explicitly marked virtual.
48.
by ppog 15y ago
This is probably a fair point about the "enterprise .NET" community, which is by nature very conservative and closely aligned to core Microsoft technologies where the guarantees of support are strongest and the developer pool the largest. H
49.
by ppog 15y ago
Func<Action> would be a function that takes no arguments and returns an Action. The desire is to be able to specify void as the return type of a Func, so that you can use Funcs for all callbacks, instead of having to use Funcs for
50.
by ppog 15y ago
Last time I looked (early 2009), Scala compilation to the CLR was a bit of a joke. It targeted version 1.1 of the CLR, which had been superseded nearly 4 years earlier. I think the problem was with the predefined libraries. Supposedly yo
51.
by ppog 15y ago
Nitpick: You're right that the C# designers don't have to worry about a JCP-like standardisation process, but they do put some effort into producing a formal language standard (I think through ECMA). Unlike earlier Microsoft proprietary la
52.
by ppog 15y ago
Looking at that article, the slowness doesn't come from having to download the entire RSS feed. As commenters there note, If-Modified-Since means you only need to download the feed when there are changes. So in your second paragraph, you
53.
by ppog 15y ago
It may be unnecessary, but I don't think it's an abuse. As I understand it, frameworks like Rails use idioms like this quite extensively, and enabling code written in static languages to receive dynamic member calls is pretty much the poin
54.
by ppog 16y ago
Typo in the link: http://omgubuntu.co.uk
55.
Breaking the ice at conferences(womeninwetlands.blogspot.com)
1 points by ppog 16y ago|0 comments
56.
by ppog 16y ago
Just to add to the historical perspective... One of the Project 7 languages was a Haskell dialect named Mondrian. If memory serves, this was brought to production as a scripting language back in the .NET 1.x days, but it never really got m
57.
by ppog 16y ago
That's partly correct. The danger comes not because F# is "based on" .NET but because it can call into other .NET libraries. F# code by itself, including the F# libraries, won't create null references except in two very specific cases (se