richard_todd

22 ms·

211.
by richard_todd 11y ago
It looks cool, though the claim about having no platform dependent code must be false... either they have it or they depend on someone who does. Since it's all in one file and I'm on an iPad right now, I didn't try to discern
212.
by richard_todd 11y ago
A superficial inspection of the engine files seems to say most of them have not changed since 2006-2009 timeframe. Did they run out of ideas, or enthusiasm, or money, I wonder?
213.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Indeed, one thing I initially liked about Prolog was that you can't deeply nest expressions due to the way evaluation works. Simple examples looked nice and explicit. But, you quickly run into the problem of having to name 15 intermedi
214.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Absolutely: Datalog is the one that is not Turing-complete. Thanks for pointing this out. I typed it on my phone and should have proofread it better. I'd remove the comma, but I think HN doesn't let me edit a post after a timeout
215.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Datalog is a subset of prolog, which is not Turing complete. But, by giving up the ability to compute anything, you get a fully declarative language (the order of clauses doesn't matter) whose computations always terminate. In contrast
216.
by richard_todd 11y ago
The multiple standard libraries thing also really cooled my enthusiasm last time I investigated the language. They really need to resolve that, or at least explain on their website why a newbie should not be concerned.
217.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I was curious about this statement: > The Standard is currently written in troff, which is subject to increasing bit rot as the tools for formatting it evolve. What exactly is bit-rotting? There are multiple maintained troff's out
218.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I noticed that too. People get it wrong all the time but the right way to discuss a change relative to the starting value is to divide by the starting value.
219.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I have had syntax highlighting off for a few years, but I always turn it on when looking at XML... especially poorly formatted files. It helps my eyes navigate the soup. That's where I think the value is: it helps to make up for confus
220.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I think it's more of a philosophy than an excuse. I'd say it's only in the Java era that people have started expecting their language to have "batteries included." Big ships like C/C++ turn slowly, but it does
221.
by richard_todd 11y ago
That's because C started as a language rather than a platform. You have always needed to marry it to POSIX or Win32 or whatever to do anything useful. Now with various proposals like 2D graphics, C++11 threads etc. it looks like they a
222.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Right, if you can watch loopback as a normal user, then the biggest problem is with machine configuration. After that, assuming the transmission has to happen, it's just a matter of how difficult you want to make it for root to see the
223.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I enjoyed the article and nodded along as I read it. But after, I felt like it was overstating its case a little. It puts up a toy implementation that kinda works, and then explains that to make it act correctly in the real world you have t
224.
by richard_todd 11y ago
That's an excellent example (in a long list) of things that would be possible with generics, or even parameterized packages. They could have provided an interface Channel[T] with syntax sugar if desirable. But as it is, everything in
225.
by richard_todd 11y ago
> I'd bet on CPU-enforced isolation over software any day of the week, even memory safe languages have bugs, and so do hypervisors. ... and so do CPUs! I do like CPU protections as long as they are dirt-simple, but it really scares
226.
by richard_todd 11y ago
I agree, it's all been done and the concepts have not changed, so I wish the article acknowledged more of the history behind these ideas. What's interesting to me is what _has_ changed: the gap between core memory and cpu performa
227.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Though I really shouldn't care, I admit it kinda turned me off when I saw the prominent code of conduct. I don't think they are needed (you can ban a troublemaker without a document) and I don't think they are effective (nev
228.
by richard_todd 11y ago
Does anyone try to count equivalence classes (after rotation or reflection) instead of raw board positions? To my mind, that would also be of interest if you want to know how many actually distinct game situations there are. I guess as a r
229.
by richard_todd 11y ago
The motivation for PEP-0498 given in the article was the difference in verbosity between these two lines: "{} {}".format(a, b) "%s %s" % (a, b,) That's not very convincing. I was hoping this article would m