skohan

35 ms·

421.
by skohan 5y ago
I never said C is without abstraction, only that it is a relatively thin abstraction. Are you seriously arguing that Rust is not at a higher level of abstraction than C?
422.
by skohan 5y ago
It's funny because it mirrors MS' approach to product development in general.
423.
by skohan 5y ago
To be fair, I think Swift does have a reasonable selling point in that it's an easy-to-write language with ADT's, named function parameters and excellent nullability handling. It really can be quite nice to work with. But I think
424.
by skohan 5y ago
In Rust you opt into every heap allocation with an abstraction like Rc, Arc, Box etc. With C you would have to implement each of those behaviors with primitives, because C is at a lower level of abstraction than Rust.
425.
by skohan 5y ago
I don't see how you could argue that C is comparable in terms of level of abstraction to Rust and C++. For instance with Rust memory management is totally abstracted away from you as the programmer, which is a core part of what a comp
426.
by skohan 5y ago
For what it's worth, I find it remarkable what you actually can do with C with just a few libraries. For instance it's entirely possible to write a simple video game in pure C with a few well-chosen libraries for things like au
427.
by skohan 5y ago
> But few people can understand everything that optimising compilers and modern processors do to normal looking code. Well when I'm talking about an abstraction over assembly I'm not talking about optimizing compilers. That&#x
428.
by skohan 5y ago
Yeah I mean I think it's largely semantic. I think when most people talk about "swift on the server" they mean they want to write their server-side business logic in Swift, and that seems perfectly suitable in a serverless c
429.
by skohan 5y ago
I think the motivation for actors is that it's an abstraction which lets you write concurrent code with reasonably strong safety guarantees without adding as much cognitive overhead as a strict system like Rust. GCD is a really nice a
430.
by skohan 5y ago
Hmm I've always thought of C in terms of "portable assembly". Not so much that features were omitted because they weren't performant enough, but because they strayed too far away from machine-primitive operations.
431.
by skohan 5y ago
I am mostly a fan of Rust, but it's made some missteps in its evolution imo. For instance sync rust is mostly nice to work with, but async is another story entirely. I have the impression that it was somewhat rushed into the language
432.
by skohan 5y ago
You wouldn't consider code executing in a lambda to be server-side? What is it then?
433.
by skohan 5y ago
That's exactly why Zig is such an interesting language to me. The premise of trying to write a modern C replacement - essentially what C would be if it were designed with the learnings of the past 40 years in mind - is super exciting.
434.
by skohan 5y ago
Many people have already figured it out. I would imagine a few years after SwiftUI becomes the primary UI stack used by iOS developers, many of them will be cursing Combine's name, as it will be clear most of the problems making iO
435.
by skohan 5y ago
Yeah fair enough - constraints can be really powerful, but they really do take some time and practice to wrap your head around.
436.
by skohan 5y ago
I think Swift could work very well in a lambda/serverless context. In that case, you'd be writing mostly functional Swift code with sparing use of reference types, which would mean you wouldn't hit ARC at all and you'd h
437.
by skohan 5y ago
C seems ok no?
438.
by skohan 5y ago
Objective-C is a neat little language. Don't get me wrong - I would never go back to it, largely because of runtime errors due to duck-typing - but there were definitely things to like about it. The best part was the perfect C/C+
439.
by skohan 5y ago
Did you ever try going all the way and using graphical layouts (Nibs/Storyboards)?
440.
by skohan 5y ago
You may be able to tell I am not much of a fan of FRP ;) But to be fair, the comment you linked is not a prophecy it was a lamentation
441.
by skohan 5y ago
It's bad because it obscures flow-of-control from the programmer and surrenders it to a large opaque system. In some cases it makes things a little bit easier, but when things go wrong it's a nightmare because your stack traces a
442.
by skohan 5y ago
Same, working with Python is such a poor UX by comparison. That project had a ton of potential, but it seems like it lacked buy-in from the industry, and the team working on it seemed to lack leadership as little progress ever seemed to get
443.
by skohan 5y ago
Declarative rendering has a lot of advantages in terms of composability. My main issue with SwiftUI is that the tooling just doesn't seem ready at all. I tried a small project recently, and the preview feature basically doesn't
444.
by skohan 5y ago
> It is obvious that Swift has outgrown my influence, and some of the design premises I care about (e.g. "simple things that compose") As someone who was heavily invested in Swift, and an active member of the community from aro
445.
by skohan 5y ago
I just have a hard time believing it to be true that no amount of exercise will increase the overall caloric expenditure. For example, I've done a few multi-week bike tours, and we ate an enormous amount of mostly pasta every day, a
446.
by skohan 5y ago
It's a play on the "unreasonable effectiveness of math" essay right? I took it to mean the "unreasonable" ingredient which makes math so effective is context independence - since that's something which is not s
447.
by skohan 5y ago
But it's not an upward deviation from the "happiness" norm, it's deviation from the joy baseline. They're entirely separate systems. To give an extreme example, someone who's addicted to drugs might receive ex
448.
by skohan 5y ago
This level of pedantry is one of the things I appreciate about HN
449.
by skohan 5y ago
I disagree. The article makes some valid points. I did a year and a half working as a "digital nomad" traveling through the middle east, Europe and Africa. It was an incredible part of my life - just an incredibly dense stream o
450.
by skohan 5y ago
So if I'm not mistaken, the hedonic treadmill is not about baseline happiness. It's about increasing your set-point for joy and/or excitement. Happiness is a state, joy is fleeting. So the goal is generally to increase your

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