slurry

29 ms·

241.
by slurry 14y ago
Python is still used alongside C++ and Java (and some Go) but primarily for prototyping and small utility scripts. A Google engineer explains: "Well, simple common sense is going to limit Python's applicability when operating at Google's sc
242.
by slurry 14y ago
Nonsense. If my Objective-C app is sandboxed, it is "managed". Saying ARC "is not mandatory" is another way of saying it is "enabled by default". There is little formal computational difference between ARC and a conservative garbage collec
243.
by slurry 14y ago
I like Python (and Ruby) a ton, but they may find themselves legacy-stamped if they don't develop a good concurrency story quite soon. No big deal to be ~50 times slower than native code in a single-thread, single-processor use case, but fo
244.
by slurry 14y ago
I like suckless too, and use some of their tools (surf is a godsend for my dying laptop) but I find it interesting they linked to the "Duct Tape Programmer" essay at the bottom. I mean, aren't they doing another kind of opposite to duct tap
245.
by slurry 14y ago
> I don't know what to think about web-apps based operating systems like Firefox OS yet, I think it is a mistake. A modern operating system, particularly on mobile where power management and security are concerns, needs a mature well-op
246.
by slurry 14y ago
Wrote and illustrated a free online book, later published, which is accessible and somewhat fun/helpful if you don't know much about programming. Wrote some parsers/generators for various markup languages, at least one of which is now part
247.
by slurry 14y ago
With regard to why: 1) Drama: fair point. 2) Personality cult: Not as sure. I've seen more than one newb told "don't waste your time" on the Poignant guide in Ruby forums. why's weakness as a coder is pretty widely recognized. In my opinion
248.
by slurry 14y ago
Not to mention: - lightweight ABI, accessible from just about any other language on the planet. - huge existing base of liberally-licensed code available for re-use - basically the only language that is not a) legacy-stamped or b) bloated b
249.
by slurry 14y ago
Big monolithic desktop apps just are not and probably never will be a strength of FOSS development. When I do use FOSS for office productivity I prefer a program with a uniquely FOSS-y take on the problem sphere (like Lyx for word processin
250.
by slurry 14y ago
> As another poster said it seems the only real cure for Greece is going to be inflation i.e. stimulus, in Keynesian terms. (Thinking about economics in terms of common sense and morality is generally unhelpful.)
251.
by slurry 14y ago
> Taking in more debt to pay for old debt is not sustainable. Of course it is. Rolling over debt securities is everyday practice for both governments and private companies. > In no way can western states sustain the entirety of thei
252.
by slurry 14y ago
"Everything is not equally good." For example, Ruby on Rails is not equally as good as Scala[1]. [1] twitter dot com
253.
by slurry 14y ago
I've come to conclude (as a home-and-office Linux user for nigh on 15 years now) that the standard Unix gui environment of X + widget toolkits + desktop environment is just too multilayered and complex to work for non-boffins. Too many movi
254.
by slurry 14y ago
Excel is completely terrible but it puts real analytic power in the hands of non-technical people. For most business organizations, Excel alone is worth the price of Office, even if only a couple of accountants or marketing people use its p
255.
by slurry 14y ago
Open/LibreOffice has never been that great and if I were considering a big install of it the fact that it's under Apache stewardship would give me pause. Apache does very good work but their specialty is server-side, highly-configurable, la
256.
by slurry 14y ago
Note that BBC is talking about the widely-varying hardware of Android devices, not the OS itself. Also note that developing for widely-varying hardware + Android is vastly preferable to developing for widely-varying hardware + widely-varyin
257.
by slurry 14y ago
I don't believe the suckless team is working with the same definition of "modern" as you might be.
258.
by slurry 14y ago
> It's also using most of the standard GNU tools - bash, etc. You can open a shell on a rooted android device and use it much like any other distribution. Android does use GNU gcc, but not glibc or GNU tools - it uses a custom libc call
259.
by slurry 14y ago
This is the basic problem for making GNU/Linux a user-friendly desktop environment - too many moving parts. GNU/Linux is complicated enough to say but it is actually an oversimplification - an average Linux install is actually Linux/GNU + m
260.
by slurry 14y ago
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. That's what my college used in the late 90's/early 2000's, even though web mail had been available for a while, and I know Harvard did too. The lost functionality was mostly finger. Some people still used t
261.
by slurry 14y ago
My first experiences in serious computing were on multiuser VMS, AIX and Red Hat systems. I really miss the camaraderie and interactive features of those setups. Strikes me that Web 2.0 is really about cloning that kind of functionality - m
262.
by slurry 14y ago
I'd be interested to know of examples where sustained mild deflation has been accompanied by steadily high economic growth and steadily low unemployment.
263.
by slurry 14y ago
> Personally, I don't consider mild deflation to be any worse than mild inflation. A priori this sounds reasonable. But would you rather live/invest in 1990s Japan (mild deflation) or 1990s America (mild inflation)? Mild deflation is ab
264.
by slurry 14y ago
This is roughly the scenario under which Gresham's Law was discovered. Long story short: the inflationary currency wins.
265.
by slurry 14y ago
It's easy (and legitimate) to blame the failure of Hurd on poor design and management choices. I think it's also instructive, though, to observe how no "better than Unix" project has really attained any success. Some of them have delivere
266.
by slurry 14y ago
Not very different, since we're basically doing microkernel-y things anyway using various kinds of virtualization. It would probably be more elegant to just run Hurd or whatever instead of for example running multiple JVMs on top of multipl
267.
by slurry 14y ago
Really? You'd think the generation that let World War I happen, or the many generations that practiced lynching as not merely a means of punishment but a form of entertainment, or the generation that thought Andrew Jackson's bank policy was
268.
by slurry 14y ago
> I support United States policies that move in the direction of east Asian rather than western European patterns of government spending and social welfare, putting more of the investment in future generations back in the hands of famil
269.
by slurry 14y ago
It seems to me that they are, in fact, using "statically-typed, compiled system language[s] for their scripting efforts" - that is in fact what people are doing with server-side Java, Scala and C#, not to mention Java/Dalvik and Objective-C