smarks

9 ms·

31.
by smarks 2y ago
Cool! Yes, that’s been our experience in Java as well. The randomized order of unmodifiable Set and Map (from `Set.of` and `Map.of`) have enabled us to make optimizations to the internals mostly with impunity. We’ve done so twice since thei
32.
by smarks 2y ago
(from Feb 2021) Some of the JDK's unmodifiable collections, such as those from `Set.of()` and `Map.of()`, also randomize iteration order. At the time they were added, Go and Python also randomized iteration order. However, more recentl
33.
by smarks 2y ago
Note the date line on the article: Published on Sunday, January 15, 01989 • 35 years, 7 months ago Specifically, the five-digit year! Also the explicit listing of the age of the article. Most sites have a “human readable” or “fri
34.
by smarks 2y ago
Wow, pretty amazing. I remember playing this game after somebody ported it to Wang 2200 BASIC sometime in the mid 1970s. I didn't figure out how to land it myself, but I remember being shown the technique of coasting for the first seve
35.
by smarks 2y ago
Sun veteran here. There was undoubtedly a "cool" factor to Sun in the 1980s and 1990s which I and a bunch of other people bought into. It had burned off by the mid 2000s though after the dot-com bust and wave after wave of layoffs
36.
by smarks 2y ago
In the thread below his preview post, Mashey added the following (edited for typos): "When I lead tours of Computer History Museum, I usually say there were 3 giants in the early decades of computer architecture: Gene Amdhal - mainfram
37.
by smarks 2y ago
Here’s a link to Mashey’s post on mstdn: https://mstdn.social/@JohnMashey/112477330642538953 It’s short enough that I’ll quote it here. “I am very sad to report death May 17 at age 89 of Gordon Bell, famous computer p
38.
by smarks 2y ago
I CAN HAZ DOS ATTAK
39.
by smarks 3y ago
Does it have an option to park the heads before shutting down?
40.
by smarks 3y ago
"Whoa! Stuart blew his air sac!"
41.
by smarks 3y ago
Clearly, those are virtual hands.
42.
by smarks 3y ago
The link to the video showing how to unwrap an onigiri was very helpful! I’ve encountered that wrapping before but I found it confusing. (I don’t read Japanese and I couldn’t figure it out from the diagrams.)
43.
by smarks 3y ago
Every language has its zealots. What I like about this quote is that it embodies Stroustrup’s personal attitude. He’s ultimately pragmatic. Nothing can be perfect — including C++ by his own admission. It’s aligned well with his other writin
44.
by smarks 3y ago
“C++ is a language, not a religion.” I swear Stroustrup said this at the beginning of his EE380 (CS Colloquium) talk at Stanford around 1986. At the time we (grad students) were all C programmers and we were sure that C was the best languag
45.
by smarks 3y ago
This series of puns is macron me ill.
46.
by smarks 3y ago
Yep. And 2^20 bytes of unreliable storage is a mebibyte.
47.
by smarks 3y ago
So did you take the PowerBuilder job or the Fortran job? (Nice story, BTW, thanks.)
48.
Markmail.org has been shut down
6 points by smarks 3y ago|1 comments
49.
by smarks 3y ago
Thanks for mentioning Joe Darcy. He continues to work on the JDK at Oracle and occasionally works on numerics issues. Notable for this discussion, he recently updated the Java specifications for JDK 17 to remove non-strict FP semantics (whi
50.
by smarks 3y ago
The model of a Java String, as presented via the API, is as an array of 16-bit unsigned integers. Strings use a UTF-16-like encoding to represent non-BMP Unicode characters. The main difference from UTF-16 is that illegal sequences of 16-
51.
by smarks 3y ago
Everybody kills JavaScript on their first trip.
52.
by smarks 3y ago
> Wut? It sounds like you're talking more about dip pens than fountain pens? No. These things don't happen all the time with fountain pens, but they can happen much more frequently than with ball point pens.
53.
by smarks 3y ago
The practical tradeoffs all cut against fountain pens: they run out of ink quickly, they dry out quickly, the ink smudges until it dries, the ink will run or be erased if the paper gets wet, they are very sensitive to the quality of paper,
54.
by smarks 3y ago
Thanks for raising this issue. What you describe as "local theories" (I'd say "mental model" but I think we're talking about the same thing) is quite important. We expect beginners to come up with erroneous mod
55.
by smarks 4y ago
Yes. Absolutely. One of my favorites is this video that shows a robot she built to argue with people on <strike>the Internet</strike> Hacker News. (7 seconds) https://youtu.be/PJiRijiLwbQ
56.
by smarks 4y ago
Click on the link to skip the delay.
57.
by smarks 4y ago
The model of a String, internal to the JVM, as manifested in the `java.lang.String` API, is still UTF-16-like. The internal representation has changed to be either UTF-16-like or Latin-1. JEP 254 didn't change the API. This is invi
58.
by smarks 4y ago
Internally, the model of a String is UTF-16-like, a sequence of unsigned 16-bit `char` values. However, it's not strictly UTF-16 because a Java String permits unpaired surrogates and invalid code points. Externally, Java has historical
59.
by smarks 4y ago
Yes, this. The files in the source repo are 99.9% ASCII. Anything that's not ASCII should be encoded in UTF-8 instead of some other encoding. The mailing list discussion refers to some issues we've had where characters in Shift-JI
60.
by smarks 4y ago
Lots of useful history. The bug in question has a number in the 8,000,000 range, but that doesn't mean there are 8M bugs. The bug numbering was carried over from the old Sun-internal bug database. That bug database was shared across a

More ›