stevedonovan

11 ms·

61.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
I was a SciTE diehard but Geany is just better designed. It understands Rust right out of the box (and well enough to mostly satisfy my needs - 'jump to symbol' being about 80% correct). Does a nice dark theme as well. Yes, IDEA R
62.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Contrast with Rust references, which are very much their own type (they more resemble pointers in their behaviour, with explicit dereferencing and address-of needed). As a C++ dev, this took some getting used to! But I never was a fan of ho
63.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Yes - there is definitely a hierarchy of difficulty: user code, library, macros, full syntax extension. The trouble is that designing new languages takes a lot of _taste_ and experience. We don't know the full domain, so DSLs tend to h
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Consider Rust - new _stable_ language release every six weeks. Debian would have puppies! However, having the 'rustup' tool available in the repos would work fine to bootstrap Rust environment. PS: plus, very explicit goal of Carg
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Consider the thermal Plutonium power sources that have been sent on outer Solar System missions. One of those crashing is a much more serious problem than a new U-235 reactor, since Plutonium is very toxic.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Well, we already have a christmas tree colour issue. I think rustc could do better here - check whether types differ by only '&' and put out a hint. That is, by adding/removing &, could the error have been resolved?
67.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Oh yes - there will be some explicit type like std::vec::Vec<&std::string::String> in the error and that all-important '&' gets lost in the verbosity. Definitely necessary to learn to see the needle in that haystack.
68.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Yes, the compiler is a permanent construction zone and there can only be so many projects on site, let alone workers. So this feels like something that _should_ be doable outside the compiler, but using its metadata. (BTW, "rustc --exp
69.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
The error messages are indeed _mostly_ marvelous (and there's an ongoing effort to make them even more marvelous). Often working with `rustc` feels like pair programming for introverts. But here's a question: `rustc` often gives _
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'The difficulty is the point': teaching students how to really read(theguardian.com)
25 points by stevedonovan 9y ago|3 comments
71.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Discussion about frameworks and SPA focuses on developer convenience, but it's necessary to look at user happiness. Is the bloat of the modern web a necessary consequence of big frameworks or a result of incompetence? That is, are peop
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
It's a genuinely hard problem. There are proposals for Rust, but nothing actionable. Catching up with all the other cool things takes precedence. (side-note: Rust dodged the problem by using macros. As a C++ guy, I was a little uneasy
73.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Agreed, except for one thing - it works best when a build-tool language is mostly used declaratively, except for those little cases when you need imperative as well. I had great fun building Lake (build tool in Lua)
74.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Contrast with Lua: equally possible to do monkey-patching, but it's considered unclean and confusing to do it in Lua, at least among the community. Generally, there is a thing we could call the 'magic budget' and it's im
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Heh, you get to see your desktop? I've usually got so much up that I can't see it. I like boring XFCE for that reason.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Similar idea, but done in C: Hisham 'htop' Mohammed's dit editor. Use it for all my quick-in-out edits.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Yes, compare to LuaJIT. On a good day, it can bite C's shiny metal ass, but consistent and reliable application performance requires intimate knowledge of those performance cliffs.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Classical Greek civilization was the high point of the 'city-state', but the poleis could only survive if there was no strong nation-state messing around with them. They rallied together to prevent Persia moving Westwards, but sim
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
I had to collaborate with some distinguished middle-aged scientists, and Fortran is what they spoke. And given how 'terrible' the code was, I developed great respect for their intellect - how they were able to get such results out
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
For my sins, I look after a Polymer 0.8 based site left to me by a Chrome enthusiast. It is starting to break in mysterious ways. Not looking forward to the upgrade path...
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Good point, but then perhaps the solution is some minimal theming? Good use of a menu item ;)
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Anything can have a REPL - I did one for C++ called UnderC. Unfortunately, a technological dead end and some of the worst Bison on the planet. But it was surprisingly pleasant to use C++ in a interactive way and I wrote a C++ book working f
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
I have to agree about Java, but hundreds of thousands of people seem to be happy using Python REPL, even if just to discover an API. At least it _does_ have a literal syntax for things like maps.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Yes, Rust would be seriously irritating without try! (and its short friend the question mark operator). So I feel the pain of gophers here.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
It's a bit of a cats and dogs problem - there's mutual incomprehension. An introvert's nightmare is when the dogs judge the cat show - e.g. modern justifications for open-plan working environments.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
That's an amateur hour mistake on their part, frankly. I hope they have a 'switch color off' flag.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
There are other reasons to worry about GMOs, like agriculture dominated by the agenda of a few big multinationals. It would be sad if membership of the club of reason would be determined by simplistic rules like 'approves of GMO wholeh
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
Well, there's a smart fellow called Mike Pall who would like to race Lua against JavaScript for you. Plus, the very best VMs are Java.
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by stevedonovan 9y ago
For a full rebuild, that's a reasonable C++ build time for a project of this size. But full rebuilds are not representative, if the project is composed of many independent compilation units. The compilation unit in Rust is the crate, w
90.
by stevedonovan 9y ago
Rust (and Go) present an interesting challenge to people who have cargo-culted object-orientation. In Rust, data is dumb, and traits (aka 'interfaces') provide meaning. So you can go polymorphic with 'trait objects' or m

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