stiff

17 ms·

91.
by stiff 12y ago
If you describe yourself as an "ambitious 19 year old" (and ambition by itself is not necessarily a virtue) and if you tie your happiness to doing "something great", you are likely in for a very unhappy life. Everything
92.
by stiff 12y ago
Every occasion is good to start a flame war, isn't it?
93.
by stiff 12y ago
There are lots of papers, dating back to the 1970s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/publications/date/algprog.... Actually Dijkstra also was a proponent of deriving programs, it's discussed in his &quo
94.
by stiff 12y ago
I have specifically mentioned two such attempts.
95.
by stiff 12y ago
Computers are formal systems as much as an alternating electrical current is a complex number, same with programming languages, even though both programming languages and formal systems can be viewed as abstract entities. Technically speaki
96.
by stiff 12y ago
It is funny how this paper like the writings of Dijkstra is widely cherished, while its attitude and conclusions simultaneously are completely ignored. Seems to me that people simply really like to complain about the current state of the ma
97.
by stiff 12y ago
You frequently have packages that are named after generic nouns, like time, host, file etc. There are many contexts where this same generic name makes for the best variable name: clear, short, and easy to type: func ReadFile(filename St
98.
by stiff 12y ago
I don't think simply having a separate symbol table for packages and a separate one for types and variables would hurt much, and I hate writing things like aList := list.New(). Having said this, I know many of those things are purporte
99.
by stiff 12y ago
There is something to your description. I use Go sometimes, for pragmatic reasons, when I need more performance than I can get from Python or Ruby, but boy is it a ugly language! There are just tens of little ugly things Go does and the res
100.
by stiff 12y ago
Might be it's not in the blog post, but he gave a keynote at RailsConf about this and that's pretty much what he said: http://www.justin.tv/confreaks/b/522089408 http://www.justin.tv/conf
101.
by stiff 12y ago
That’s inaccurate and unfair. Testability is useful precisely because it’s an effective, tangible proxy for other properties of software that are harder to anticipate or recognise: things like modularity, composability, reusability and so
102.
by stiff 12y ago
Take a task of some inherent complexity but that can still be coded in 10-20 pages of code or less, create one solution, and then try out various different versions of it, or even complete rewrites, changing coding style, decomposition into
103.
by stiff 12y ago
The kind of "architecture" that you are talking about that was often postulated under the banners of "Single Responsibility Principle" (a poor rule of thumb in fact) and "design for testability", that results i
104.
by stiff 12y ago
It may still run on Windows, just on top of a POSIX compatibility layer, no?
105.
by stiff 12y ago
Among the many texts almost the only one I really liked and learnt from is Courant's "Differential and Integral calculus" and the newer edition "Introduction to Calculus and Analysis". It doesn't do the typical
106.
by stiff 12y ago
Oh, you do use calculus, at least in the notes, actually touching on the topics I mentioned, so it's a good illustration. For example in the chapters about generating functions and on sums and asymptotics: http://ocw.mit.edu
107.
by stiff 12y ago
This does not seem very informed, starting from the false premise in the question up to the random concepts listed in the answers. Calculus is actually important for Computer Science, it's actually important for everything, it's w
108.
by stiff 12y ago
If you are serious about programming and have the resources to go to a university for a CS degree program by all means do so, there is a hardly a better way to get at the same time: A) broad overview of the existing knowledge related to com
109.
by stiff 12y ago
I think you get more benefit from reading code if you study something very close to what you are working on yourself, something in the same domain, in the same framework perhaps, or at least in the same programming language, at best somethi
110.
by stiff 12y ago
This is not an argument, just an attractive narrative for what boils down to a rejection of the possiblity of a better programming language reducing bug rates without negative side effects outweighing the benefits - I don't think you w
111.
by stiff 12y ago
You can't really draw a hard line between administration and development, in the end you are just building a system and the more you know about it from all angles the better design decisions you can make and the easier it is to fix iss
112.
by stiff 13y ago
Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" is available online as a series of video lectures: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30
113.
by stiff 13y ago
The only book on mathematics actually reassembling SICP I found is "What is mathematics?" by Richard Courant. I have read it after reading SICP, largely because I very much liked some of the more mathematical fragments in SICP, an
114.
by stiff 13y ago
I know nothing about crypto, but I found comparing both codebases at a high level very instructive from a pure software engineering / project management standpoint: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/securit
115.
by stiff 13y ago
He has done tons of work of spreading a very positive message distilling the essence of Buddhist teachings and freeing it from what we know today is superstition. His books, unlike most books in this genre, are almost completely free of &qu
116.
by stiff 13y ago
Even if you work on a commercial project, where there is a reasonably stable core team, people just committing stuff, even if it's in itself pretty good stuff, won't result in good overall code quality. You need to have a systemat
117.
by stiff 13y ago
I had some problems expressing what bothers me clearly and edited the comment heavily, perhaps it makes more sense now. You're right it is not that surprising, but it's still disappointing that even the most rudimentary best pract
118.
by stiff 13y ago
It is surprising that a project that is quite mission critical is completely at the bottom of the scale when it comes to how much the development process is oriented toward reliability. There are no systematic unit tests, no systematic docu
119.
by stiff 13y ago
I never understood why you would use YAML for storing settings. In fact, I observed that because of YAML devs are less likely to extract things into configuration settings, especially adding a setting seems to involve a manual server restar
120.
by stiff 13y ago
No doubt V8 is much more mature than MRI, I think some language considerations do still apply though, JavaScript doesn't have method_missing, problem #5 doesn't apply, I guess there is more.

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