stiff

22 ms·

151.
by stiff 13y ago
That's because you clearly are unable to read at all.
152.
by stiff 13y ago
If you are only interested in the hard facts, sure, but then most popular science books and even some textbooks are not much better either, in some sense I wish I could unread some of the stuff I read as a youngster about complex numbers, z
153.
by stiff 13y ago
Looks like a random sampling. My personal favourites: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman Little Dieter Needs to Fly by Werner Herzog
154.
by stiff 13y ago
In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month _one of that movement's leaders_, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.
155.
by stiff 13y ago
The "Unix Programming Environment" book by Kernighan and Pike is still the best source for a UNIX command line "course". I love the elegance of this book, I learned most of what is in it already by "osmosis" be
156.
by stiff 13y ago
Papa Dijkstra wants to have a word with you: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831....
157.
by stiff 13y ago
I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache
158.
by stiff 13y ago
The bulk of the formal CS theory is much more related to the imperative model than it is to the functional one, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024731
159.
by stiff 13y ago
And you don't see value in the core sequence being more deeply interconnected?
160.
by stiff 13y ago
The point is that the later courses in CS curriculum depend much more on a good understanding of the imperative model and the issues that first arose in programming early Von Neumann computers, than they depend on understanding functional p
161.
by stiff 13y ago
It's trivially easy to write perfectly valid looking Haskell programs that are abysmally slow because of how they are actually executed, and since the reason for this can't be explained at a level of abstraction of such a course,
162.
by stiff 13y ago
Knowing the single fact that a language is ultimately a piece of software is different from having an intrinsic understanding that each high level construct has to be somehow translated to what the computer can do. Everyone learns the fact
163.
by stiff 13y ago
To me there seems to be something wrong with using as the first language something that depends on a very, very complicated runtime and execution model to run on the hardware we currently are using. This way people end up viewing programmin
164.
by stiff 13y ago
I think there is more to learn here about engineering mistakes than about Go: - Why pick Go for this project in the first place? Those days the biggest productivity difference that arises from language choice comes from the availability of
165.
by stiff 13y ago
None of those quotes are derogatory toward Feynman, and I don't see how Wolfram being pleased by Feynman liking his idea says anything about Wolframs ego. In fact, this was very modest for Wolfram standards, and a much more interesting
166.
by stiff 13y ago
Notebookcheck has a test of this laptop: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-XPS-13-Ultrabook-La... I love their review because they go into very much detail and some of the information is hard to found elsewhere, like
167.
by stiff 13y ago
What I meant by the "space of possible languages" is the set of design choices involved in making a programming language, and this obviously includes deciding on the imperative, logical or functional (or yet another) paradigm. A g
168.
by stiff 13y ago
I didn't claim those are identical, but you are cherry-picking facts, what about: - syntax (curly braces, star for pointers and dereferencing, ampersand for getting the address etc., cleaned up for faster parsing and with some genuinel
169.
by stiff 13y ago
Once you understand the space of possible programming languages you can often learn a new one in just a week or two, I learnt Go over the last two weeks and it is so similar to C there wasn't much friction involved and I am already get
170.
by stiff 13y ago
What repels me is the kind of approach taken by this Rozanski & Woods book. It's like a 500 pages of authors philosophy of software, and whether all that is of any use is completely uncertain. There is not much of a widely establis
171.
by stiff 13y ago
Programs are powerful because of concepts. Whether or not you will be able to build a good 3d engine rests much more on the fact whether you know or able to invent a concept of a vector and have it guide all your future coding than it rests
172.
by stiff 13y ago
The point is that how emacs is broken down in modules is one of the least important things about emacs. I can draw a block diagram without a "software architecture" course, thank you. In software engineering, there are of minor us
173.
by stiff 13y ago
It is actively harmful to teach students that software architecture is something that somehow arises from diagrams or that those kinds of silly pictures capture anything important about it. Powerful architectures come out of powerful ideas
174.
by stiff 13y ago
Stallman doesn't have much influence on Emacs development itself anymore, but Emacs is a GNU project, Stallman is still the head of GNU, and a move to another VCS would be a major organizational change. I too wish he would be less hard
175.
by stiff 13y ago
I think this is more inertia than anything else. It is pretty obvious that Stallman isn't the easiest person to talk to, but he has consistently put huge amount of efforts into GNU for lots of years, and, whatever he did as the maintai
176.
by stiff 13y ago
FWIW, just a few days ago I was browsing through the Emacs Bzr repository - after a full bzr clone, that took ridiculously long as well, a simple bzr blame takes 40-60 seconds to execute locally, and I have an SSD drive, four-core intel i7
177.
by stiff 13y ago
I am talking about one of two typical situations: either you want to commit all your changes to a single branch, but in more than one commit, or, you want to distribute your working directory changes between two different branches. In the f
178.
by stiff 13y ago
This seems to boil down to a criticism of the staging area, so it is strange its purpose is never clearly explained in the paper. The reason why the staging area exists, is, I think, that for larger teams working long term on a code-base, i
179.
by stiff 13y ago
So drones are good because they are less bad?
180.
by stiff 13y ago
You can write 2.days().from_now() in almost any OO language which allows extending primitive types, so it isn't really very impressive. There are lots of example of languages with very powerful means of abstraction / composition a

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