valw

12 ms·

61.
by valw 7y ago
> The most telling sign is how many FP languages are in existence today. If it was such a good thing we wouldn't need them all. This is a silly argument. FP means only first-class functions and immutable values, and the vast majorit
62.
by valw 7y ago
One thing that's nice with Datomic (don't know about Eva, but probably the same) is that syncing data to other stores is straightforward, thanks in particular to the the easy change detection.
63.
by valw 7y ago
> Since Clojure has no statistics / ML ecosystem afaik, I am not sure why you mention it. I mentioned it to illustrate my point, that semantics and other aspects matter much more than syntax in many cases. (Btw Clojure does have a M
64.
by valw 7y ago
> The matlab style syntaxt is infinitly better for ML, stats and math. Syntax is a secondary concern for all but short-term, small-scale programming. When it comes to making scalable software systems (scalable in every sense of the term,
65.
by valw 7y ago
If people wonder, this is NOT the same notion of 'simplicity' at all than in the classic 'Simple Made Easy' talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ I think a more relevant t
66.
by valw 7y ago
Yeah, I was saying this to add to what you said, not to disagree with you - sorry if I didn't make that very clear. I on the same quest as you are.
67.
by valw 7y ago
> f' off about calling people "the most severe cause of climate change" for eating a beef sandwich without considering anything else. It's unhelpful, provocative, and completely incorrect. That's an entire mischa
68.
by valw 7y ago
> With that said, I don't emit that much (all things considered) Cool, how much? IIRC, sustainability would require an individual average below 2 teqCO2/year. > Besides, would money not be better spent curing cancer? Look at
69.
by valw 7y ago
> I've seen numerous promising business ideas to capture carbon and convert it into useful materials; I think it's more feasible to do that than to force veganism on every one. Yeah, we've all seen them - they make for fan
70.
by valw 7y ago
Yes I'm sure - unfortunately most of my references are French, so I don't think it's useful to share them here. I do agree with the sad statement that we're generally lacking a scientifically rigorous and pragmatic leade
71.
by valw 7y ago
> At some point, pulling energy out of thin air will end up cheaper than doing expensive drilling operations. A lot of people seem to believe that abundant clean energy is a sufficient solution for our environmental problems. A huge part
72.
by valw 7y ago
Regardless of the controversy on the risks of nuclear energy, don't overestimate it's potential. We simply can't build nuclear plants everywhere we need them. We still mostly need a reduction in energy consumption and defores
73.
by valw 7y ago
Careful: having the entire world adopt the living standards of Western countries is about the best way to guarantee that climate change makes the planet inhabitable by 2100.
74.
by valw 7y ago
> This only works if we are sure that the forest will stay a forest for several hundreds of thousands of year You do realize that carbon sequestrated in a forest 100ks of years is prevented from contributed to global warming during all t
75.
by valw 7y ago
Have you considered that once they're dead, they stop farting? Methane counts too!
76.
by valw 7y ago
Climate change requires a call to arms for everyone. Many scientific experts don't believe that enhanced technology can be the main solution. True, technology can be a part of the solution, but changing our values and life habits are m
77.
by valw 7y ago
You seem to imply that planting trees cannot durably decrease the CO2 levels in the atmosphere; if so, your reasoning and conclusion are incorrect. Increasing the biomass of trees (e.g, growing a new forest) does reduce the CO2 levels; true
78.
by valw 7y ago
Another reason might be the "cultural" aspects of Clojure, and their impacts on its ecosystem - in particular simplicity and stability are paramount, whereas the Elixir ecosystem seems to put more emphasis on immediate ease of use
79.
by valw 7y ago
As a Frenchman, can confirm that the French homonym to 'bit' is the english homonym to 'Coq' ;)
80.
by valw 7y ago
Then I might have misunderstood what you meant by "integer-arithmetic recurrence"; my understanding of it was that it was the traditional recursive implementation of Fibonacci, which has much worse complexity than matrix exponenti
81.
by valw 7y ago
A huge 3rd category of programmers is entirely missing: those that don't care about abstraction at all, be it mathematical or linguistic. I think the priority for our industry is to get those on board, then we can discuss what tools
82.
by valw 7y ago
> If you want precise results for large sizes, then the integer-arithmetic recurrence is faster than computing the square root of 5 to very high precision and raising it to the nth power. Know what's even faster? Exponentiating a 2x
83.
by valw 7y ago
You might be interested in the works of Gérard Huet! http://gallium.inria.fr/~huet/PUBLIC/FSCD16.pdf
84.
by valw 7y ago
Interesting! In supdate the transform would be: {:a {2 inc}}
85.
by valw 7y ago
As the author, I fully agree with this description! The cost of abstraction should not be ignored, and that's why a lib like supdate sometimes makes sense before reaching out to Specter, lenses etc. (although I love those too!)
86.
by valw 7y ago
Any comparison of languages in the form "language X is generally better than language Y" with no additional project context or problem domain is going to be an extremely naive one, to the point it's not relevant to anyone hav
87.
by valw 7y ago
Nice article, it would have been nice to add a word or two about manifold embedding though.
88.
by valw 8y ago
I'd take the 'Elementary' qualifier with a grain of salt here :) - there are more elementary notions of topology (such as point-set topology, continuity, connectedness, compactness etc.) that can already get you pretty far in
89.
by valw 8y ago
I've had a relatively high degree of proficiency with other languages by several accounts, including Java, Scala, and JavaScript. Yet I've observed empirically that I am usually much more productive in Clojure for the sort of prog
90.
by valw 8y ago
STOP HAVING UNNUANCED OPINIONS about programming, they don't work and waste everybody's time. Now be mindful of the work you're doing, and be careful about the tradeoffs of your tools.

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