wduquette

5 ms·

31.
by wduquette 3mo ago
On the contrary, language code is what is "authored". The authoring tools are the IDEs, editors, compilers, etc. that we use to produce the executable application.
32.
by wduquette 3mo ago
At least not automatically. From an algorithmic standpoint it seems likely to be undecidable. But let us not look too closely at what was really a throwaway remark.
33.
by wduquette 3mo ago
Kurt Godel says that you are correct.
34.
by wduquette 3mo ago
A stated goal of the API is to have "low ceremony" when reading arbitrary JSON files. I agree the JSON creation API looks pretty clunky, but the parsing API looks fairly simple.
35.
by wduquette 3mo ago
And things I missed the first time through.
36.
by wduquette 3mo ago
We used to call this “middleware”, that which sits between the client and the server.
37.
by wduquette 3mo ago
Fascinating. When I was a kid and was having difficulty with some task, my grandfather would say, "You didn't hold your mouth right." Many years later, I realized that he was talking about tacit knowledge (and probably most s
38.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Re: Java classes called "SimpleFoo": that's usually because `Foo` is an abstract class or interface, and `SimpleFoo` is the version you actually use most of the time, unless you absolutely have to implement a `MyReallyComplex
39.
by wduquette 4mo ago
I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter. Things tarnish. New things pop up to rep
40.
by wduquette 4mo ago
And then, along with economic bubbles you also get moral panics. Seen a bunch of those in my time as well. It's a similar thing.
41.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Yes, but the term "Bubble" comes from the South Sea Bubble.
42.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Excellent book. The high point for me was the enterprising fellow who set up a stall in London during the South Sea Bubble (the original bubble!), allowing people to invest in "An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what
43.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Yes, that’s what we had too. I loved that machine. What was the incantation? 104799L, or something like that?
44.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Yes. It brings the experience of playing a text adventure to writing a text adventure.
45.
by wduquette 4mo ago
I've spent time with various versions of Inform, and bounced off of Inform 7 fairly hard, for the same reasons that I bounced off of AppleScript years ago: it's a read-only language. Which is to say, the English phrases you use
46.
by wduquette 4mo ago
Heathkit sold an LSI-11 as a kit; my father built one in the mid-70's. I learned BASIC, a bit of Fortran, a bit of PDP-11 assembler, and Pascal on that machine. We started with paper type, and eventually moved up to dual 8" floppi
47.
by wduquette 5mo ago
I've been a WordPress user for years. I don't want integrated AI. Sure hope I'll be able to ignore it.
48.
by wduquette 5mo ago
You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.
49.
by wduquette 5mo ago
"You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools." I've long regarded myself as more a master craftsman tha
50.
by wduquette 5mo ago
Yes, the Volcano View. We planned to add a new area just past it, but as I say we ran out of memory. I've no idea where the version we started with would fall in the family tree, but this would have been ~1979, and the OS was HT-11, H
51.
by wduquette 5mo ago
We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), y
52.
by wduquette 5mo ago
I had an instructor require these in a programming class in the early 80's. I've never seen them used in practice.
53.
by wduquette 6mo ago
I know that to be true because the other group members talked about it with my daughter, and were honestly surprised at how much difference not using AI made. She has another group member who’s a slacker. But not all of them.
54.
by wduquette 6mo ago
Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
55.
by wduquette 6mo ago
Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.
56.
by wduquette 6mo ago
My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions. If you use AI t
57.
by wduquette 6mo ago
Obligatory reference to Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: a form of water ice that freezes at a high temperature.
58.
by wduquette 6mo ago
I'd add Owen Lattimore's Desert Road to Turkestan : Lattimore traveled through the Central Asian deserts with a camel caravan in the 1930's, one of few westerner's ever to do so; and also Richard Hopkirk's Foreign
59.
by wduquette 6mo ago
And in addition, the time you spend making a component work properly is absolutely a function of its complexity. Once you get it right, package it up neatly with a clean interface and a nice box, and leave it alone. Where "getting it
60.
by wduquette 6mo ago
Right. This would conflate, e.g., the British and American editions of books published in both countries in the same year; and they are frequently different, as might be different editions of a book published in the same year.

More ›