willtim

35 ms·

331.
by willtim 7y ago
Quoting the Emacs web site: "To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will
332.
by willtim 7y ago
I've been working on my own encrypted and de-duplicated backup solution using libsodium. It's early days and progress is slow with limited spare time, but it works well enough for my own use already. I wanted to avoid any closed s
333.
by willtim 7y ago
I respect this position, but we must also recognise that it makes Go less of a general purpose language (as is often claimed) and more a domain-specific language (with the domain being systems/network programming).
334.
by willtim 7y ago
Why not allow call-by-name parameters to functions? That would enable library authors to build whatever error handling conveniences they wanted. This feature dates all the way back to ALGOL-60.
335.
by willtim 7y ago
Sure the entire input list will need to be consumed, but not every element of the output will need to be determined if we are only taking the top 10. Laziness enables many compositions to work efficiently, whereas with a strict language, yo
336.
by willtim 7y ago
This was probably the theory behind their decisions. While I agree that the lack of expressiveness might discourage some incidental complexity, for example premature or unecessary abstractions, the inherent complexity of a problem will rema
337.
by willtim 7y ago
Sounds like you perhaps have experience of dynamically-typed languages? Haskell is statically typed, compiled, has a scalable multi-threaded runtime, a very good FFI; and was designed around the notion that large programs should be built by
338.
by willtim 7y ago
It's around 10 dollars, but then I have less than 1 TB. I recently starting backing up my RAW files remotely, so this number is set to increase significantly (!) I am very interested in S3 alternatives. I haven't looked at the Am
339.
by willtim 7y ago
I disagree with the author's explanation as to why all questions are algorithmic. I suspect the real reason is due to the US dominance in tech and the popularity of algorithmics in US academia. Indeed the parts of computer science to d
340.
by willtim 7y ago
A huge shame. I backup my optical media to S3, but I also use M-DISC "mineral discs" which hopefully will last much longer. Sadly they were not available back then.
341.
by willtim 7y ago
Yes, but it's still a great pity, as Haskell, a descendent of ML (the "meta-language") is a suberb fit for writing a compiler.
342.
by willtim 7y ago
It depends entirely on whether the big project still has an elegant and complete formal grammar. Hand-rolled parsers are only common in industrial languages because many have grown to be far too complex and ad-hoc, requiring e.g. additional
343.
by willtim 7y ago
Sounds like he (edit: or more accurately, the university) has hasn't taught them enough functional programming and Haskell.
344.
by willtim 7y ago
I'm a Haskeller, but it's great to see OCaml improving significantly with every release. It's a win for typed functional programming in general.
345.
by willtim 7y ago
My company proxy kept triggering endless Google captcha games. I switched to DuckDuckGo.
346.
by willtim 7y ago
I'm not sure there is consensus that Mars is much more likely to have had life. As the article states, Venus had liquid water for 3 billion years versus 400 million for Mars.
347.
by willtim 7y ago
Using C# as an example, foreach and IEnumerable are baked into the language as is try/catch and more recently Async/Await. These are all just library functions in Haskell and often more general (e.g. forM in Haskell works for any
348.
by willtim 7y ago
> if you see Spring as existing to correct issues with the underlying Java language, then I'm highly skeptical that you've ever had meaningful experience with either one. Let's please avoid personal attacks if at all possi
349.
by willtim 7y ago
Firefox on mobile has improved enormously since Quantum. It works well enough to ditch Chrome.
350.
by willtim 7y ago
Yes it seems strange to me that a Java developer is willing to learn Spring, a massive ad-hoc framework which exists in part because of Java's weaknesses, rather than functional programming and Clojure (a lifelong skill that will benef
351.
by willtim 7y ago
> Many static languages have no dynamic types, I think that's worse. I can't think of a static language that doesn't support a dynamic type, it's just that most require explicit casts or unpacking to use with existin
352.
by willtim 7y ago
From a type-theoretic point of view, Python is unityped: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/dynamic-lan... Python has a lot of merit as an easy to use language, a modern BASIC, but "strongl
353.
by willtim 7y ago
Hopefully carefully considered and well-designed technology will prevail. In this industry we are often too eager to endorse the first-mover as the standard.
354.
by willtim 7y ago
It's easy to forgot the benefits of laziness: http://augustss.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-ev... Laziness is a good default for declarative programming. Nix from NixOS is an example of a recent
355.
by willtim 7y ago
History is littered with purpose built languages and notation for mathematics, logic, music and law etc. A language guides (or limits) one's thoughts, offering a particular set of abstractions. Functional programming is very close to l
356.
by willtim 7y ago
By "major options", I guess you mean popular/mainstream options?
357.
by willtim 7y ago
Haskell is an excellent example of a community-driven language. It's more mature and advanced than most commercial offerings too, offering a superior type system, fast and efficient executables, lightweight fiber concurrency, software
358.
by willtim 7y ago
Intel certainly does not know how to build a secure CPU.
359.
by willtim 7y ago
> That's true (and will be addressed) Glad to hear it! It's probably the biggest issue trying to do functional programming on the JVM. > There is no difficulty supporting that. In fact, the Java language is about to get that
360.
by willtim 7y ago
> What are the restrictions on F# that were posed by them? It does make it harder to add features to the language that do not map to the current reified "generics" spec, for example higher-kinded polymorphic types. Of course, t

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