willtim

31 ms·

361.
by willtim 7y ago
I was not comparing Flash to the JavaScript of the era, just pointing out that, as an end user, Flash didn't seem "fast" to me (on Linux, Android and OSX). Performance on a desktop-class CPU is also only one metric. Flash was
362.
by willtim 7y ago
All good points. But I'm still struggling with the idea of using the word "fast" to describe a technology that brought a 2GHz GPU-accelerated machine to its knees with Scrabble. Perhaps "sucked less than JavaScript"
363.
by willtim 7y ago
Which bit was fast? My wife's MacBook sounded like a jet engine whenever she would play the Facebook flash-based Scrabble. Eventually the machine died of fan failure and I had to spend an entire afternoon doing brain surgery on it. I w
364.
by willtim 7y ago
Bazel has not "been stable for years", perhaps you are thinking of "Blaze"? Bazel is full of brand new code and recent bugs (such as not releasing file handles) suggest it is not yet fully ready for mass adoption.
365.
by willtim 7y ago
Google the "Out of the Tar Pit" paper by Moseley and Marks. After incidental complexity, Accidental complexity is the all remaining stuff. It's the complexity you wouldn't have to deal with in an ideal perfect world. For
366.
by willtim 7y ago
It's one of my all-time favourites too. The Criterion Collection edition I believe contains the final directors cut. The ending is superb, it beggars belief that Hollywood tried to butcher it.
367.
by willtim 7y ago
Yes I like Dhall, I also had a go at my own one a while ago: https://github.com/willtim/Expresso
368.
by willtim 7y ago
In my opinion, a statically typed config file would be preferable.
369.
by willtim 8y ago
Congratulations and a huge thank you to all those involved! Emacs is a truly remarkable piece of software. I started using it for text editing over 20 years ago, now I use it pretty much as an operating system!
370.
by willtim 8y ago
IMHO the windows phone live tiles made the static iPhone icons look very dated (they are essentially unchanged from 1980's NeXTStep). Even now I believe the iPhone clock and calendar icons require privileged hacks to show the correct d
371.
by willtim 8y ago
It's certainly not as readable as the Haskell version, despite the claim to the contrary in the comments. But it's nice to see them supporting this style of programming.
372.
by willtim 8y ago
A hammer isn't strictly better than a rock, it costs a lot more money/resources to obtain :)
373.
by willtim 8y ago
> Hmmmm, I wonder how a subscription can cause side effects? A subscription is a side effect.
374.
by willtim 8y ago
IIRC they are essentially Monads, but someone decided that was too scary a name. The result is confusion for experienced programmers, ironically the ones more likely to use F# (!)
375.
by willtim 8y ago
The monad does enable imperative programming in Haskell, yes. But it is not needless complexity. It enables an imperative program to be assembled using a pure functional program. Imperative statements become first class values, control flow
376.
by willtim 8y ago
> And since FP is a style, it can be followed quite effectively in almost any language. It's not black and white. FP is more like a spectrum, with pure functional programming more towards the opposite end, just before total function
377.
by willtim 8y ago
Well if it was a MacBook, everything would be glued-in or soldered, but yes the trend is worrying. I guess the popularity of MacBooks, despite their form-over-function, is what is driving this. But surely they could have kept the T490 like
378.
by willtim 8y ago
You never defined what you meant by a "good concurrent GC", only now are you asking for "performance" numbers. My point is that writing a GC for Java has in fact proved very difficult. It took Sun and Oracle many man yea
379.
by willtim 8y ago
There are a few papers about Haskell's GC by Simon Marlow where this is discussed. The absence of mutable references is a big win for writing a concurrent collector.
380.
by willtim 8y ago
I'm not a web developer, but I don't think the OOP features of JavaScript are really used much. I once saw some jQuery code and it looked pretty functional to me.
381.
by willtim 8y ago
It's actually harder to write a GC for a language like Java with both rampant mutation and plenty of garbage!
382.
by willtim 8y ago
Why is the IO monad a leaky abstraction? Any function that returns an IO computation in Haskell, is still a pure function.
383.
by willtim 8y ago
GUI frameworks have always been OOP-based because everybody was copying Xerox Parc. But even the most successful were not always easy to use (composition and control-flow/concurrency being particularly awkward). Modern GUIs are all bas
384.
by willtim 8y ago
The Pixel slate didn't fair so well in all the reviews though.
385.
by willtim 8y ago
This depends on what you mean by "technology". I would expect them to be aware of emerging trends in the industry. Bonus points also for an interest in the latest computer science. But I don't care if they haven't hacked
386.
by willtim 8y ago
Fedora chooses what Red Hat develops. And Red Hat are building their own OS, with a lot less of the modularity and customisation that has historically been possible in Linux.
387.
by willtim 8y ago
Spring and "aspect-orientated programming" are completely ad-hoc! They use reflection and byte-code generation to implement various forms of runtime magic. This makes reasoning about ones code much much harder. IMHO there are much
388.
by willtim 8y ago
They are an example of managing content without overlapping windows. i3, Sway and Xmonad all have good support for them.
389.
by willtim 8y ago
The litigation from Apple came after Microsoft copied the Mac with overlapping windows (as shown elsewhere in Wikipedia), so this article does not appear correct. Windows 1.0 had tiling windows because IIRC, its lead developer, a former Xer
390.
by willtim 8y ago
> They failed because normal people didn't like them. Do you have proof of this? I suspect they failed because everyone decided to copy the Mac which was trying to emulate a real desktop with bits of paper on it. > Super limited

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