willtim

8 ms·

121.
by willtim 6y ago
I completely agree. There should be motivating problems and examples. But I don't think that's at odds with Dijkstra's viewpoint?
122.
by willtim 6y ago
I cannot imagine a mathematics lecturer telling his students "a monad is like a burrito". Sometimes I think the analogies can actually hurt our understanding of something very abstract or novel, as is the case with the bad burrito
123.
by willtim 6y ago
Developers: please start supporting and advocating Linux, then we'll all have (hopefully) a better alternative future.
124.
by willtim 6y ago
I think what you are asking for are first-class parameterised modules, which is certainly a feature that OOP has that many FP languages don't. It does exist in some FP languages though, for example OCaml and the 1ML paper and language.
125.
by willtim 6y ago
The reasoning behind "closures", is that one can capture some context such as the example you describe. If we think of an object as simply a record of functions, then we can close over some shared context during the construction o
126.
by willtim 6y ago
"Dependency injection" frameworks look to me like a hack. In a more expressive language, such as F#, one could probably describe what needs to be done symbolically, and then write interpreters that implement the different behaviou
127.
by willtim 6y ago
Exactly what I was thinking
128.
by willtim 6y ago
> What you see in K8S is the exception rather than the norm in Go - but is the norm in other languages. I suggest that is because not many large applications have yet been built in Go and it is still relatively young. If Go was used more
129.
by willtim 6y ago
> Yeah it's hard to write weirdly complicated code in Go Just because Go lacks many forms of abstraction, doesn't mean complex code will not be created with it. Quite the opposite. It's lack of expressiveness will encourag
130.
by willtim 6y ago
> Functional programming is about programming with immutability first. I completely agree with this. So perhaps I am being rather hard on Scala.
131.
by willtim 6y ago
I am skeptical about the novelty of Scala's "OOFP" as you put it. It looks essentially the same as the original anonymous classes or SAM types in Java. Function values are objects with a single method and methods themselves a
132.
by willtim 6y ago
> You can do this in any language, functional or not. No, not in practice. For example, in an average imperative language, you'd have no tail-call optimisation, and so would run out of stack space pretty quickly. There'd also b
133.
by willtim 6y ago
Well, I have noticed significant degradation of 128kbps MP3 sources when sent over Bluetooth, whereas my FLAC CD rips sound fine. I don't think that the effects of transcoding are well understood or well-studied, especially the interac
134.
by willtim 6y ago
Actually that's probably a description of how JavaScript itself came into existence.
135.
by willtim 6y ago
> Transcoding doesn't make much of a difference either. I respectfully disagree. Transcoding does make an audible difference, at the bitrates typically used, and should have no place in "high fidelity" audio. My issue with
136.
by willtim 6y ago
My understanding is that music gets decompressed on the Apple headphones, the original AAC stream is sent over the wire. Most Bluetooth headphones will just effectively transcode the audio, such that for example AAC gets decompressed then r
137.
by willtim 6y ago
AptX is lossy compression which when applied to already compressed sources (e.g. Spotify), still gives noticeably inferior audio (it's effectively transcoding). Most people listen to compressed music and so the right thing to do with
138.
by willtim 6y ago
This isn't true. It was never as good as Intel's Connman, which was designed to be modular from the start. NetworkManager started out as a UI app and then was evolved into what it is now. It's still not as fast as connecting
139.
by willtim 6y ago
I, personally, wouldn't use VBA at all, ever. I would only consider Excel and Word for very simple use cases. For example, I refuse to use Word for technical documentation. But Office and Excel are everywhere in large corporates; and s
140.
by willtim 6y ago
Yes and "on error resume next" is what I usually see in VBA code
141.
by willtim 6y ago
Yes, every statically-typed language has a dynamic language as a subset. It is up to the author to use and apply types. One can certainly write Haskell where everything is in IO and everything uses Strings.
142.
by willtim 6y ago
If you use String for all your data types than you are no better than a dynamic language. There are many string like things that benefit from their own types, e.g. currency, identifiers, post codes. Such types should only be created from a
143.
by willtim 6y ago
The language and notation is inconsistent with hundreds of years of use in maths and confusing for kids learning both maths and programming (at least it confused me). Regarding your skeptism of immutable data structures, it's best to t
144.
by willtim 6y ago
It's worth pointing out that Haskell has always overloaded the dot. It is used for module namespace disambiguation, e.g Set.fromList
145.
by willtim 6y ago
That's a bad choice of name from one or more old languages that misused established mathematical terminology (e.g. C misuses void, constant and variable). An immutable variable (or in maths, just "variable') has a value that
146.
by willtim 6y ago
Well Brexit caused the pound to plummet and supposedly made ARM tempting. I find it ironic that the current UK Brexiteer government talk constantly about soveignty and control, yet were quite happy to allow this sale.
147.
by willtim 6y ago
Objects don't have to have mutable state. And even if they do, it can be unobservable. This is true "state encapsulation" but the OOP definition of encapsulation does not require this. Such objects are still very useful as &q
148.
by willtim 6y ago
On my Kinesis Advantage I can type any letter whilst keeping my wrists straight, hands still and with much less finger movement than a regular keyboard. It completely cured my RSI and it hasn't returned in over 4 years. I realise this
149.
by willtim 6y ago
> I don’t know why everyone wants keyboard with a long throw, Because one does not need to hit the bottom and "shock" the fingers in order to activate the keys. With a mechanical switch the keys can be activated by partially pr
150.
by willtim 6y ago
> What's the difference between mutating state on the inside and hiding state on the inside? Aren't they practically the same? You can mutate state on the inside, but still provide a "pure" mathematical function on th

More ›