willtim

12 ms·

151.
by willtim 6y ago
No, the biggest benefit is first-class modules. This is a feature that for example FP languages have struggled to incorporate. "Encapsulation" with OOP is a bit of a misnomer, as state is not encapsulated, it is just hidden. Suc
152.
by willtim 6y ago
I feel like even "soft real time" is too generous for Android.
153.
by willtim 6y ago
That depends on the programming language, for example C# with LINQ and functional programming languages are pretty good at expressing queries. SQL has no capability for abstraction and so only the simplest queries will be succint, if you wa
154.
by willtim 6y ago
I recommend reading the original "Monads for Functional Programming" paper by Phil Wadler, it's in a tutorial style and IMHO still better than any blog post explanation I have seen: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk&#
155.
by willtim 6y ago
> should the language catch us making a type error here? With a statically typed language, the choice is up to you. Every statically typed language is just a "dynamically typed" language with the ability to statically assign ty
156.
by willtim 6y ago
> people have been conditioned by years of robocalls to ignore out-of-area calls. This is so true!
157.
by willtim 6y ago
The problem with the Archimedes was that it arrived late on the scene and was very expensive. My school purchased only one; and none of us kids got to go anywhere near it. The Atari ST is what I moved to after my BBC micro, in about 86 or 8
158.
by willtim 6y ago
The Play Store has very little for tablets. The Android tablet market is effectively dead.
159.
by willtim 6y ago
Because opening pubs was the top priority of the government, not holding exams.
160.
by willtim 6y ago
Many people buy Apple hardware because that's where most of the apps are, especially the iPad. I purchased an iPad for my kids for precisely this reason, and regarding the actual software that Apple provides, I am not at all impressed
161.
by willtim 6y ago
It's perhaps less important because software can still be installed on Android without Google Play. Don't forget that Apple has already cut special deals with Amazon, so the extortionate 30% is negotiable, if one is big enough to
162.
by willtim 6y ago
> it's not the underlying query language, SQL and it's implementations do not support nested relations. The parent is suggesting that e.g. nested relations would enable better ORM solutions.
163.
by willtim 6y ago
The "expression problem" from Wikipedia (quoting Phil Wadler): "The expression problem is a new name for an old problem. The goal is to define a datatype by cases, where one can add new cases to the datatype and new function
164.
by willtim 6y ago
This paper on "Object Algebras": https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2012/ecoop2012.pdf is a great example of using ideas from functional programming and category theory to improve on the visito
165.
by willtim 6y ago
And Acorn (fruit of the oak tree), Tangerine, Blackberry and of course the Raspberry Pi.
166.
by willtim 6y ago
I am very impressed with the recent changes happening to Java, all of which seem very carefully thought out and planned, keep up the good work!
167.
by willtim 6y ago
> Therefore the real advantage of Loom user-mode threads and co-routines is syntactical programming convenience. That's the real innovation in Loom! It's an interesting alternative to Async-Await / Haskell Monads / F#
168.
by willtim 6y ago
> You can't eliminate the complexity; only move it, Yes and by using null-in-every type for your messaging, now you've pushed the problem out of your app and published it to the world.
169.
by willtim 6y ago
> Pretending it doesn't exist would cause more trouble in the real world than letting it be I don't agree at all with this point. RDBMS types for example are non-nullable by default. Protobufs, XML and many other exchange form
170.
by willtim 6y ago
A huge improvement over JSON, but you still implement Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake! There also appear to be no schemas / static types or sum types (the dual to records)? A schema would allow to you to overload the string li
171.
by willtim 6y ago
You do raise a very important point. At my organisation, Apache Avro was selected by the Java Devs due to the "cross-platform" marketing. However, they found out after it was too late, that the C/C++ implementations were too
172.
by willtim 6y ago
Performance is the least of my concerns owning an Intel laptop. Intel's obsession with it is why their laptops sound like jet engines, scorch laps and have lacklustre battery life. If I was Apple, I would advertise the the improved qua
173.
by willtim 6y ago
I don't like many of the syntax choices either (e.g. the function return type syntax borrows from, but is not consistent with ML/Haskell). However, the language and tooling is already a huge improvement over C and there is already
174.
by willtim 6y ago
That Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants have become so big, is because competition is not always possible and free-markets do not regulate themselves. How can anyone compete with Amazon in its present form with hundred
175.
by willtim 6y ago
I'm not convinced the premiums paid (taxes paid by corporations) match the risk and payouts given, it's only been 12 years since the last hundreds of billion dollar bailout. But yes, capitalism alone does not work.
176.
by willtim 6y ago
I think it's fair. Unix has a lot of legacy baggage. It's largely terminal-based with three character folder names and two character commands, a monolithic kernel, the C programming language. In contrast, Acorn's ARX was full
177.
by willtim 6y ago
> It doesn't matter if your functions are pure if they return a unique data type for your API or library that is not understood easily by the caller. If it's an abstract data type, it doesn't have to be understood by the c
178.
by willtim 6y ago
If languages adopted structural typing, rather than nominal as the default, then it would be much easier to align the types (e.g. projection/renaming of columns). Most FP languages have a limited form of structural typing with tuples.
179.
by willtim 6y ago
It has to be pure functional programming to get the full benefits of compositionality. Most mainstream "functional programming" is not necessarily pure and side-effects are not controlled/tracked. Analogous to how "mostl
180.
by willtim 6y ago
Developers spend most of their time reading other peoples code, so yes, one does have to learn the less sensible alternatives, if you choose this tool. It's called historical baggage for a reason.

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