willtim

29 ms·

181.
by willtim 6y ago
Google are not much better. They supported my Pixel C for 2 years after I bought it (2017-19); and it was more expensive than a Samsung. I basically got scammed. Never again. I've given up on disposable tablets.
182.
by willtim 6y ago
Yes Standard Chartered does have its own strict Haskell scripting language (Mu). But it mostly wraps C/C++ quant libraries, it's used as a alternative to Python (because Python is a bad idea at scale). GHC is used too and is what
183.
by willtim 6y ago
You do have a point, with Mac the choices have been made for you. I guess the most mac-like distro is probably Ubuntu. If you pick the LTS, you might even have a smoother ride than the macOS yearly updates.
184.
by willtim 6y ago
> The visuals of Mac are vastly superior to any flavor of Linux I've tried. This is subjective. I think the MacOS UI looks and acts like a toy. My Linux machine has a solarised theme (I can toggle light/dark) with minimal windo
185.
by willtim 6y ago
This is anecdotal. My own anecdote is that we've had far more trouble with my wife's MacBook than my NixOS ThinkPad which just works, even after upgrades. The Linux experience depends on the distribution, software and hardware you
186.
by willtim 6y ago
You've missed off possibly the biggest advantage of ditching Intel. A perfectly usable machine without jet engine fans and a scolded lap. I don't use Mac's, but I see this as good for the industry.
187.
by willtim 6y ago
Are you sure? Packages are signed for most of the mainstream distributions.
188.
by willtim 6y ago
The absence of nullable references is completely orthogonal to pure FP and static typing.
189.
by willtim 6y ago
Unfortunately as much as I love Linux, you are absolutely right. But I think it more of a social problem than a technical one.
190.
by willtim 6y ago
Most mainstream statically typed languages use subtyping, that is why they permit equality comparisons of different (sub) types. But they should and do obey all the usual mathematical laws, associativity, transitivity etc.
191.
by willtim 6y ago
The average developer spends most of her time reading other peoples code, so avoiding having to understand == is a luxury most will not have.
192.
by willtim 6y ago
> That you don’t know this shows me that you don’t actually understand JS very well. I know about the === operator, but the original one still exists, as does all the code that was (and still is) written using it that needs to be reasone
193.
by willtim 6y ago
> But they had to dislike it in a productive, nuanced manner. No, they fundamentally rejected JavaScript, enough to build a whole new language and set of tools. This was not a subtle dislike of a few aspects of it. Personally JavaScript
194.
by willtim 6y ago
> It has an incredibly powerful Hindley Milner system under the hood. Scala does not use Hindley-Milner, which is why it has much poorer type inference compared to Haskell or OCaml. It uses subtyping to encode sum types and under many ci
195.
by willtim 6y ago
All high-level languages with optimising compilers have "non-compositional performance" as you say. The big issue with laziness is reasoning about space usage. A strict language is not immune to this however. If one builds lazy ab
196.
by willtim 6y ago
You have a very valid point. As someone who uses Haskell professionally in a large organisation, I can honestly say that past changes such as FTP and AMP have added very little but caused significant issues for both academic and industrial
197.
by willtim 6y ago
Monads are a pattern for sequential composition of effectful computations (i.e. statements). Some expessive languages, such as F#, Haskell and Scala support a special overloadable syntax for any arbitrary monad, therefore giving a fully pro
198.
by willtim 6y ago
In a language that supports Monads (e.g. Haskell or Scala), the above could be implemented as a library.
199.
by willtim 6y ago
> the fact that no single language or paradigm completely overtakes all others is evidence in favor of there not being a very big bottom-line impact. Or perhaps because no paradigm is universally applicable to all cases. There will be a
200.
by willtim 6y ago
A Crematorium Management System built in Microsoft Access is still a Crematorium Management System.
201.
by willtim 6y ago
Beowulf had no shared memory abstraction, programs had to be written using message passing, e.g. MPI. I'm not convinced a shared memory abstraction is a good thing for distribution across machines. Some Beowulf clusters actually had mu
202.
by willtim 6y ago
Why specify aluminium? For example, Magnesium alloy is 30% lighter and less prone to warps and dents. For Linux, I would consider a ThinkPad (T or X series) or a Dell XPS developer edition.
203.
by willtim 6y ago
Is AMD now a better choice for Linux, especially given the ongoing stability problems with Intel's Linux graphics drivers?
204.
by willtim 6y ago
I tried it recently and went back to i3. For me, Gnome didn't work well for multi-monitor setups and seems surprisingly lacking in customisations. It did seem very polished though.
205.
by willtim 6y ago
I would add NixOS to that list. Especially if you value rolling back upgrades or pinning package versions.
206.
by willtim 6y ago
Martin Odersky followed the same logic with Scala and he has since expressed some regret, especially as more and more people become familiar with Python, which is more succinct: https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/is
207.
by willtim 6y ago
Broadcom unfortunately has never been well supported on Linux. I've always used ThinkPads for running Linux and have never had these sorts of hardware issues (and I keep laptops for at least 8 years). You need to buy a machine with run
208.
by willtim 6y ago
Debugging declarative code is always hard, whatever the language. Haskell does allow you to use trace expressions which will output values to standard out, see Debug.Trace. This is no reason to avoid arguably the most popular (and state-of-
209.
by willtim 7y ago
The Sony's have +5db of exaggerated bass that cannot be EQ'd out on the headphones when using LDAC. Without EQ, I find them completely unlistenable for jazz or classical music. I kept them as I only use them with one device (so EQ
210.
by willtim 7y ago
I remember buying "Linux - unleashing the workstation in your PC" circa '94 which had the tag line "friends don't let friends use DOS !". I was quite stunned at how much better it was than DOS/Windows at t

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