ziotom78

35 ms·

1. 331.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   I think that the idea behind this project is to simplify Emacs' code, e.g., by dropping support for ancient systems (they mention MS-DOS) and using pre-existing crates instead of in-house solutions. A simpler codebase might provide sig
2. 332.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   It's true that using matplotlib in Julia (via PyPlot.jl) is some sort of a hack. However, it works surprisingly well!
3. 333.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   Hi dom96, Generally speaking, and exceptions aside, astrophysicists are not programmers. They usually write bad code, but most of them are aware of this. They are sometimes able to abandon an old technology and adopt a new one, but reasons
4. 334.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   This reminds me of an episode that happened roughly ten years ago. I am a cosmologist and I have worked to the ESA Planck mission [1], a spacecraft launched in 2009 to study the Cosmic Microwave Background. Planck was the successor of anoth
5. 335.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   I am going to study Cray's Chapel [1]. I'm a cosmologist and regularly have to write/use codes that run on clusters. In the past years I have tested many different languages to substitute C/C++/Fortran for HPC devel
6. 336.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   Inkscape is one of my favorite tools when I am creating slideshows. Sometimes I rely on Jessyink, when I want to use some zooming slides (like Prezi does), sometimes I use it to create visually complex slides that I include in presentations
7. 337.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   I'm probably the only one around here that went from Mac to Linux... I decided to do this after a number of frustrating problems with hardware: ethernet port not working [1] and a severely swollen battery (although I followed all the a
8. 338.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   Agreed. At the end I turned to Python + Fortran (via the awesome f2py) for almost everything, although using two languages is far from ideal. It confuses students which hardly know just one of them, plus there is the cognitive burden of usi
9. 339.▲
   by ziotom78 10y ago

   I tried to use Ada for some numerical code I was developing a few years ago (see this old blog post of mine: http://ziotom78.blogspot.it/2012/09/discovering-ada.html ). The language is fantastic, and the type syste
10. 340.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    You're right, mathematically speaking the two systems are the same. As a matter of fact, the calculations that describe the attitude of a spacecraft flying not far from the Earth are usually expressed in a geocentrical reference frame.
11. 341.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    "Blind watchers of the sky", by Rocky Kolb, is an awesome book about the history of astronomy which spends quite a lot of pages about Galileo's trial. It is wonderfully written and full of humor: Kolb is a notable astrophysic
12. 342.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    I believe that Ada allows case insensitive identifiers in order to prevent programmers from using the same names for different variables/procedures. Once I saw some C code like this: int x, X; X = 0; for(int i=0; i < N;
13. 343.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    A few months ago, I considered Oberon as a viable alternative to C for my pet projects. Horace, after some time spent playing with it, I was scared by a fewserious limitations: (1) there is no support for UTF-8 strings, native strings are j
14. 344.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    Note that the VIRGO detector, located near Pisa (Italy), has already taken a set of measurements a few years ago, and it would have been sensitive enough to detect waves like the one from last September. Unfortunately, Virgo was down for up
15. 345.▲
    by ziotom78 10y ago

    I used it for a small project where I needed a quick way to plot some lab data. I chose Lazarus because these data needed to be displayed on all the computers in our lab, including a few Windows machines. I was amazed when the program I dev
16. 346.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    A few months ago I tried to port the "supposedly portable" libunwind to OpenBSD, as a part of an effort to port Julia under OpenBSD. I failed miserably, as I found the task was too complex for my abilities (see this post of mine:
17. 347.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    "Binary compiled"? Isn't waf a Python script?
18. 348.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    I think the point in the "variable"/"VARIABLE" difference is that, although they visually look very different, their meaning does not. In a more practical case, if I read some code which has two variables within the
19. 349.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    Hi dom96, I am a Nim fan too, but I doubt that Nim would fulfill the requirements of the author of this article. At the very beginning of his post, the author says, "[the language] has to be reliable. I can't afford to spend my ti
20. 350.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    As camgunz said, emitting C code makes your compiler far more portable, as you can find C compilers for virtually every target (e.g., AFAIK, the current version of LLVM does not support SPARC architectures). Another theoretical advantage of
21. 351.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    It is indeed an interesting idea. However, it is hardly the first to do this. The first C++ compiler (cfront) did so [1], and there are other languages that follow this idea still today [2][3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w
22. 352.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    Another example: * I read this book whenever I feel lonely. * I read this book many years ago A friend of mine coming from Scotland once told me that he phoned Twinings (the English tea maker) in order to understand how to pronounce it (&qu
23. 353.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    Many thanks for this clarification! I have added a link to your explanation at the end of my post.
24. 354.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    I used it a few months ago to develop some HPC code for analyzing the timelines of a cosmological instrument (ESA Planck/LFI), and I was quite happy with the result. I even wrote a blog post about my experience ( http://zioto
25. 355.▲
    FPC version 3.0.0 “Pestering Peacock” has been released(freepascal.org)

    1 points by ziotom78 11y ago|0 comments
26. 356.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    I have tried Mendeley, but despite its odd (Swig-based) interface, I prefer JabRef ( http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ ). It is open-source, and it keeps its database of references in plain BibTeX format: therefore, it is super-
27. 357.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    Thanks for having shared this. I live in Italy, and in the last years we have get accustomed to news like "four hundred refugees reached Sicily last night", "50 Syrians died yesterday when their boat sank near the coast"
28. 358.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    Don't worry, chronial, the meaning of your post was crystal clear.
29. 359.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    > Have you noticed that every complete Bible contains the Old Testament, including the Pentateuch in its entirety? Yes, I already had noticed this. > Old Testament law and prophesy is woven deeply in the fabric of the gospels and of P
30. 360.▲
    by ziotom78 11y ago

    > Polygamy is a Christian institution. It was pointedly prescribed in the old testament. Correction: "Christian" refers to Jesus Christ, which does not appear in the old testament. Catholics, Ortodoxes and many protestant churc