BellsOnSunday

6 ms·

1.
by BellsOnSunday 2mo ago
I thought this was going to be https://web.archive.org/web/20120106121645/http://wiki.alu.o... . Brings back memories of following comp.lang.lisp, not least as a sort of soap opera. Lots of characters and
2.
by BellsOnSunday 3mo ago
Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.
3.
by BellsOnSunday 9mo ago
Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.
4.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
Recently like in the last hundred years?
5.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
More likely but not certain. People who rely on this rhetorically tend to ignore it isn't a slam dunk.
6.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Fancy type features
7.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
In the UK the Consumer's Association and Which? fulfil the same role, and has been going since the 1950s. Before the internet the magazine was a part of everyday life for many - if my parents were going to buy something like a new wash
8.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. Th
9.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crowds and money. I've never spoken with anyone
10.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
Given what he did to the British economy in the shortest tenure of any chancellor, it's easy to believe he doesn't know what day it is.
11.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
Whoever worked out how to light a fire must have been very popular for a while, and then rapidly lost ground to the person who gave it a name.
12.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.
13.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
Same way that Shakespeare "invented" the word "elbow" and thousands of others.
14.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart from this description, it gets called "that part of the pig
15.
by BellsOnSunday 3y ago
C-h f butterfly
16.
by BellsOnSunday 4y ago
Yep. That's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation...
17.
by BellsOnSunday 9y ago
What's the little book of his about a man and a woman trapped on an island where they geekily explain things to each other? I might be misremembering the setting...started it once but it was pretty cheesy.
18.
by BellsOnSunday 9y ago
I think the tobacco industry has been no slouch in the marketing department, but the real difference is that there's no way to use tobacco that is safe and beneficial for you.
19.
by BellsOnSunday 9y ago
Yep, I was going to comment that if you write your own compiler you'll find plenty of bugs, which is the same point.
20.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
I know I won't be thanked for pointing out non-technical infelecities in the writing, and I'm not a grammar nazi or anything but... "There was a lot of excellent Haskell writing this year. One can’t possible enumerate all of
21.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
It doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.
22.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
I found out how to pronounce sal volatile just the other day, perhaps thirty years after first reading it (crops up quite a lot in Victorian novels). Fortunately, I never once had occasion to say it out loud in the intervening time.
23.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you hear
24.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
You need this ominous sounding permission to intervene and pause an app when a call comes in.
25.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumably modern day fantasy writ
26.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
What's dated about it?
27.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
It's a humorous lament on the fragmented state of devops, not to be taken too seriously.
28.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
Ezra Pound's ~ABC of Reading~ changed the way I read poetry and literary fiction. When, much later, I started to be interested in technical things I don't think I found it too hard to adapt, but I still focus on style, allusion,
29.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
That doesn't seem like something a compiler should care about, I think it would be better to add it to something like hlint.
30.
by BellsOnSunday 10y ago
I think most people would need to write some code to really grok it, I would anyway. It's a simple enough idea in context, but there's no royal road to understanding. The explanations I know of (all from the Haskell community) are

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