arnsholt

6 ms·

1.
by arnsholt 23d ago
The application writing its state to the executable is basically Smalltalk (or Lisp). It's an extremely powerful way of writing software, IMO.
2.
by arnsholt 26d ago
Yeah, it's not that the hurdles pointed out in this article are wrong, but IMO the jump from "it's very hard" to "it's impossible" isn't convincingly argued. In discussions of the future of C, somethi
3.
by arnsholt 1mo ago
Very chatty build scripts for one. I remember reading the build instructions for clisp many years ago, and it very explicitly told you to run the build in xterm and not something like gnome-terminal, because xterm was way way faster at gett
4.
by arnsholt 2mo ago
Oh derp. It’s been a while since I worked adjacent to this, so I clearly misremembered some important bits. Thanks for the correction!
5.
by arnsholt 2mo ago
And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to the surface through the drilling mud.
6.
by arnsholt 2mo ago
John Regehr tried to start an initiative to make what he called Friendly C, removing some of the most blatant C footguns, and even that turned out to be extremely hard to get consensus on: https://blog.regehr.org/archives&#x
7.
by arnsholt 5mo ago
If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding where to look for Tiktaalik. Basically, you start with what
8.
by arnsholt 7mo ago
I worked as a Smalltalk developer for a few years, and it spoiled to such an extent that I’ve tried to make an extension for IntelliJ to replicate the browser for Java development. Maybe I should revive that project, actually…
9.
by arnsholt 8mo ago
I wasn’t involved in the day to day operations of the system, but it had records going back to the 90s at least I think. I think data related to non accepted offers were deleted fairly quickly (since they didn’t end up being actual customer
10.
by arnsholt 8mo ago
Yeah, basically. The full system actually has more date stuff going on, to support some other more advanced stuff than just tracking objects themselves, but that's the overall idea. When you need to join stuff it can be annoying to get
11.
by arnsholt 8mo ago
The core system at my previous employer (an insurance company) worked along the lines of the solution you outline at the end: each table is an append only log of point in time information about some object. So the current state is in the ro
12.
by arnsholt 8mo ago
Lichess uses a scheme which is probably more efficient on average, described on revoof's blog[0]. Basically, it's a variable length scheme where the first 64 bits encode square occupancies, followed by piece codes (including castl
13.
by arnsholt 8mo ago
For about two and a half years I worked on a Smalltalk system, written in a quite old Smalltalk, which gave me two idiosyncrasies editor-wise: I no longer care very much about syntax highlighting (though I don't really bother to turn i
14.
by arnsholt 9mo ago
Good PBT code doesn't simply generate values at random, they skew the distributions so that known problematic values are more likely to appear. In JS "__proto__" is a good candidate for strings as shown here, for floating poi
15.
by arnsholt 10mo ago
I'm pretty sure the publishers are alleging that a crime has been committed. In that case, private parties can't open a suit (at least if Swedish criminal law is at all similar to Norwegian law), so this asks the police to open
16.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
I found the Smalltalk way of working in the running environment to be very programmer efficient too, and that it was by far the smoothest development experience I’ve had, even in a pretty dated and clunky Smalltalk at that point. And debugg
17.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
I worked on a Smalltalk system which ran on Visual Smalltalk Enterprise, and in that system the image opened its windows as native Windows GDI windows, which made the application quite seamless in the OS (except this was in 2016-2018 and VS
18.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
I've only used PBT a few times, but when it fits it's been extremely useful. A concrete example from my practice of what has been pointed out in this thread, that you want to properties of your function's output rather than
19.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
In discussions like this, I sometimes feel that the importance of related work like the increasing use of Rust in Android and MS land is under-appreciated. Those who think C is fine often (it seems to me) make arguments along the lines that
20.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
After a couple of years working in Smalltalk, I’ve acquired the hot take that all the code should be in a proportional font. Admittedly it doesn’t work quite as well for brace syntax languages, but in Smalltalk and Python it’s great.
21.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
KT is obviously (from context here) Karahan Tepe, and GT thus Göbleki Tepe. ANE is a standard abbreviation for Ancient Near East. For PPNA Wikipeda supplies Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, which is a subdivision of the Early Neolithic period.
22.
by arnsholt 11mo ago
Underscore for italics probably has its origins in the use of a solid underline as markup in a manuscript/typescript instructing the typesetter to set that fragment in italics (underscore generally being frowned upon in professionally
23.
by arnsholt 1y ago
Oh yeah, the good hand crafted grammars are really good. For my PhD I worked in a group that was deep in the DelphIN/ERG collaboration, and they did some amazing things with that.
24.
by arnsholt 1y ago
Because the Rafah crossing is currently controlled by the Israeli army. Egypt can allow all the aid it wants, it’ll still get stopped by the Israelis.
25.
by arnsholt 1y ago
To expand on "tin was hard to come by", I believe two major sources of tin have been identified for bronze used in the Fertile Crescent: one in Cornwall, and one in Afghanistan. They had to travel really far abroad to make this
26.
by arnsholt 1y ago
Arabic script as written in Iran (and Pakistan I think) is in a different style than most of the rest of the world. The style is called Nastaliq (the more common one being Naskh).
27.
by arnsholt 1y ago
My favourite one was when I learned about the existence of US survey feet.
28.
by arnsholt 1y ago
To expand a bit on why this is cool: it lets you introduce new abstractions (for example wrapping some code in a database transaction or specialised exception handling) on an equal footing with the rest of the language, all without macros.
29.
by arnsholt 1y ago
My stint with MongoDB was brief, but I too came away with a deeper appreciation of SQL bases. I feel it's a bit like a good type system: yes, there absolutely is an upfront cost, but over time it really does save you from stupid runtim
30.
by arnsholt 1y ago
Ownership serves another important purpose: it determines when a value is freed.

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