diffxx

5 ms·

31.
by diffxx 2y ago
I support the push towards memory safe languages but emphasizing Rust in the way this paper does seems misguided. It creates a false dichotomy between c style languages without safety guarantees and Rust as though there are no other alterna
32.
by diffxx 2y ago
My gut reaction is that independent of the quality of this product, $30 is easily spent on lunch for 1 in many places. I would like to see more developers willing to pay for tools that they benefit from using. Since we generally don't
33.
by diffxx 2y ago
It can work if you think carefully about module boundaries so that the dsls do not leak out of their containing scope. Most of the time, dsls are not well bounded and even if they are, they are likely to confuse newcomers to the codebase. O
34.
by diffxx 2y ago
This feels like an argument against learning how to play an instrument. Why would anyone do that when there are so many other highly skilled players out there?
35.
by diffxx 2y ago
Yes, and there is an incentive problem too that people are rewarded for being decisive but rarely punished for being wrong. In many contexts the odds are really stacked against you if you have a strong opinion that deviates from the consens
36.
by diffxx 2y ago
There are some good points, but I disagree pretty strongly with some of the premises in your blog post. I ask this quite seriously: why should I care about the health of the jvm ecosystem? Unless I am oracle, how does that fit in with my pe
37.
by diffxx 2y ago
The irony of a substacker attacking the concept of bullshit jobs is a bit much...
38.
by diffxx 2y ago
Why should my tax dollars pay for your special interest group to have free meetups? How would we distribute access to this newly created resource equitably? I don't disagree with the concept, but it gets hairy in the particulars. The p
39.
by diffxx 2y ago
I truly loathe that quote. It is a tautology that is used to deflect legitimate criticism.
40.
by diffxx 2y ago
I found GEB understandable but ridiculously long winded and the passages with achilles were insufferably annoying.
41.
by diffxx 2y ago
Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Instead of optimizing the performance of the interpreter, they should optimize the language semantics to be fast by default.
42.
by diffxx 2y ago
I don't agree that this is what living in a democracy means. It has been known since ancient times that democracy is vulnerable to hostile takeover by a populist demagogue. Sometimes, paradoxical as it seems, it is necessary to overrul
43.
by diffxx 2y ago
I do not understand how you can not see this is an activist court. They have by fiat invented new judicial principles out of thin air: "history and tradition" and "major questions doctrine" come to mind. And they apply t
44.
by diffxx 2y ago
How would you feel about someone who says "we believe we should follow what the bible says even if it’s (in)convenient"?
45.
by diffxx 2y ago
I think it's really unfortunate that most programmers are taught c style loops before tail recursion. But this is also a symptom of standard c's problem of not allowing one to define functions inside of functions. A loop can alway
46.
by diffxx 2y ago
I feel reasonably confident that most of the people who are making these hyperbolic claims either don't understand programming at a deep enough level to make the claim or are trying to sell you something.
47.
by diffxx 2y ago
I am confused by this comment. All the enumerated features are dependent directly or indirectly on the memory management approach that the system uses. If one chooses badly for the target workload, there are many things that will go wrong i
48.
by diffxx 2y ago
Writing documentation up front is a good idea, but only if one treats it as the first iteration of the program with the expectation that the initial documentation may well be thrown out. The process of writing the documentation no doubt wil
49.
by diffxx 2y ago
It's not an either/or.
50.
by diffxx 2y ago
I would be very happy if you streamlined the approval process for my project. vs. I will donate $20k to your reelection campaign if you streamline the approval process. Clearly the former construction could not possibly construed as an impl
51.
by diffxx 2y ago
> I don't think it has been possible to sell a compiler which isn't a loss-leader in a bundle for what, 30 years? I agree and personally feel that this is unfortunate and that we are in some ways imprisoned using mediocre to ba
52.
by diffxx 2y ago
Not the OP, but for me one of the main lessons from Forth is that the boundary between high and low level code can be as thin as you make it. With Forth, you can define high level words using low level primitive words. You then weave these
53.
by diffxx 2y ago
I mainly agree although I think that the trough of despair often comes after an initial bump. At first when designing the new system, you pluck the low hanging fruit of improvement for a small subset of the system. There is no dip yet -- th
54.
by diffxx 2y ago
> Dr. Sutskever’s title at the new company will be chief scientist but he describes his role, according to Ms. Meservey, as “responsible for revolutionary breakthroughs.” My word that is an impressive level of self-confidence.
55.
by diffxx 2y ago
I happen to be reading Poincare's Science and Hypothesis right now and he introduced a way of defining the square root of two that I found enlightening. In less articulate form: consider two sets, one of which contains all numbers whos
56.
by diffxx 2y ago
Do you believe that all humans possess equal amounts of consciousness?
57.
by diffxx 2y ago
This is neither distinct to religious beliefs nor universal among practitioners.
58.
by diffxx 2y ago
> One of the interesting tradeoffs in programming languages is compile speed vs everything else. Yes, but I don't think that compile speed has really been pushed aggressively enough to properly weigh this tradeoff. For me, compilati
59.
by diffxx 2y ago
> Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in. Would you be satisfied with a professor who i
60.
by diffxx 2y ago
Cool language. One modest suggestion: perhaps return 0 rather than 1. Feature request: addition and division as well as subtraction and multiplication ;)

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