grumpyprole

7 ms·

31.
by grumpyprole 1y ago
GEM was in ROM on the Atari ST and it was fantastic. It was light years ahead of where Windows was at the time. It was Amiga Workbench that was somewhat limited by being on a floppy disk.
32.
by grumpyprole 1y ago
Absolutely, when I first tried Windows Cubase in the 90s, it wasn't long before it ate all my data. Even today's DAWs still haven't caught up with the original ST Cubase in terms of stability.
33.
by grumpyprole 1y ago
Well said. I guess such ignorance is not that surprising given that most "programming" today is glueing code together with scripting languages. This is really just a form of configuration. It certainly requires domain knowledge an
34.
by grumpyprole 1y ago
The way software is built hasn't changed in decades.
35.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
And taking away women's rights.
36.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> To me that's a large part of the very definition of a useful general purpose OS is that it's flexible and enables you to do whatever you need to do today, NixOS gains most of its power from restrictions. These restrictions en
37.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
This is fantastic, but of course strictly speaking the use of back references means these aren't true regular language expressions but the "enhanced" kind that give security headaches for all the big tech firms.
38.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> naive inexperient developers blaming the tools That's not the problem. It's naive inexperienced developers using the tools. Most developers have to maintain code they didn't write themselves. One can learn all the C++
39.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Oops I mean't back references, since that is the problem feature (that requires backtracking).
40.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Are you sure it was Thompson who added backtracking to grep? Note also that the POSIX standard intentionally omits backtracking regex. It is a shame that others have not deprecated them.
41.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
This "strong typing" message from the Python community has always sounded like propaganda to me - designed to confuse management. Strong typing is about machine checked proofs of invariants, not whether you avoid a few daft built-
42.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Small languages, if they are suitably constrained, offer far more reasoning power and optimisation potential. This is why we need more small languages, not less. Python aims for maximum flexibility and maximum ease of use. This comes with
43.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
That Python makes the wrong trade-offs for mission critical software. This goes beyond just lacking static types.
44.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Even with those retrofits, it's still a language designed for maximum flexibility and maximum ease of use. This has trade offs with regard to reasoning for correctness.
45.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> My students are launching a satellite into low earth orbit that has its primary flight computer running python. Yes, sometimes this does waste a few hundred milliseconds Never mind performance, would it not be good to at least machine
46.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> We do see people try to take it too far though I see it as a useful guide like any methodology should be. But I have worked with someone who insisted the rules should be followed to the letter, literally not a single sentence of explan
47.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> these are Google engineers managing a million interacting state machines via a giant pile of global (mutable) state Yeah that doesn't sound good. I understand the point you are making now and agree.
48.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Objects and "method calls" generally implies mutable state to me, but yes the parent was not explicit about this. I assumed mutable (implicit) state was being argued in favour of an explicit state representation. Perhaps I misunde
49.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
I was talking in the most general sense. I am sure there are state machine implementations that are terrible to reason about, especially any that emerge from a codegen tool. But hopefully they are the exception and not the rule.
50.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
A state machine makes the actual program state first class and easy to reason about. One does not even need mutable state to model one. Whereas you appear to be advocating mutable objects. The state space then becomes a combinatorial explos
51.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> So scanning processes is the correct thing to do. Most solutions in engineering involve a trade-off. Clearly this solution trades simplicity for complexity and multiple CVEs. An OS could utilise a known static configuration as describe
52.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
It still sounds like duct tape to me. An OS should know the dependencies of each service without having to perform complex dynamic scanning to find out. Is this information not already in dpkg?
53.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Reading the CVEs makes this piece of software sound like a Rube Goldberg machine.
54.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
You can write imperative programs in Haskell and many people do. You get effect tracking, giving perhaps the "the worlds best imperative language" :)
55.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
> For any practical program, memory usage and number of operations are part of the engineering specification And yet if I read a C++ program, I have no idea with just a local inspection where, if any, the allocations are happening. Reaso
56.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
And he got it completely wrong, as more and more Haskell features end up in industrial programming languages. Oracle's Java architect even publically stated he was influenced by Haskell.
57.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
This is a poor and lazy criticism of Haskell. It might be hard to reason about the memory usage and other operational behaviours of a Haskell program, but the ability to reason about semantics and correctness is far ahead of the mainstream.
58.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Standard mathematical notation?
59.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
So Swift does implicit conversions?
60.
by grumpyprole 2y ago
Yes, in fact even a Harrier Jump Jet was designed with pencils and a slide rule!

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