gtrak

6 ms·

1.
by gtrak 6y ago
It's a question of where to focus your attention. Consider the explore/exploit trade-off. Boring tech may be a little, well, boring, but that means you get to spend your limited decision-making capacity on solving your actual pro
2.
by gtrak 7y ago
The web has killed desktop apps. I use linux, but I don't buy software on any platform besides games. I think it makes sense for professional productivity apps, like CAD stuff. I don't think basic desktop apps are worth a fee, si
3.
by gtrak 10y ago
The easy and dangerous way is to mount your entire hard drive inside virtualbox. Follow instructions here: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk The issue occurs when you for example accidentally boot wi
4.
by gtrak 10y ago
There is an alternative that I have found quite useful. Create a Dualboot situation for normal linux work but set up a VM in your windows host that points to your bootloader and linux partition. Now you have the best of both worlds, more me
5.
by gtrak 12y ago
Just a hunch, LLVM uses Static-Single-Assignment, which is just that, saving every single variable change.
6.
by gtrak 12y ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Lines of code is an objective measure. How meaningful that might actually be, well, that's subjective.
7.
by gtrak 12y ago
I know neither. I'd skip Objective-C and learn Swift to actually make a thing. If you want general language knowledge, a really hairy production language and toolset isn't the place to look. You'll be fighting with lots of i
8.
by gtrak 12y ago
There are objective measures. There aren't necessarily 'absolute' ones. Lisp is relatively more concise than C or Java for the same tasks. Java is relatively safer than C for the same tasks.
9.
by gtrak 12y ago
Every new dev machine should have an SSD. It's under $1/GB
10.
by gtrak 12y ago
I really like this comment. But I bet some folks gloss over a particular point of importance. For me, there's a huge advantage in literally using tree-paper, either for code-reading, designing, taking notes, what have you. It involves
11.
by gtrak 13y ago
Very strange to have a programmer culture that is afraid of thinking about performance. It's treated like a hobgoblin.
12.
by gtrak 13y ago
Better stacktraces would be better, sure, but there are good arguments on both sides whether it's better to separate the language from the platform or not. I prefer a thin, readable compiler and core library over such abstractions. I
13.
by gtrak 13y ago
the practical difference between lists and seqs is laziness (details like chunking, too).
14.
by gtrak 13y ago
This is somewhat irrational critique, clojure was an opportunity to start fresh and graft a concurrency-focused lisp onto a pervasive runtime, not to reimplement ABCL. It fills a need. I was always somewhat halfway interested in learning c
15.
by gtrak 13y ago
Maybe I'm a bit of a masochist, but it's not that hard to read the compiled output, especially when you have a decent mental model of what it should be. It doesn't look like idiomatic javascript, but the structure is pretty
16.
by gtrak 13y ago
What makes the right level of abstraction right? Seems like the units of abstraction have to be amenable to application (analogy), but rightness is fluid. If you have a turing machine, it might make more sense to write a JS compiler first
17.
by gtrak 13y ago
My interpretation: javascript is slowly catching up to the rest of the world. It's reach both makes it a lingua franca and slows it down. Maybe one day it will be suitable for real programming, if people who complain after 10 minutes
18.
by gtrak 13y ago
People prefer this incremental series of hacks to the existential despair of being faced with a cohesive system, say a lisp machine. :-)
19.
by gtrak 13y ago
I think at least the criticism of immutability and FP resulted from taking concepts to extremes. I made a point to address lock-in of different aspects of clojure in my post. I think if you're mutating deeply nested things, or doing he
20.
by gtrak 13y ago
there were changes to the core data structures in order to support reducers, namely the addition of polymorphic reduction by the collection. See: https://github.com/clojure/clojure/commit/5b281880571573c591..
21.
by gtrak 13y ago
FWIW, I agree, I would love to see an expert talk about real tradeoffs, both abstractly and in regards to clojure. I'm just kinda piecing it together from what I think Rich was thinking, what I've picked up from JoC, blogs, talks
22.
by gtrak 13y ago
Yes, having to understand the details and implications of clojure's compilation was definitely painful, but the implementing code is accessible. There's always going to be some performance bottlenecks, I guess I'm more conce
23.
by gtrak 13y ago
Yes, you're right. Tradeoffs was more of a theme than a commitment to being comprehensive. I guess I meant to portray design tradeoffs and their implications, and sort of what perceptions I have about them. It wasn't meant to s
24.
by gtrak 13y ago
even with productive languages, there is such a thing as 'idiomatic'.. (I say to myself as I munge some legacy clojure)... I still prefer to work on old clojure code than new java code after a year and a half with it, even java written by
25.
by gtrak 13y ago
Real people have jobs writing clojure. I can't speak for Rust.
26.
by gtrak 14y ago
Macros will eventually be in core JS, see: http://disnetdev.com/blog/2012/10/14/hygienic-macros-for-jav... and http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/#/40 http://www.infoq.com/presentations/State-JavaScript
27.
by gtrak 14y ago
yes and no. Yes, because the example is a novel language feature in other languages that would be very difficult to implement. No, because these sorts of things are easy only when code is data, like lists, which is a design property of l
28.
by gtrak 14y ago
I think the counter-argument is this: We have control over the amount of real reasoning we can do about our code. The hassle of the real can be minimized. For example, I like clojure, and there are real benefits to theoretical things like
29.
by gtrak 14y ago
The real world is crappy, and we're depending on these academic types to free us from the drollness of it, because we don't all have time to invent an STM. If I wanted to write CRUD apps all day and say that's real-world, I suppose I could
30.
by gtrak 14y ago
AOT already means something to clojurists. It means removing the extra runtime compilation phase of .clj into classfiles. The JIT is what the JVM does, which still occurs just like before.

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