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Corbin

@ Corbin @programming.dev

Posts
1
Comments
96
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • I just ask my problem bro...chill....

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  • If it's on Stack Exchange, you can help us keep the community decent by assuming good faith and being patient with newcomers. Yes, it's frustrating. And yeah, sometimes, it's basically impossible to avoid sarcasm and scorn, just like how HN sometimes needs to be sneered at, but we can still strive for a maximum of civility.

    If all else fails, just remember: you're not on Philosophy SE or any of the religious communities, it's just a computer question, and it can be answered without devolving into an opinion war. Pat yourself on the back for being a "schmott guy!" and write a polite answer that hopefully the newbies will grok. Be respectful of plural perspectives; it's a feature that a question may have multiple well-liked answers.

  • I just ask my problem bro...chill....

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  • Yeah, this list of sites is making me think of asking for a book by loudly asking a library, a series of coffeeshops, a chud microbrewery, and an 11-year-old bully. Try quietly reading in the library first, I guess.

  • Functional bros be like

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  • Define your terms before relying on platitudes. Mutability isn't cleaner if we want composition, particularly in the face of concurrency. Being idiomatic isn't good or bad, but patterned; not all patterns are universally desirable. The only one which stands up to scrutiny is efficiency, which leads to the cult of performance-at-all-costs if one is not thoughtful.

  • And don't forget RTFM

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  • Thanks for offering your perspective! It's important that we keep in mind that not everybody who studies computer science becomes a professional programmer, and you've offered us good food for thought.

    For what it's worth, pointers are fundamental for Von Neumann machines, which are very common in the computing world; your current machine and the machine serving this page are both Von Neumann. In such machines, memory doesn't just store data, but also instructions; the machine has an instruction pointer, which is a pointer referencing the currently-executing instruction in memory. So, if one wants to understand how a computer jumps from one instruction to another, then one must somewhat understand pointers.

  • And don't forget RTFM

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  • Yeah, some folks have trouble with pointers, and computer-engineering curricula are designed to discourage folks from taking third-year courses if pointers don't make sense. It's a stereotype for a reason. I'd love to know if there's an underlying psychological explanation, or if pointers are just...hard.

  • And don't forget RTFM

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  • Learn finance and bookkeeping; work for a bank. Software development is not lucrative; the high-paying jobs are fundamentally tough and cause burnout. Median employment at big software companies is maybe 2-3yrs and it will ruin your ability to relate to other humans.

  • Company forgets why they exist after 11-week migration to Kubernetes

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  • Lucky 10000: It's a pun. A quaver is a duration of a musical note in the UK, equivalent to a USA eighth note; a semidemihemiquaver is a sixtyfourth note, used to notate e.g. certain kinds of trumpet trills.

  • What if we added a social component like "Stories" to this calculator app?

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  • What if we added a social component like "Stories" to this calculator app?

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  • Free Software is literally communist.

  • I like seeing the numbers go up

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  • Nailed it. I think about this a lot: a sysadmin is basically a manager of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers. But management is a poor way of orchestrating human labor; small teams usually operate better without management. So, is there a better way to administer computer systems as well?

  • OpenD, a fork of D

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  • In this case, we are discussing the leadership of a community project; the leaders are the ones who set policy for the project. In this sense, yeah, it's a political situation.

    Given your username, I'm a little surprised that you wouldn't recognize that the leaders of community projects are politically important...

  • The Perfect Solution

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  • I'll be informal to boost your intuition. You know how a parser can reject invalid inputs? Parsers can be generated from grammars, so we can think of the grammars themselves as rejecting invalid inputs too. When we use a grammar for generation, every generated output will be a valid input when parsed, because the grammar can't build any invalid sentences (by definition!)

    For example, suppose we want to generate a JSON object. The grammar for JSON objects starts with an opening curly brace "{". This means that every parser which accepts JSON objects (and rejects everything else) must start by accepting "{". So, our generator must start by emitting a "{" as well. Since our language-modeling generators work over probability distributions, this can be accomplished by setting the probability of every token which doesn't start with "{" to zero.

  • The Perfect Solution

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  • Don't use OpenAI's outdated tools. Also, don't rely on prompt engineering to force the output to conform. Instead, use a local LLM and something like jsonformer or parserllm which can provably output well-formed/parseable text.

  • OpenD, a fork of D

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  • PLDI is political; in general, any sort of language-design process is political. This is because language is expressive and also constraining, so the expressible and easy-to-express concepts in any language are its de facto default policies.

    Social conservatives tend to produce languages which are patrician and sadistic in their demands upon their users; C and Go, D, Hoon and Nock, Hare, and V all come to mind. They see these languages as offering "choice" and power to the end-user, and see languages which have redundant structures and safety, like Ada or Pascal, as "bondage & discipline".

    You're likely familiar with the frustration of using designed-by-committee languages, too; say, C++ or Python. These systems tend to evolve social conservatism as a way of preventing an explosion of features, as happened to Perl and is happening to Rust.

    Hopefully this is good food for thought. Your choice of language is not politically neutral, but occurs within a social context and has policy implications. Work at a PHP shop for a few years and you'll suddenly care quite a bit about which languages you use!

  • OpenD, a fork of D

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  • Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.

    Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that "political stunts" had a "negative impact" on your planned development?