EdwardCoffin

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

On the other hand, the bars have to be cut no matter which strategy one uses, so this criticism of not being able to cut the bars into exactly equal pieces applies equally to the other strategies.

This Egyptian strategy definitely does have a property of being easier to reason about, and one doesn't have to contend with complaints of say losing out on small amounts of metal around the cuts when one is given three smaller bars that put end-to-end are as long as another, but whose internal mating surfaces don't match up exactly.

EdwardCoffin

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I think it was C+@ (pronounced CAT, as I recall).

Edit: pasting a comment of mine from here in 2019 [1]:

The language is C+@ [2]. I dug up an article about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal, the October 1993 issue. This does not seem to be the article I am remembering, since it does not go into the instruction interleaving technique anywhere near as much as I remember, but they do mention it and say it was called "beading":

The binaries produced by the C+@ compiler are independent of the underlying machine architecture. Without recompiling, applications can be moved from SPARC to 68000 to Intel x86, and so on. C+@ is not interpretive--the binaries are encoded using a sophisticated 'beading' technique developed at Bell Labs. Because of the streamlined language design, the C+@ compiler produces these portable binaries with extraordinary speed, without the need for preprocessing or front ends.

This is from the article's introduction:

The C+@ programming language, an object-oriented language derived from AT&T Bell Lab's Calico programming language, was developed to provide programmers with a true object-based language and development environment. C+@ (pronounced "cat") has the syntax of C and the power of Smalltalk. Unlike C++, C+@ includes a mature class library with more than 350 classes used throughout the system. The C+@ compiler itself is written in C+@, and all of the source for the class libraries is included with development systems. The Calico project was started at AT&T Bell Labs in the early '80s, after the introduction of Smalltalk and at the same time as C++. Calico was originally used for rapid prototyping of telecommunication services; hence, its heavy emphasis on keeping the language syntax simple and showcasing the power of the graphical development environment.*

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583430

[2] https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/C%2b%40

EdwardCoffin

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

I use one much like this four or five times a day, and have none of the problems described. I fill it through the spout though, so never have to remove the lid.

EdwardCoffin

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

This makes me think of Bane's rule, described in this comment here [1]:

Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single machine first.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739

EdwardCoffin

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Though I was confident this was just a metaphor, I did try cracking a walnut using this method. I submerged three walnuts in a jar with some tap water, and let them sit for three years before trying to open them.

It was a let-down: they were easier to open, but certainly not by hand, I still had to use a nutcracker. They smelled bad, too. I did not try eating them.

EdwardCoffin

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

In the same vein is the talk Pathological Physics: Tales from 'The Box' [1] which talks about various physics papers written by amateurs and sent in to the physics department at the university the speaker was in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXSgp755DSA

EdwardCoffin

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.

EdwardCoffin

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

>> ‘It was the development environment’

> No, it wasn’t.

I kind of think it was. The best argument I think is embodied in Kent Pitman's comments in this usenet thread [1] where he argues that for the Lisp Machine romantics (at least the subset that include him) what they are really referring to is the total integration of the software, and he gives some pretty good examples of the benefits they bring. He freely admits there's not any reason why the experience could not be reproduced on other systems, it's that it hasn't been that is the problem.

I found his two specific examples particularly interesting. Search for

    * Tags Multiple Query Replace From Buffer

and

    * Source Compare

which are how he introduced them. He also describes "One of the most common ways to get a foothold in Genera for debugging" which I find pretty appealing, and still not available in any modern systems.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/XpvUwF2xKbk/m/X...

EdwardCoffin

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2]

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758

EdwardCoffin

vor 8 Monatendiscuss

In a similar vein is this 2003 post in an MIT discussion forum by Scott McKay [1].

I'd also highly recommend that anyone interested in this kind of thing listen to all three of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series panels from 2001: runtime [2], language design [3], and compilation [4]

Note that though these are videos, there isn't that much compelling in the visual portion, you could easily rip them to audio files and lose little.

[1] https://libarynth.org/fifty_questions_for_a_prospective_lang...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LG-RtcSYUQ

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agw-wlHGi0E

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7viw2KXak

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. I don't have a link, but I am sure he has talked about it elsewhere too.

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1]

[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt about it, from an interview he did with CNN [1]:

CNN: Would you like to live in the Culture [the society he has created]?

Iain M. Banks: Good grief yes, heck, yeah, oh it's my secular heaven ... Yes, I would, absolutely. Again it comes down to wish fulfillment. I haven't done a study and taken lots of replies across a cross-section of humanity to find out what would be their personal utopia. It's mine, I thought of it, and I'm going home with it -- absolutely, it's great.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/15/iain.banks/ind...

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

If caches have a place in a file storage format, they should at least be optional and separate from mandatory content, and I got the impression from the critique that they were neither.

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

I think the point of the criticism I read was that the edit should have worked. There is no reason why the opaque mess following what was obviously a definition of the contents of the spreadsheet should even be there let alone be dependent on the original contents of the cells.

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Monatendiscuss

I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 containing the formula A1+B1. That spreadsheet was saved, the file opened in an editor which showed the values of the cells, and A1 changed to something else, say 3. This broke the spreadsheet, as there were all sorts of knock-on effects contained in the virtually opaque mess that followed the cell contents.

I've probably got the details wrong, but that was the gist of it. I'd love to rediscover the analysis, but my searches have not yielded it.

EdwardCoffin

vor 11 Monatendiscuss

If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a tape recorder in his interviews with subjects, and from this article about McPhee's method, I learned that McPhee does not either. I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought for such deep research one would want a recording to refer back to, but both seem to feel that the drawbacks of influencing their subjects outweigh their benefit.

EdwardCoffin

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

My impression was that with this part he was trying to come up with his own version of the fantasy trope of different races with different characteristics (orcs, elves, men, etc), and imagining a situation that could produce such.

EdwardCoffin

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Was it in The Future of Reading [1] perhaps? From page 6:

In a very different approach, most music and sports learning only has contact with a one on one expert once or twice a week, lots of individual practice, group experiences where “playing” is done, and many years of effort. This works because most learners really have difficulty absorb ing hours of expert instruction every week that may or may not fit their capacities, styles, or rhythms. They are generally much better off spending a few hours every day learning on their own and seeing the expert for assessment and advice and play a few times a week.

A few universities use a process like this for academics—sometimes called the “tutorial system”, they include Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.

[1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/future_of_reading.pdf