b3morales · HackerTrans

8 months agodiscuss

As one who was interested by Nim and tried it out for some personal projects, I found that this was the biggest problem with the project. There's several options for any given need (including internal tools like LSP or installing the compiler) with very little clear way to choose between them. Each will have different (dis)advantages that you must discover primarily by digging through forum posts or GitHub issues.

In some ways it's the sign of a very strong language, like the curse of Lisp: someone can easily just write their own version of whatever they need. But as a user trying to navigate the ecosystem it is frustrating. I do keep meaning to try it out again though; the language itself is very pleasant to use.

b3morales

4 years agodiscuss

> changing history on an (upstream) PR hurts the review experience e.g. comments on lost commits.

It does, but this is specifically a weakness of GitHub's UI, not of the process itself. It's handled better by other tools.

b3morales

4 years agodiscuss

> Many developers don't have the knowledge or confidence to use "amend" etc. consciously,

The secondary problem here is that GitHub (just to throw another complaint on the pile about GitHub) makes a dog's breakfast of tracking PR comments when things have changed. Amending and force pushing only seems to make it worse, so even though it should be the better workflow, it causes friction in a different place.

b3morales

4 years agodiscuss

As I said

> Of course you can take your code and license it to said employer in whatever way you both agree on.

but that's likely to be a manual step with a lot of raised eyebrows, frowns, and questions involved.

b3morales

4 years agodiscuss

I think the parent is alluding to a situation where their employer has copyright for the code written on the job. If you take your own previously-written code and just "submit" it to the codebase, you've created a legal snafu for yourself if you ever want to use that same code again elsewhere.

Of course you can take your code and license it to said employer in whatever way you both agree on. But this is going to be much easier if the code is already publicly available to everyone, with a known license: the employer doesn't need to even care really who the author is, just the license.

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

Imagine a parallel situation. There is a type `NonEmptySet`, with an `intersection` operation. Now, given `NonEmptySet(1, 2).intersection(NonEmptySet(3, 4))`, and the requirement that `intersection` produces another `NonEmptySet` what does that return? How about a set containing everything except 1, 2, 3, 4? Does that seem reasonable? That's analagous to what `(unsigned)3 - (unsigned)4` does.

In short, the operations on `unsigned int` do not really behave like "non-negative integer"; as such it's a weird match to use them for that purpose.

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

Same here, I was never a proponent of the dot syntax. As we know, compiler development at Apple got taken over at some point by C++ people, and we can all see the results: https://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/remove-features-for-grea...

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

This is in fact how @property works; the declaration is sugar for a pair of accessor methods. The dot syntax is sugar for calling those methods.

    #include <Foundation/Foundation.h>

    @interface Foo : NSObject
    @property (copy) NSString *bar;
    @end

    @implementation Foo
    @end

    int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
        Foo *foo = [Foo new];
        [foo setBar:@"Hello, world!"];
        NSLog(@"%@", [foo bar]);
        return 0;
    }

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

> the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.

Only if the rate stays there permanently, which is unlikely. Over the span of a century or two, some population contraction might actually be good for overall survival.

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

Can you explain why you think this is covered by fair use? It seems to me to be

1a) commercial

1b) non-transformative: in order to be useful, the produced code must have the same semantics as some code in the training set, so this does not add "a different character or purpose". Note that this is very different from a "clean room" implementation, where a high-level design is reproduced, because the AI is looking directly at the original code!

2) possibly creative?

3) probably not literally reproducing input code

4) competitive/displacing for the code that was used in the input set

So failing at least 3 out of 5 of the guidelines. https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/index.html

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

> jump back with my C-x stuff like I do with M-. and M-, - any emacs people have suggestions on how to do that?

Using builtin commands, `C-x <left>` will switch to the previous buffer if you've jumped to another file, or `C-u C-SPC` (popping the mark) should work if you're in the same file. Not sure if this is sufficient for you, but it's a simple option to try.

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

Also "if the code is clear, it documents itself". Which in my opinion completely misses the point. Good documentation doesn't tell you what the code is doing, it tells you why it's not doing something else.

b3morales

5 years agodiscuss

I think there's an element of pridefulness too, in having the ability to manage dense and intricate stuff at all. They're very smart, and it makes them feel good to be able exercise that and juggle and retain so much context at once. And they don't realize how fragile that juggling is, that it's going to take a ton of effort for them or other people to come back to it.

I think this is more prevalent for some languages/stacks than others, too; there's definitely a cultural aspect fostered the language owners or whoever the leaders are.