masak · HackerTrans

4 years agodiscuss

I'm curious how this sentiment of pg's rhymes with his two languages, Arc and Bel. As a person who has written a Bel implementation, I find one of the traits the language has is that it's trying to be "straightforward" in the same way spoken language is.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

Fun side note on this:

Bel's macros are definitely macros and not Kernel-style operatives. Here is a comparison, for clarity:

(A) Bel's macros do a syntax->syntax transformation, but this expansion happens (according to the spec) in the evaluator, after concluding that the operator is a macro and not a function. (B) In the greater Lisp-and-Scheme tradition, macros do a syntax->syntax transformation, but at compile time. (Usually after "read" but before "eval".) In this sense, they are small compilers themselves. (This puts limitations on macros: they have to be "statically visible" in the code. You can't late-compute a macro at runtime in this system.) (C) Kernel's operatives do a syntax->"side effect" transformation, at that same late stage as Bel's macros. Kernel operatives are essentially functions, except that the evaluation of the operands (syntax) into arguments (values) has been suppressed. In this sense, operatives are small interpreters.

If an (A) macro is well-behaved, you can often "optimize" it either to a (B) form or a (C) form. In my Bel implementation, it took me ages to notice that I could do the latter. I documented it here: https://github.com/masak/alma/issues/302#issuecomment-992556...

masak

5 years agodiscuss

Hooray! Another Bel implementation!

As someone who is on their third year of Bel implementation -- getting there -- I recognize many of the insights in this post about continuations and about the well-chosen Bel built-ins. Great work, and thanks for writing this post.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

As a westerner living in mainland China, I might be able to weigh in on this. China's data does indeed look hard to believe from basically anywhere outside of China (and New Zealand). I don't expect to sway anyone who doesn't want to be swayed.

But I can say this: (a) there really is a pervasive nationwide effort to track and trace, which affects everybody and everything, and (b) the minor outbreaks that do happen get shard pretty faithfully on social media -- even if there is also censorship, it seems it's not as fast as the grassroots spread of news.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

Neither the type system of C++ nor the type system of TS is sound, in the sense of "the type system rejects all incorrect programs".

If what you meant by "strong" is just "you can declare types on variables", then both TS and C++ qualify as strong, but JS doesn't.

Your use of the word is based on feeling, not fact. Which was my point.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

This reply is a good example of how "strongly typed" ends up meaning practically nothing -- except possibly "the kind of type system I prefer".

I once attended a talk where the speaker had identified half a dozen axes that papers or projects were calling "strong"/"weak" with relation to type systems. Some were not even consistent with themselves, switching definitions halfway.

Type systems are tools, whose formal properties can be described and analyzed in precise detail. Unfortunately, that kind of precision is hard, so semantically empty words like "strong" get used a lot instead. This message is intended to raise awareness about that fact.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

The two behaviors don't seem very related.

In `if a == b == c`, the value of `b` is evaluated only once, even if `b` is in fact a bigger/side-effecting expression, and `c` might not be evaluated at all.

In `a = b = c`, the `c` is evaluated first, and then `a` and `b` are assigned to, left-to-right.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

If I may be so bold as to recommend my in-progress Bel implementation: https://github.com/masak/bel

Caveat: I'm still working towards being able to recommend Bel _unconditionally_, not just for small programs. Right now you'll experience unreasonable slowness, terse/uninformative error messages, and missing documentation -- probably in that order. All of those are being addressed. But already today, it's fun to play with.

masak

5 years agodiscuss

He's poking fun at himself with the whole "programming has never been my forté" -- the fact that he kept count of all the bugs in TEX and METAFONT is the amazing thing.

At the risk of stating the obvious, iTeX is not a real successor of TeX, it's a deliberately-vaporware joke.

masak

6 years agodiscuss

I know the Swedish like to repeat that there is no second wave like in the other European countries, but... I've been looking at this graph for the past few weeks: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr...

Now, it might be that the new cases this time are less severe, I don't know. But it's a second wave.

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