phr

15 years agodiscuss

Last time I looked, MacPorts had a more paranoid approach to dependencies. That can be good and bad. Homebrew can be easier to use, until you run into a corner case that trips it up. MacPorts can be frustrating in how many dependencies it will insist on installing its own version even though the system-provided version might have worked.

I've gone back and forth. For a while homebrew could install a working GHC for me while I wasn't having any luck with MacPorts. Later something else caused me to switch back to MacPorts. Neither is perfect. Even MacPorts only allows dependencies at the package level, without regard to variants, or versions, if I recall correctly.

phr

15 years agodiscuss

Intriguing idea.

Extending it to absurdity:

All functions should be stored in a searchable key/value database, where the key is a cryptographically signed canonical representation of the function source code. By "canonical representation" I mean a translation to a canonical form of the lambda calculus, so as to capture the complete meaning unambiguously.

This database would, of course, translate the lambda calculus to erlang, lisp, haskell, php, what-have-you, on demand at the view layer.

Metadata would need to be extensive, but we could crowd-source that Wikipedia-fashion.

phr

15 years agodiscuss

Wooden boat building is a lot of fun, and doesn't have to take a lot of space. There are kits available for beautiful kayaks and such that people have built in their apartments. Be sure to plan how to get it out of the house if you build something bigger inside :) Also, beware of potentially toxic chemicals. Some wood dust (cedar) is dangerous.

phr

15 years agodiscuss

Steve Yegge says every programmer should be a fast, accurate, touch-typist:

  http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

I couldn't find his minimum-speed prescription, just now, but he does say 70 words a minute is easily obtainable for anyone with two hands.

phr

15 years agodiscuss

When receiving criticism, I should do as you say, and assume my mistakes are the target, not my (oh so sensitive) self. But when handing out criticism, I should assume the other person will take it personally. It's like that principal for Internet robustness: be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept.

phr

15 years agodiscuss

If, like me, you have heard bits and pieces about McLuhan, but never delved deeper, the 20 minute introduction by Tom Wolfe is well worth your time.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I thought EMC bought VMWare?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I can't judge how useful the data-mining stuff is, but there's some nice Lisp code in there. Simple, powerful, and makes it look easy.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

If you own several different media properties like this guy, is it a good strategy to incorporate each one separately, to keep an unintentional Adsense TOS violation from affecting all the others?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

Any thoughts on Heroku, now that you have some paid experience with it?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

16/19: No surprise that I missed php and groovy, but I should have guessed fortran. I read somewhere that Backus was involved in the early stages of the functional programming language movement, and got sidetracked by that. He is also the B in BNF, of course.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

Same on Mac Safari. Webkit bug?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

A cancel button?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

Very cool.

I didn't see a link to back out of the page for adding a component, for example a hard drive, other than the browser back button of course. Maybe it's there and I'm blind?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I'm also strongly against drug use, and think society should discourage it through education.

On the other hand, the war on drugs is destroying Mexico, and is not stopping drug use here in the States. I just don't think we can afford the drug war's costs (social, foreign policy, and monetary) any more. If you can't teach your kids to stay off drugs, I'm sorry, but they're on their own, as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: I don't live in California, and haven't looked at Prop 19 in detail.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I'd rather see a fairly low karma and a few weeks or months account age thresholds, but then I'm biased, being mostly a lurker here.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

Several comments mention the upcoming intersection as if crossing traffic were likely. It is actually a classic cloverleaf. Search google maps for Renton Washington and look for highway 167, where the incident occurred, and its intersection with I-405. I haven't been over there for several months, so I'm not sure how up-to-date the satellite view is, but it looks right to me.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

Two questions:

1) What is best for my business?

The answer may well mean sticking with a flawed technology that nonetheless is serving the business well. Remember there is still lots of COBOL chugging away.

2) What is best for me?

If it's my business, but I'm sick of PHP and would like to switch to Ruby, Lisp, Haskell, whatever, it might be better to sell the business and start a new one based on the new language, rather than risk a rewrite. Isn't that part of the freedom being a founder was supposed to buy?

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I have to agree that the higher-education bubble is just as cruel in its way as the real estate bubble was. Please don't let yourself rot away at your parents' house: work on open source projects, build a web app, do some on-your-own learning, etc.

phr

16 years agodiscuss

I remember when "structured programming" was the new silver bullet all the guru's were talking about. This must have been the late 70's or early 80's. I was programming in DEC Basic-Plus on the RSTS/E operating system on a PDP-11. All variables were global, as I recall. We had subroutines and user defined functions with arguments but no local variable scope. We had if-then-else, but I think only a single statement was allowed for the "then" branch, so the cleanest way was often "if condition then gosub 1000 else gosub 2000" or something like that. A lot of the legacy code I had to work with was classic spaghetti-code with goto for flow control. Oh, I think we had only single-character variable names. Those were the days.

But I worked out how to adopt the new structured style to the limitations of the language, and learned a lot. Better languages make better tools, of course, but it's the hacker's attitude that really matters.

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