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wduquette

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wduquette
·hace 12 días·discuss
Re: Java classes called "SimpleFoo": that's usually because `Foo` is an abstract class or interface, and `SimpleFoo` is the version you actually use most of the time, unless you absolutely have to implement a `MyReallyComplexFoo` for some specific purpose.
wduquette
·hace 12 días·discuss
I remember the golden age of dial-up Bulletin Board Systems. I remember the golden age of Usenet. I remember the golden age of blogs. I remember the golden--well, silver--age of FaceBook and Twitter.

Things tarnish. New things pop up to replace them. I'm currently witnessing the tarnishing of Substack.

It was ever thus; so shall it be.
wduquette
·hace 13 días·discuss
And then, along with economic bubbles you also get moral panics. Seen a bunch of those in my time as well. It's a similar thing.
wduquette
·hace 13 días·discuss
Yes, but the term "Bubble" comes from the South Sea Bubble.
wduquette
·hace 13 días·discuss
Excellent book. The high point for me was the enterprising fellow who set up a stall in London during the South Sea Bubble (the original bubble!), allowing people to invest in "An undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." People lined up for a couple of days to give the fellow their money...after which the fellow disappeared, never to be seen again. No lies detected!
wduquette
·hace 24 días·discuss
Yes, that’s what we had too. I loved that machine. What was the incantation? 104799L, or something like that?
wduquette
·hace 25 días·discuss
Yes. It brings the experience of playing a text adventure to writing a text adventure.
wduquette
·hace 25 días·discuss
I've spent time with various versions of Inform, and bounced off of Inform 7 fairly hard, for the same reasons that I bounced off of AppleScript years ago: it's a read-only language. Which is to say, the English phrases you use read well...but are hard to remember and hard to look up.

I'm sure it's possible to become highly fluent if you use it a lot, but I'd much prefer something that didn't use English prose for logic and control.
wduquette
·hace 26 días·discuss
Heathkit sold an LSI-11 as a kit; my father built one in the mid-70's. I learned BASIC, a bit of Fortran, a bit of PDP-11 assembler, and Pascal on that machine. We started with paper type, and eventually moved up to dual 8" floppies. We started with 16K of memory, IIRC, and ended with 28K.

Been a programmer ever since, me.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
I've been a WordPress user for years. I don't want integrated AI. Sure hope I'll be able to ignore it.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
"You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools."

I've long regarded myself as more a master craftsman than an engineer, and I've had the pleasure of working on one-of-a-kind or first-of-a-kind things. Perhaps fortunately I'm near retirement. But I genuinely enjoy the coding: it's how I engage with the problem and learn to understand it. It's also how I ensure that I'll be able to read the code and find things in the code base when I come back to it years later. Last thing I want to do is spend my days overseeing someone (or something) else's code. If I wanted to be a manager of programmers I could have done that years ago.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Yes, the Volcano View. We planned to add a new area just past it, but as I say we ran out of memory.

I've no idea where the version we started with would fall in the family tree, but this would have been ~1979, and the OS was HT-11, Heathkit's version of RT-11 for their H11 computer kit. So far as I know there was nothing special about it, except that it had been ported to RT-11 on the PDP-11.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
We had a copy of the Fortran source for the PDP-11 when I was a teenager. My buddy and I managed to add a room: in the first room of the Maze of Twisty Little Passages All The Same, if you gave the command "out" (as one tried), you discovered that you were "Nowhere". "There is nothing in all directions." You could then enter "in" to go back to the Maze, or "get nothing" to add "nothing" to your inventory.

There was a place in another room where your way was blocked by lava; our plan was to let you drop the "nothing" on the lava, and proceed, but we had run out of memory. (28K max!)
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
I had an instructor require these in a programming class in the early 80's. I've never seen them used in practice.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
I know that to be true because the other group members talked about it with my daughter, and were honestly surprised at how much difference not using AI made. She has another group member who’s a slacker. But not all of them.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.

If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.
wduquette
·hace 2 meses·discuss
Obligatory reference to Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: a form of water ice that freezes at a high temperature.