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prodigal_erik

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prodigal_erik
·il y a 10 ans·discuss
A smart pointer is just a way to add custom behavior when it's created and destroyed. The question is what the smart pointer does. Usually the answer is update a reference count, which happens so frequently that it ends up being a lot more expensive (especially in bus bandwidth) than occasionally tracing live objects between long periods of useful work.
prodigal_erik
·il y a 10 ans·discuss
Knuth's code has bugs. NASA's code has bugs. There's no reason to believe that high quality software engineers even exist.
prodigal_erik
·il y a 10 ans·discuss
Viaweb used Lisp as their secret weapon, and pg and rtm rolled the money from the Yahoo acquisition into Y Combinator's first classes.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

Hacker News itself is written in a new Lisp dialect that resembles Scheme.

https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/lib/news.a...
prodigal_erik
·il y a 13 ans·discuss
He has been fired for cause. Best case is the victim (whose real name we should cease using in this affair) wins a ruinous lawsuit for long-term damage to his career, and Adria Richards is blackballed by the industry as vindictive and profoundly unsafe to have any kind of interaction with. But we know that nothing is going to happen.
prodigal_erik
·il y a 14 ans·discuss
TRS-80 Color Computer? That's what I learned 6809 assembly on around 1981, only to be startled how many little things were harder on the Commodore 64's 6502. The extra memory (64k after bank switching!) made up for it though.

I didn't have a multiprocessing platform until 1988 (4.3BSD at college). I wonder how much better I'd be now if I could have gotten my hands on OS-9 earlier.
prodigal_erik
·il y a 15 ans·discuss
I would prefer we avoid shooting the messengers. Even if there's an argument that EMTs should honor indelible express wishes, we can't have this debate with all of them simultaneously. We are being informed that many of the ones out there today will not, which never would have occurred to me, and knowing that has some value.
prodigal_erik
·il y a 17 ans·discuss
If you somehow prevent significant events like this from appearing on twitter, the net effect is that fewer people are aware of them. Is that the outcome you want?
prodigal_erik
·il y a 17 ans·discuss
Usenet was only predominant for about ten years. But programmers have been rejecting Lisp and the ideas behind it for nearly fifty. No matter how much we like it, it's not going to win. Think of it as your secret weapon à la pg.