I'm not professional physicist, just trying to understand modern physics, partly as a Koan, partly as a part of philosophical endeavor. I think that my view is similar to yours. I'd say that modern physics really needs vast refactor. To my amatheur mind, it's just a bunch of equations proved to be useful; however variables named after well defined and comprehensible terms, seems to mean nothing except that they seem to fit those equations (so they are not properly defined). This is really situation I never met studying any other science. I think there is something wrong with assumptions. That's usually the case when I'm caught in paradoxes or my code works strange. :)
Especially interesting point I'd love to read more is that "Because QM is a (the?) generalization of probability theory to involve complex numbers, whose squared absolute values are probabilities. It includes probability as a special case."
It seems similar to my situation. Probably I'm not as praised as you are and people do discuss with me, however everybody else seem slow and I feel I don't belong, because my thinking is totaly different and I can't do much about it, because verbal arguments seem not to work well (performance does, but it probably lead to problem you've described, that people stop to argue and take your words for granted). I practically never spend full time on working, I have a lot of time to learn which is awesome, but nevertheless it doesn't feel right.
I think that it's partialy right what @ctvo said "above average developer working at below average company" — that's why I'm looking for a new job more carefully. On the other hand, I think that it's not all in my case. I just happen to work as a programmer, it's just tiny part of my interests, so that most of the people seem very narrow minded (I don't judge them, it probably works for them, but not for me).
Maybe in more sophisticated company I would find better matches. On the other hand, as I don't care too much, my current situation has its advantages, because I can decouple self-development from work. This is good because I have some values I would like to implement and it seems they can't be achieved inside this system (because it's too specialized and my approach is too holistic), I need `f*k you money` so that I can act freely. For now, alienation at work is ok, as I'm quite introverted so I prefer to spend time alone in nature (that's why I work in countryside) and just from time to time I go to the city to party with my friends or play some games with my neighbour.
So along with "look for a new job", there is an "adapt" option. Just relax and think out of the box how to use this situation. You can reduce significance of your work and do stuff you please. It's ok to do this, because you are 10x dev so you need only 1/10 of your time to match your company. The only question is if you have what to do with remaining 9/10. :)
Of course, in the program like this. It's quite obvious that for a bigger program it would be much harder. I wouldn't use C for a big monolith system or if I had to, I would put much effort in diagnostic features.
I don't write professionaly C code. I use it for my purposes so debugging is easy. I agree that such a problem in a bigger system whithout ability to reproduce environment and debug would be very nasty. However that is matter of context. In bigger system it's more reasonable to buy more safety for price of simplicity, because I doubt any of competitors in the benchmark is as simple as C.
This is a very good point. Good testing, good programming practices, good logs are necessary. And it's not only about C. It's not so hard to do better than in Java. xD
Yes, I consider that memory management is the biggest problem with C. Always the question is what is more valueable to you: simplicity or memory management.
Is there any language that can save you from control tracing problem? I think that well made architecture is only solution. In fact I would say that C is easier in that respect (if you don't use goto), because all control flow is explicit. In other languages you have exceptions, polymorphism, implicit constructors, destructors (and their order in case of inheritance, templates, etc.
C is dead simple in that respect. If you can't write right concise code no language can help you. However of course, as C is more verbose it is more challanging to structure code well. And to some extend other language can help you move the point where control flow becomes a problem.
The biggest problem in C programming for me is memory management, but maybe it's just a lack of experience. Certainly C++ is convenient with smart pointers and automaticall called destructors.
Anyway, i didn't consider big project a scope here. I wouldn't write realy big programs in wine. I would try to create as small independent parts as possible.
Everything is matter of price. Such an error is nobrainer actually, because just before I get an error message. If I don't know that yet, I run on gdb and everything's clear. Couple of seconds. How manyof them I have to do to ballance learning a new language(and I'm not sure if I like it eventually)? If I was a system software developer, that would probably be a good choice. I program mostly in high level languages, so maybe not. :)
There is missing NULL check, but it doesn't crash, because the function would get nonexistent filename only if filesystem driver would do something strange (or file would be deleted just between readdir and fopen). xD
I also noticed, that I don't close files and directories. Not a big deal, because fully functional and 100% correct program wasn't the goal here. :)
EDIT: Actually fopen would return NULL when file is not readable. My bad. Anyway, such problems are trivial to debug.
Nice and clear article. I like an idea of looking at quality of the process and not only the product. It was pleasant to read.
I didn't like that C itself was missing, because C is still my language of choice for some tasks and I still use it because I'm happy about it, I don't feel I would need any of its competitors. Maybe if this benchmark included C it would be some argument to give them a try. So I decided to do it for you.
It took me 30 minutes, only change is that I don't check if file is binary, I guess. I liked that I was doing it in C because I know it and I'm comfortable with it. Few checks in man and everything's clear. Only disadvantage of C is that it doesn't have standard API for directories, so my code is only for POSIX. Here's the code: https://github.com/BartekLew/dumbgrep
The other thing are sources you've done. They are almost the same (it'd be nice to see the more feeling of the language, idiomatic code, etc.) and I didn't like reading them at all, not a clean code and all are longer than my C code.
Another thing is that C has very narrow application nowadays. A benchmark should be focussed on them and not on generic algorithms.
Sometimes I used old computers because they appeared functional enough. Not so long ago I used a computer from late 2000s and it was a quite normal user experience on Linux (on lightweight window manager of course) with a small exception of web browser. Amount of scripts and data on modern sites caused problems, made whole OS hang often. If only JS was turned off, no problem.
First you have to choose your flavor. If you want to use JVM, probably clojure. Otherwise Scheme, Common Lisp and Racket. Scheme is rather minimalistic, Common Lisp is very functional and Racket is the most modern one I guess. I ended up with Common Lisp and I rather don't look for change. SBCL is implementation I use and like it. Probably the best one and quite portable.
Emacs seems the best choice for Lisp, since it is scripted in Lisp and it's best adapted to it probably. However when I started, I was already so used to vim that I kept going with it. Maybe not the best option, but it's ok, maybe just a little bit more effort to automatize some stuff.
If you choose Common Lisp, this is probably the best book for start: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ . Anyway be prepared, Lisp is not easy to grasp at first, but as soon you do, you will probably love it and appreciate way it is. :)
Amazing, just amazing. Thanks alot. I would only suggest author to set og:image in your pages. When you share it on social media no image appears, you know how does it affect spreading, right? :)
For me, the biggest boost lately was Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan, Antifragile. He's a real philosopher in a sense that he addresses real world problems instead on messing with theory. He's an insightful practitioner who builds proper terms to describe phenomena he observes and follow consequences. For me, his books were not only very inspiring because of its messsage (not popular, but seems very true, using terms he proposes contributed much to my understanding of the world), but set a good example of forming a good base for finding out stuff. He's inspiring, because he has similar interests to me, especially cognitive biases and he shows with his success that you can refuse to do bull*t people do nowadays and be successful. Plus, he's much into Probability Theory, so he's a good choice for an engineer who prefer mathematics over more social stuff.
I would also recommend The Structure of Science Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), very important book to understand how science works, what are its limitations, how should we treat scientific facts. It also show very nature of learning about world (it's not lineary incremental like most people think). It also emphasize that there is always quite a lot of dogma in science (you need some assumptions that can't be really proved right, only wrong if you dwell on it and eventually fail). If you are interested in modern science belief system and what are stuff it can't explain (according to Kuhn, any science paradigm has smaller or bigger blind spot), it's quite well explained in The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.
If you are interested in nature of non-linearity of learning, what were steps in forming human's worldview, I think Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West make a good point. I can't say for sure, because I have only started (it's very long, 1500 pages), but I definitely like the guy. :)
Especially interesting point I'd love to read more is that "Because QM is a (the?) generalization of probability theory to involve complex numbers, whose squared absolute values are probabilities. It includes probability as a special case."