pldrnt · HackerTrans

I've been working with FPGAs for 4 years and shortly on ASICs before that, did software in a previous life (and still do), do you have something specific in mind?

pldrnt

10 anni fadiscuss

Looking forward to where this goes... For work I had to implement arp, icmp, udp and our protocol on top of udp, for 10G ethernet, in an fpga, it would have been fun to add dhcp and tcp but the time and priority weren't there.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

My thoughts exactly, as someone who has spent quite some time creating a (usable and readable) LALR syntax that can do everything modern C++ does (plus named arguments, a null-coalescing operator and extension methods) and is currently writing a transpiler based on it, I hope more people share your concern :)

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

"Notation matters"

"If a language is useful, you will want to generate it by program"

well said

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

I read that paper a long time ago and it was certainly an inspiration :)

Originally, the language started out quite different but I can now see why SPECS looks the way it does, I do not agree with everything they did and my effort these days is towards making it simpler and smaller but there's some convergent evolution indeed.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

Yes, that is the idea.

Dealing with the preprocessor is a lost cause, so I just don't, the idea at the moment is to let the preprocessor do its thing and pipe the output into ctags (and if a better ctags comes out in the future it will be trivial to put that in instead), the result is not 100% perfect but is good enough to capture most of the declarations present in the included headers and make them visible to this language.

If a library absolutely requires preprocessor macros to be useable, someone will have to make equivalent hygienic macros in this language but at least you won't have to make a huge wrapper for everything.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

So, my after-work project these days is a language that transpiles to C++ and can do all that current C++ can do.

The grammar is completely regular, and the syntax maps 1:1 with the ast in memory, I can generate one from the other idempotently.

The main reason I am doing this is that I wanted a language that is easy to build tooling for (including of course code transformations) while being compatible with existing C++ libraries out there.

This kind of articles give me hope there might actually be demand for my crazy thing once it grows up.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

Incidentally, this is exactly what I am working on, grammar and parser are mostly done (the grammar is _regular_ and programs can rewrite themselves starting from their AST, because I really want something like `go fmt` one day), doing the transpiler at the moment, it's... interesting to say the least.

(it will be foss of course but nothing is published yet)

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

I work there.

It is indeed expensive but salaries can change wildly depending on your position.

I think I could afford to go out and eat out but I decided not to. This way I save money to bootstrap my own thing afterwards and I can find some free time to teach myself the skills I will need to do so.

The procedure to start a venture depends on the canton, expect to put in at least 10k to start, plus whatever the notarial fees will be. I do not think I will be incorporating here.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

For what it's worth, that is exactly one of the things I am building. Glad to read I am not the only one needing it.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

I wrote mine, but I track tasks and milestones rather than time spent.

Time tracking makes sense for freelancers and other people who bill by the hour but personally I tried rescuetime & co. and I do not see the point in knowing how long I was on facebook or how long I spent editing a particular file.

Milestones require manual input but I find that information much more relevant.

pldrnt

11 anni fadiscuss

This is EXACTLY what I needed right now for a project. Does it already have a module to do the equivalent of an lspci? If not, where would I have to look to learn how to implement such a feature?

pldrnt

12 anni fadiscuss

This hits home, I have spent many evenings designing a language that is semantically equivalent to C++ (in fact, it's made to transpile to C++11) but with a LALR grammar (using just flex and bison). Glad to read that none other than Rob Pike agrees with many design choices in my language :)

pldrnt

12 anni fadiscuss

I see it runs Linux, do you make the OS available?

pldrnt

12 anni fadiscuss

I've been tracking my work for over a year now with a tool similar to this and now I would not live without (I should finally package it up and ship it...)

Some ideas, you can do very nice things through bash autocompletion, for example:

- immediate jumping between timelines (I have hundreds, by topic-project-task and so on)

  $ tau jump proj tau<TAB><TAB>
  /projects/taulog
  /projects/taulog/android
  /projects/taulog/appengine
  ..and so on..

- autosuggest for todo lists:

  $ tau done<TAB><TAB>
  [ 1] setup JTAG probes
  [ 2] write script to control probe
  ..and so on..

And after you use this for a while you realize it can do more than manage log messages and todo lists, the same interaction can be used to quickly access bookmarks, reference material and local paths you often have to `cd` into :)

pldrnt

12 anni fadiscuss

Same here, good luck!

pldrnt

12 anni fadiscuss

Italian working in Switzerland here, I've also worked in France and Germany before, they're all very doable. I do not understand what OP is asking for, an obvious first step for a student would be to take a semester or more abroad, or finding an internship (I've done both, several times, and I suggest it wholeheartedly). OP, having a European passport gives you access to so many possibilities compared to millions of others that all you have to do is find someplace to go and leave.

pldrnt

13 anni fadiscuss

Whoa the price is... interesting, may I ask what has been your experience with pricing over 9 years and how you decided to set it at $45?

pldrnt

13 anni fadiscuss

I have up to four lists per task (tasks themselves form a hierarchy):

- todos: for the immediate future

- goals: for longer term objectives

- ideas: for spontaneous 'eureka' moments

- gotos: related bookmarks and local folders

Whenever I'm done with an item, it goes from the list into the task timeline where I journal all other progress.

I manage them all with a tool I wrote myself, called tau (shameless plug, http://signup.tau.la)

pldrnt

13 anni fadiscuss

I LOVE this question (and it's the first thing I usually ask to myself and to others) so:

- Study scientific papers by deconstructing them through a wiki-like interface.

- Filtering news feeds, automatically removing stories and tweets I don't care about.

- Keeping an updated journal for each of my projects in the fastest and least intrusive way.

- Learning languages by cutting and pasting single expressions from podcasts into a personal audio library.

- Aggregating my soundcloud, beatport, bandcamp, youtube and shoutcast 'likes' into a single cloud playlist.

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