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prodigal_erik

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prodigal_erik
·10 anni fa·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
·10 anni fa·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
·10 anni fa·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
·14 anni fa·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
·15 anni fa·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.