_jyty · HackerTrans

As someone who isn't in academia, I've heard of this being a problem before, but in the context of research related to computer science, it seems like private research at companies like Microsoft might be better for such research. A lot of interesting research comes from Microsoft, and I don't think they have a problem of over-incentivizing the speed of research publication. That said, I'm not in academia (and have never done research) nor employed by Microsoft; I'm an undergraduate in computer science. Just speculating. Do you think this could be plausible, or is it way off?

_jyty

3년 전discuss

That's what I mean; it's often easier to use a font that doesn't have ligatures (like the NL variant) than to use a font with ligatures and hope your editor lets you disable ligatures.

_jyty

3년 전discuss

If you have a lot of different symbols, it makes sense that ligatures would help to distinguish them more easily. So, ligatures for Haskell symbols also probably help, since there are so many infix operators in Haskell. There are also a bunch of old papers that showcase Haskell code and use the ligature representation of its operators.

However, most programming languages really just have a few symbols: arithmetic operators (+, -, /, *), comparison operators (<, >, <=, >=), and logical operators (&&, ||, !). C also has bitwise operators (~, &, |). It's already easy enough to distinguish these without ligatures, so the benefit is negligible here, IMO. I prefer to go without ligatures, because I have no trouble remembering or distinguishing them, and, like someone else mentioned, I find ligatures in a monospace font kind of weird (how they morph into a two column character when you write them, and turn back to a one column character when you delete half of it).

_jyty

3년 전discuss

>"Rust is so hard to learn that the AI doesn’t get it" is a bad place to be for rust.

I don't think this is really a big point against Rust; in my experience, ChatGPT doesn't write good code in general.

To be honest, I think Rust's borrow checker won't seem very hard if you've used C++ smart pointers before, which are like Rust's references/Box<T>s, but there's no borrow checker. The borrow checker just formalizes and enforces existing good practice for using pointers in C and C++, and makes sure they're followed 100% of the time unless specifically opted out of.

What actually seems more interesting to me than Rust is the ATS language. Rather than a borrow checker, you have proof objects that you pass around with pointers (and these proof objects exist only at compile time), which prove to the compiler that the pointer has a valid address. What's cool is that you can do things like pointer arithmetic in a type safe way. The downside is that it's more verbose than either C or Rust. I'm still trying to learn it.

_jyty

3년 전discuss

Compared side-by-side, Aptos looks rounder and less square, and it has more natural looking curves.

The problem is that differences in fonts are kind of subtle when their goals are very similar. Both Roboto and Aptos seem like they're trying to be high x-height grotesque sans serif fonts. They're going to look similar to some other font, because there are so many in that category already.

(However, the capitals of Aptos remind me more of Gill Sans than of Helvetica, so I guess it's not strictly grotesque.)

_jyty

3년 전discuss

When they refer to Swisss typography, they're likely referring to the International Typographic Style, which is also known as the Swiss Style (it's on Wikipedia). It's a style of graphic design. It typically uses a Grotesque sans serif font, like Helvetica or Univers (as opposed to a humanist sans serif).

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