gloob · HackerTrans

12 lat temudiscuss

> So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this.

Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."

gloob

12 lat temudiscuss

It's okay for you to be wrong about something.

gloob

12 lat temudiscuss

It's unclear to me whether you want "to write a program" or to "get the maximum out of Haskell". Those are two very different goals.

gloob

13 lat temudiscuss

But first, how about we let capital usurp the political system for its own ends? That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

gloob

13 lat temudiscuss

I, too, feel that perfectly uniform brace positioning is one of the critical technical challenges facing any new language today. There is no longer any excuse to get such an important and fundamental advance wrong.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

By that standard, geometric population growth is killing people.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

I agree with you entirely and unreservedly. The scare quotes in my comment were to poke fun at the idea that a person who holds a set of racist opinions is somehow not a racist.

I do maintain that it is, in some sense, a "reasonable" position for a racist to be more offended by incivility than by racism. Not ideal, or even good, but certainly understandable.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

To be fair, that's a reasonable position for a person who's "not really racist, but holds opinions that they concede certainly sound racist when said out loud".

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

Or row.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but...

How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

I look forward to being convinced that housing and car manufacturing are more stable and resilient than services.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

Given that the entire website this article lives on is about roguelikes, and the author is also the developer of a roguelike (Unangband), I imagine he is likely aware of the history of randomly generated levels.

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

Is it normal business practice to use ultimatums instead of negotiation?

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

I agree that, when we are talking about high-level languages, I prefer ones that will transparently convert integers to bignum when required. I'm just replying to the contention that (paraphrased) "this is a bug in PHP's handling of floating point numbers".

gloob

14 lat temudiscuss

This sort of thing is an intrinsic property of floating point math. It has limited precision. When the numbers get sufficiently large, that precision is insufficient to distinguish successive integers. That is to say, this is symptomatic of PHP implementing floating point stuff correctly.

This is what ghci (Haskell) says:

  Prelude> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
  False
  Prelude> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
  True

This is what Python says:

  >>> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
  False
  >>> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
  True

Here is what SBCL (Common Lisp) says:

  * (= 9223372036844775807 9223372036844775808)
  NIL
  * (= 9223372036844775807.0 9223372036844775808.0)
  T

Lua:

  > print(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
  true (!!!!!)
  > print(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
  true

Javascript:

  alert(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
  true (!!!!!)
  alert(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
  true

Other languages that will also do this[1]: Javascript, Lua. Languages that won't: anything with actual, honest-to-god integers, and not floats or doubles masquerading as them.[2] Languages that actually handle numbers sensibly: Lisp.[3] I'm not familiar with any others that actually treat rational numbers like rational numbers, but I expect there are some. (It's still, of course, impossible to treat real numbers like real numbers, meaning that this sort of thing will also happen there.)

[1] Well, not the string-to-number bit, but whatever.

[2] Except for the niggle that they'll still do this when you're using floating point numbers, because this is what floating point numbers do.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_tower

gloob

15 lat temudiscuss

Is there a "canonical" justification for why the US legislative system allows non-germane additions to a bill? Or is ball-of-mud style legislation the norm due to tradition, rather than some philosophical ideal?

gloob

15 lat temudiscuss

You get downvoted a lot. shrugs

gloob

15 lat temudiscuss

The correct response to that saying is to point out that regular expressions are significantly simpler than general-purpose, Turing-complete programming languages.

gloob

15 lat temudiscuss

If you haven't seen Trusting Trust already, you should read it: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html . It's short and smart.

The brief summary is, of course, you can almost never really know "logically what's happening", even in nice reliable languages like Java or Python or Haskell or Ruby or C.[0]

The easy solution (and the one that every working programmer makes every day) is to say: well, let's assume that the compiler is non-malicious and has relatively few bugs that will impact me. That's a fair response.

Next we run into the fact that just because you call a function, and that function happens to be called add(x,y), doesn't actually mean that the function will return the sum of x and y. In the absence of further evidence, it could be an HTTP server or fill your hard drive with infinite copies of Das Kapital or anything at all. The normal solutions proposed to this are (1) read the documentation, or (2) read the code. Those are both workable solutions.

Then macros come into the picture. I fail to see how the already-heavily-used techniques of (1) reading documentation and (2) reading the implementation of the macro, which seem to be at least tolerable and mostly workable with functions suddenly fall apart with macros.

[0] C and C++ have the preprocessor and macros anyway, which "change your program logically...prior to compilation", so I won't mention them further in this comment.

comments