How do people think? Co-inventor of Self, which influenced JavaScript. Also sped up Java, Python. Animation for screens. Reality? How to be useful now?
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Joined October 2011
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I think what I’m doing now is hector coding. I ask the SI to add something to my app, and then I repeatedly hector it till the code is decent. It is good at refactoring.
David Ungar retweeted
Joking aside, there is no one alive who writes about the classics with such simplicity and depth as @SpencerKlavan. Reading him on the Greeks is like reading Sowell on Economics. Clarity that puts the pseudo-scientific jargon of academia to shame. This piece is a joy.
“Aratus’s most brilliant insight was that the world, like a poem, is inexhaustibly layered with hidden meaning.”
Read “A phenomenal poet,” by Spencer A. Klavan.@SpencerKlavan
newcriterion.com/article/a-p…
In this morning’s after party, there was a discussion about free will. What I like to say is that I have no choice but to believe in free will. @OwenGregorian #afterparty
Clarifying: Flattening a linked data structure into an array, using indices for pointers. That's *all* you could do in FORTRAN. I wrote cross-assemblers for TI minicomputers that way in 1975.
Be thoughtful when applying a theoretical result to the real world as shown here: hillelwayne.com/post/np-hard… Hard, or undecidable in theory may not mean impractical for real problems.
It’s very hard to imagine what it was like to have to go into the office to work at night to use a computer you could never afford that had 16 K of RAM, millisecond cycle times, and if you were lucky, a MB disk. No network, and a real teletype for input and output…
An assembler was a huge achievement, written in machine code. If you wanted a compiled language, the compiler had better be very simple. My point: it’s near impossible to properly judge a programming language that was created before starting one’s career.
thehackernews.com/2022/08/as… has me wondering about the state of security research wrt reference counting vs mark-sweep GC. Thoughts?
A masterpiece of snark by @emeryberger : sigarch.org/coping-with-copi…
BTW, after 4 yrs at Apple working on Swift, I realize that production programming is very different from research programming is very different from hobby programming, even when all in the same language, same IDE. All respectable, aim to be clear which one I mean at all times.
Why so much about context? Now, I'm using Swift/Xcode. (Have worked on speeding Swift compiles.) Very very different from Self, but aimed a very different context! Deeply appreciate what that team has done. Huge set of goals, technical and non-. Tough tradeoffs. (miles in shoes)
David Ungar retweeted
38. Idiocy Saturation:
Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user. Worth remembering whenever Twitter dumbassery drives you to despair.
Just greatly enjoyed: Stephen Fry & Lawrence Krauss youtu.be/O0SNKCRV5Wg
Was reminded that I have a suspicion that the question of free will has much to do with some flaw in the way we put notions into language. I say that I have no choice but to believe in free will.
When I was young, I used to have to wait for my radio to warm up. Then we got solid-state and my transistorized stereo turned on instantly. Now, I have to wait for my receiver to boot up, feh! What was ours, is ours again, sadly in this case.
Today, we need our apps to run on battery power. That has something to do with it, but IIRC Lars Bak worked on that. Also, modern apps do much more. Finally, it could be me. Memory can be fallible. I could have been better at incidental complexity then. Still...
Just ran across & recommend gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05… and wirfs-brock.com/allen/posts/… . (I was involved.) @Gilad_Bracha @awbjs Great look back. But Smalltalk (and esp. Self) were better for creativity than the mainstream IDE/PL I use. Only partly for good reasons.
