Viewing profile — Qcombinator

Now there’s a blast from the past! (It really ought to have a warning that it’s full of obsolete code.)

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w use Lingua::Romana::Perligata; maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe. meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da. da duo tum maximum conscribementa m…

Yes, indeed — I should have said "scalar element of the array var..." or something.

I think explains a lot of the polarised reactions people have towards Perl. It's trivial to understand the difference between the scalar var $foo and the array var $foo[0] if someo…

You don't have to be "wrong". You just have to be not exactly the same as everybody else. And of course, nobody is exactly the same as everybody else, therefore there is not possib…

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to check out P6. It's stable enough and has a lot of cool features if you want to learn something new. It even has built-in multi-dispatch comma…

Then it should have been called "1.0". Calling it "DEFINITELY NOT 1.0" while deciding that that is secret P6 code for "really means 1.0" is awfully bad marketing. (More seriously, …

A lot of languages — in fact, a lot of software in general — is designed to make things easy for the computer/programmer: "This is how it works and you just have to adapt, deal wit…

No, P6 was intended to fix as many Perl 5 problems as possible, and being eminently parseable was considered very important (and important in deciding to forsake backwards-compatib…

>The world has moved on. Except that it hasn't. What other language does everything P6 does? (Or even tries, let alone does it as well or better.) What language does "most" or "a l…

As just another Perl hacker, your "not real Perl" made me laugh. And no, let me reassure you that that snippet of line-noise is not, in fact, syntactically valid Perl after all. ..…

This applies to Macs as well. Or at least it used to, in some situations — now that I think about it, I can't really recall the last time I did that. The standard behaviour now see…

>You have to click the speaker icon once to bring up the bar, then look at it and drag it to the desired position. Actually, you don't — tap the "button" and just start sliding you…

The way command-tabbing brings all an application's windows forward always bugged me too. Fortunately, there is LiteSwitch ( http://sysbeep.com ) that lets you switch to the frontm…

Doesn't seem very ironic for an institution that, whatever you think of it, has been a prominent supporter and driver of science ever since the days when it was known as "natural p…

Various reasons, of course, but a key one is that we're lazy: formal logic needs to be applied to something, but apparently accusing the other guy of fallacies is more fun than the…

I made no reference to a subject either. For "my" experiences to be not really "anybody's" experiences is a somewhat separate problem. As is a belief that I don't really have any b…

> …device makers build in pattern learning so devices can recognize when they're been compromised. A coffee maker that suddenly starts sending out email, for instance, would be sus…

> Materialism can classify qualia as an illusion But can it? To say something is an illusion is to say that is really an experience of something else. And qualia are qualitative ex…

And for making keyboard input do things you didn't know were possible, OS X has Karabiner ( http://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ ). Advanced stuff has a steep learning curve, but the aut…

I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody can come close to understan…

Of course, one man's "reasoning should be about outcomes, not ideology" is another man's "the ends justify the means"….

> The perl example cited here kind of blows my mind compare to the trivial python approach That's because the Perl version is a two-for-one deal: just for fun, Cestith threw in a n…

We draw elephants with trunks like trumpets ( https://media.giphy.com/media/Qms9I3pAiN2la/giphy.gif )… why shouldn't they?

Wikipedia should never have existed. Encyclopedias exist to provide (a) access to information, (b) organisation, and (c) some guarantee of expertise. It's easy to take for granted …