Viewing profile — arnsholt

Very chatty build scripts for one. I remember reading the build instructions for clisp many years ago, and it very explicitly told you to run the build in xterm and not something l…

Oh derp. It’s been a while since I worked adjacent to this, so I clearly misremembered some important bits. Thanks for the correction!

And in case people think ultrasonic signaling isn’t a real thing, it very much is. In the oil and gas industry, it’s how measurements taken while drilling a hole are sent back to t…

John Regehr tried to start an initiative to make what he called Friendly C, removing some of the most blatant C footguns, and even that turned out to be extremely hard to get conse…

If I had to guess, they probably have some ideas. In Your inner fish (an excellent book, BTW) Neil Shubin has an afterword where he describes roughly how they went about deciding w…

I worked as a Smalltalk developer for a few years, and it spoiled to such an extent that I’ve tried to make an extension for IntelliJ to replicate the browser for Java development.…

I wasn’t involved in the day to day operations of the system, but it had records going back to the 90s at least I think. I think data related to non accepted offers were deleted fa…

Yeah, basically. The full system actually has more date stuff going on, to support some other more advanced stuff than just tracking objects themselves, but that's the overall idea…

The core system at my previous employer (an insurance company) worked along the lines of the solution you outline at the end: each table is an append only log of point in time info…

Lichess uses a scheme which is probably more efficient on average, described on revoof's blog[0]. Basically, it's a variable length scheme where the first 64 bits encode square occ…

For about two and a half years I worked on a Smalltalk system, written in a quite old Smalltalk, which gave me two idiosyncrasies editor-wise: I no longer care very much about synt…

Good PBT code doesn't simply generate values at random, they skew the distributions so that known problematic values are more likely to appear. In JS "__proto__" is a good candidat…

I'm pretty sure the publishers are alleging that a crime has been committed. In that case, private parties can't open a suit (at least if Swedish criminal law is at all similar to …

I found the Smalltalk way of working in the running environment to be very programmer efficient too, and that it was by far the smoothest development experience I’ve had, even in a…

I worked on a Smalltalk system which ran on Visual Smalltalk Enterprise, and in that system the image opened its windows as native Windows GDI windows, which made the application q…

I've only used PBT a few times, but when it fits it's been extremely useful. A concrete example from my practice of what has been pointed out in this thread, that you want to prope…

In discussions like this, I sometimes feel that the importance of related work like the increasing use of Rust in Android and MS land is under-appreciated. Those who think C is fin…

After a couple of years working in Smalltalk, I’ve acquired the hot take that all the code should be in a proportional font. Admittedly it doesn’t work quite as well for brace synt…

KT is obviously (from context here) Karahan Tepe, and GT thus Göbleki Tepe. ANE is a standard abbreviation for Ancient Near East. For PPNA Wikipeda supplies Pre-Pottery Neolithic A…

Underscore for italics probably has its origins in the use of a solid underline as markup in a manuscript/typescript instructing the typesetter to set that fragment in italics (und…

Oh yeah, the good hand crafted grammars are really good. For my PhD I worked in a group that was deep in the DelphIN/ERG collaboration, and they did some amazing things with that.

Because the Rafah crossing is currently controlled by the Israeli army. Egypt can allow all the aid it wants, it’ll still get stopped by the Israelis.

To expand on "tin was hard to come by", I believe two major sources of tin have been identified for bronze used in the Fertile Crescent: one in Cornwall, and one in Afghanistan. Th…

Arabic script as written in Iran (and Pakistan I think) is in a different style than most of the rest of the world. The style is called Nastaliq (the more common one being Naskh).

My favourite one was when I learned about the existence of US survey feet.