Viewing profile — cpressey

Unfortunately, it's hearsay to me; it came up in conversation (about computability and complexity) with a professor, and I took his word for it at the time; I've been meaning to as…

I'm interested in approaches like this too, but there are some practical considerations that seem to complicate it: * from a systems point of view, an infinite loop is no worse tha…

I upvoted this because it was hilarious. I can only hope it was intentionally so. "Hodgson Gestation Services, LLC"

Good to know that "by definition" it's "not outsourcing". Failing to fall into that particular narrow categorization makes all the difference to the economies involved. (Yes, this …

To this day, I find myself deleting comments or whitespace under some misguided pavlovian notion that my code will run faster. Ouch! btw, I think "fill the screen with @'s" must be…

Useful information to disseminate; however, I fear trying to "correct" the popular perception on this would be quixotic, much like trying to change how "begs the question" is used …

If that theory was correct, one might expect Forth to be really popular among Japanese speakers. I don't see a lot of evidence for that. I tend to think it's a more general effect …

You'll have a hard time finding a chromatic trumpet outside of a museum. This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valve…

We can debate how large an obstacle it is, or whether learning to overcome it is valuable, but clearly it is there, even if it's just an annoyance. I just think it would be really …

I've often thought that if there's space for something to be reformed in musical notation, it's the fact that different wind instruments are notated in different keys[1]. I realize…

Redundancy can actually be useful in notation as a sort of error-detecting code. In this case, if the pitch-symbol and pitch-position don't match up, someone must have made a mista…

I completely support anyone who wants to invent new notations for things. It's fun. But I'd just like to note that if logical, regular notation was necessarily better, we'd all be …

I wonder if the value would ever fall to precisely zero. Mightn't they still have value as a novelty or collector's item? Like, "Hey, a Bitcoin! I remember those... sure, I'll buy …

> It’s not sharing, it’s bragging. Some would call it "narcissism", which (with an appropriately nuanced meaning) I think is more accurate than "bragging". I strongly agree with th…

"Stop using strncpy already!"... or you might as well write an article called "Stop using null-terminated strings already!"... or since many commenters here have already pointed th…

After the third paragraph, I interpreted the title as "Programming is Not [the Career Choice] for Everybody".

I dunno. There are vast patches of ocean that are going pretty much unused right now. (Yes, I know that's still science-fiction, but is it really that much more of a stretch than t…

Since I've been trying to deconstruct "programmer" into "systems analyst" and "coder" in other comments, I might as well continue in that vein here, but with a slightly different t…

Does being able to land on other celestial bodies and examine them up close not count as world-changing for you? Or do you think we could pretty much just do space exploration with…

I don't disagree - but energy, mining, and forestry are also fundamental parts of the economy (with transportation, construction, and manufacturing on the level just above those), …

That's a reasonable answer, and yes, it makes sense. You could say analysis is a theoretical form of programming, or correspondingly, that programming is an applied form of analysi…

I agree with your point. But to riff off dschiptsov's comment, how do you define "programming" (as opposed to, say, "coding"), and how does knowing programming help you answer ques…

YMMV, but I found this poisonous. At least mildly so. My hobbies are what I do for fun. I don't give one whit if they're ultimately "successful". I engage in them because I find th…