Viewing profile — drobilla

Yet another fine example of why ESR seriously needs to stop pretending to be the arbiter of "hacker culture" as if he speaks for all of us.

I'm very happy to see Rust stabilize, about time we get a systems(ish) programming language with a half decent type system. With that said... I need to get some bikeshedding off my…

I'll take "fighting with syntax" over fighting with a GUI any day.

I will never understand the tendency, especially in the web community, to consider complicated, ambiguous, inconsistent, and difficult to parse syntaxes as "friendly". It might see…

This guy is so biased he can't even see straight.

Not quite as easily solvable with software as you might think. Most such scheduling problems are NP-hard.

Engineers generally already have such things. I don't think "programmer" is a well-defined enough concept to be associated with an oath. You can't go around calling yourself a Medi…

The Littler Guide to HTML Email: Don't.

> I could either have another expensive piece of paper, or add more code to my github account for future employment... You could always do both. Academics who can actually write go…

Someone needs to write a "why getting a job in industry is a waste of time" rebuttal to this tired argument to illustrate how ridiculous it is to evaluate everything with a single …

Painters paint, hackers hack

"Ha ha ha, I intentionally cause huge legal problems for the Open Source world and the software world in general, hilarious, right?" This stupid little license game of Crockford's …

Short circuiting AND isn't a very good example of the advantages of pure functions. Most languages, including those heavily based on mutation (e.g. C and its descendants), do this.…

Never say never. This only applies to WYSIWG. When writing in plain text source formats, the two spaces enable tools to distinguish the end of a sentence from abbreviations and oth…

No offence, but this is incredibly naïve, and it's kind of obviously an opinion that simply stems from working on things that just aren't that conceptually complicated. Some things…

Funny, that's how pretty much everyone else feels about visual programming. Except the UNIX way of things runs the Internet, and visual programming tools run practically nothing of…

Time.

I find the cognitive dissonance of Americans commenting on such things while still claiming silly titles like "the greatest country in the world" fascinating. This one has a "besid…

Well, this is true, but it's also hyperbole. It's not really everybody misunderstanding the problem so much as simply not caring. People are sloppy with the terms "NP-hard" and "NP…

A more accurate title would be "The Sorry State of Microsoft's C++ Compiler". As usual with native code, portability is actually quite easy to achieve - except to Windows using MS'…

It isn't. That figure is more like the size of everything there is to do with LaTeX, uncompressed, than the size of LaTeX itself.

For half a century, especially in America, we've been hearing about the "future of transportation" in the form of some car, or car-like non-mass transit device. The numbers don't w…

Significant whitespace in a live coding language? I like and use Python, but that seems like a show-stopper of a bad idea for a language designed for throwing code around in real t…

What you just explained is simply your arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology that makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another. Proprieta…

This is a very cool effort and method to teach a very silly font/language idea.