Viewing profile — gtrak

It's a question of where to focus your attention. Consider the explore/exploit trade-off. Boring tech may be a little, well, boring, but that means you get to spend your limited de…

The web has killed desktop apps. I use linux, but I don't buy software on any platform besides games. I think it makes sense for professional productivity apps, like CAD stuff. I d…

The easy and dangerous way is to mount your entire hard drive inside virtualbox. Follow instructions here: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk The issue occurs when…

There is an alternative that I have found quite useful. Create a Dualboot situation for normal linux work but set up a VM in your windows host that points to your bootloader and li…

Just a hunch, LLVM uses Static-Single-Assignment, which is just that, saving every single variable change.

I'm not sure what you mean. Lines of code is an objective measure. How meaningful that might actually be, well, that's subjective.

I know neither. I'd skip Objective-C and learn Swift to actually make a thing. If you want general language knowledge, a really hairy production language and toolset isn't the plac…

There are objective measures. There aren't necessarily 'absolute' ones. Lisp is relatively more concise than C or Java for the same tasks. Java is relatively safer than C for the s…

Every new dev machine should have an SSD. It's under $1/GB

I really like this comment. But I bet some folks gloss over a particular point of importance. For me, there's a huge advantage in literally using tree-paper, either for code-readin…

Very strange to have a programmer culture that is afraid of thinking about performance. It's treated like a hobgoblin.

Better stacktraces would be better, sure, but there are good arguments on both sides whether it's better to separate the language from the platform or not. I prefer a thin, readabl…

the practical difference between lists and seqs is laziness (details like chunking, too).

This is somewhat irrational critique, clojure was an opportunity to start fresh and graft a concurrency-focused lisp onto a pervasive runtime, not to reimplement ABCL. It fills a n…

Maybe I'm a bit of a masochist, but it's not that hard to read the compiled output, especially when you have a decent mental model of what it should be. It doesn't look like idioma…

What makes the right level of abstraction right? Seems like the units of abstraction have to be amenable to application (analogy), but rightness is fluid. If you have a turing mach…

My interpretation: javascript is slowly catching up to the rest of the world. It's reach both makes it a lingua franca and slows it down. Maybe one day it will be suitable for real…

People prefer this incremental series of hacks to the existential despair of being faced with a cohesive system, say a lisp machine. :-)

I think at least the criticism of immutability and FP resulted from taking concepts to extremes. I made a point to address lock-in of different aspects of clojure in my post. I thi…

there were changes to the core data structures in order to support reducers, namely the addition of polymorphic reduction by the collection. See: https://github.com/clojure/clojure…

FWIW, I agree, I would love to see an expert talk about real tradeoffs, both abstractly and in regards to clojure. I'm just kinda piecing it together from what I think Rich was thi…

Yes, having to understand the details and implications of clojure's compilation was definitely painful, but the implementing code is accessible. There's always going to be some per…

Yes, you're right. Tradeoffs was more of a theme than a commitment to being comprehensive. I guess I meant to portray design tradeoffs and their implications, and sort of what perc…

even with productive languages, there is such a thing as 'idiomatic'.. (I say to myself as I munge some legacy clojure)... I still prefer to work on old clojure code than new java …

Real people have jobs writing clojure. I can't speak for Rust.