Viewing profile — improbable22

OK, I thought you were advocating zero based on complicated index calculations for some algorithm, with mod & div, which is what I was trying to say could be abstracted away. The l…

Maybe less readable than I remembered, sorry! But these `CartesianIndex` things are how you index multi-dimensional arrays. If by indexing you only mean adding offsets to pointers …

That's not so obvious, the abstractions for multi-dimensional indexing are better than (I think) you're imagining. Here's a nice recent example: a new reverse!(A; dims) function, w…

My parents did it the unofficial way, put in 5-10 trees along the road, over a few weekends, with the same style of concrete surrounding that the city used. They are huge now, and …

Time is a continuous variable, and kids know this pretty early on: they will happily tell you they are 5 and a half years old. Their second year starts when they are aged 1.0. Engl…

If you ask kids how old they are, you will often get "5 and a half" etc. They are, correctly, thinking of time as a continuous variable. You "turn 1" when your age reaches 1.0.

If "any language" means "any language sufficiently low-level to have C-like pointers", then no contest! Surely the point of any language at all is to abstract away some details of …

> is a general concept that by definition is part of any language featuring mutation. One counter-example is Mathematica. I can mutate any object any time I like, and doing so is e…

> Most of the aerial imagery used in Europe for improving OSM is shot from planes Yes I know, and not just Europe. But my comment there was specifically about contours, i.e. height…

It depends a lot where you go. In places like Nepal OSM is often better than any map you can buy. In the Europe and especially the US, it's not as detailed as the national maps. Th…

MapOut is great. Does one thing but does it very well, without distractions. Has contours (and a 3D presentation) unlike some OSM-based apps. Works well offline. No subscription no…

Some of them make downloading more of a hurdle than others, insisting that you download a whole country, or figure out what region you want. On MapOut at least, you zoom in too far…

If there's a time at which the stars are born, then there's no paradox. Non-star things can stay cold for the same reason comets stay cold in our universe: they can radiate heat in…

It's not arbitrary at all, at least in my dialect. "He went to hospital" and "he went to the hospital" mean different things. The first implies that he was a patient, he was there …

The discreteness is a distraction here. You are interested in the total flux of light, from all stars in some patch of the sky. If some of them contribute on average less than one …

Yes, a spatially infinite universe, with no expansion, but finite time since the stars all turned on, doesn't have this paradox. I think people didn't like this answer because it n…

But I think there are some exceptions for communicable diseases, which they will treat without attempting to bill you. I doubt vaccination would fall under that but don't really kn…

Julia's lambdas look like `x -> f(x,2)`, with no backslashes. The pipe `x |> f` is indeed the same.

You might also like "marp", which works as a VS Code plugin for markdown. Much simpler & less control than Beamer, but does allow equations (which it seems the linked presenta.cc d…

There's some truth in this. I think many of its enthusiasts aren't jaded multi-lingual programmers evaluating a new tool among many. They had some other problem they care about, fo…

Other things are OK too. I quite like that if/elseif/else/end only needs one closing, no other openings. I don't know whether using {} for both types & blocks would be hard to pars…

It goes to `literal_pow`, one way to check is to overload this: Base.literal_pow(::typeof(^), x::Int, ::Val{n}) where {n} = (println("power $n"); float(x)^n) pow = -5 2^-5 # yes 2^…

It's not so pretty, but what are the alternatives? Making indentation meaningful has downsides (copy-pasting can go very wrong) and using up ascii characters just for this means th…

I think we're getting there, slowly. Quite a lot of people who don't in any way think of themselves as programmers now reach for python/R/julia for tasks that would once have been …