Viewing profile — mrkeen

The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms). Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Unde…

In C's defence, you only have forward-compatability of string handling to the extent that your string type will not change in the future . Byte arrays are great for this. All strin…

If you draw a line from 'ad-hoc byte-wrangling nonsense' to 'parser combinators', this can't be more than 20% along it. Looking at the linked URL parser, why doesn't it look like u…

Yep! And since your partner will be unlikely to build a new architecture on the request of one customer, you should 'do the Kafka thing' on your end, capture everything (double-sen…

I usually preach that a big blob of mutable state in the middle of your system (the db) is the problem, and events are the solution, and this seems like its most obvious case. All …

Build MarsX and hope they can one day get over to Earth

I think you might be asking too much when it comes to correctness. It's like fixing all the problems with democracy by putting everyone in charge of their own 1-person election.

Maybe give shape another try. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHiWqnTWsn4 1:00:00 - Open/closed principle and 1:13:52 - Liskov substitution principle. Both are given in terms of Sh…

Paxos is extremely hard to understand and implement. So Raft is a simple and easy-to-understand alternative to Paxos. This is one of the most uncritically parroted memes in these p…

I'm not sure most languages get a vote here. They can't even represent Fuse's Functor example, i.e. f: A -> B, x: F[A] so maybe they don't get any points for syntax.

A programmer is someone who declares "I understand the problem so well that I can teach a computer to solve the problem, even for examples I have never seen before". If it's too ha…

Am I not even allowed to use https://www.oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/enterprise-ai... ?

I don't mind rebasing, so that's not really an issue. The problem I sometimes have is when I queue up 4 or 5 PRs in the afternoon and expect someone to take a look in the morning. …

The most widely available, useful, and best-bang-for-buck formal method is using a good type system.

> A proof of a basic todo list or something like that. Just using a verb here would be a first step toward rigorous thinking. A proof that a todo list does what?

If the author wants to take "a C program with concurrency and mutability is fine" (correctness being left to the reader), then he might as well just put a big global lock around th…

'Statefulness' doesn't make anything clearer. What exactly are you mutating?

This doesn't follow at all! Dropping interactivity [keep Concurrency, mutability]: The most popular choice is to drop interactivity: since there is no one to randomly access runtim…

It depends on the type system you choose to apply to LC. Simply-typed LC terminates. You have to include a construct that introduces general recursion to make it Turing complete. T…

The argument is that 'the program returns' is strictly easier to prove than 'the program returns the correct answer'. If the first is impossible, then the second is too. I'm all in…

I'm of course hearing this second- or third-hand, but when I read 'evolution of weather systems' I substitute for 'cellular automata'/'Conway's game of life', vaguely recall them a…

OK, count me onboard! Can we convince the 2-3 other stakeholders in our deployment unit to go with this crazy plan? Or are there 40-60 other stakeholders we need to convince?

The pain of the network boundary pays for itself many times over compared to sharing a codebase with developers who don't program to the interface.

Right, and I am also "the cranky guy" to the other guy. But yes, I am equating those. Some people might take Conway's law as a warning to try to avoid; others might take it as a na…