Viewing profile — normac

Count me in on this as well. It's very strange because it's not a voice, but in some sense there is sound--I can "hear" when there's a rhyme, for instance. I've heard it claimed th…

On the off chance you haven't heard of him, you might want to check out Daniel Tammet [1]. He's a high-functioning savant who has number-related synesthesia, can do calculations by…

I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the …

This is such a great demonstration of both how fast JS engines have become in the browser, and how much less efficient native software has become overall. Running on top of an x86 …

One of my favorite pieces of code I've written is a 150 line Python script I made to solve a really ugly text processing problem. I have tried to use it as a code sample when talki…

Python occupies a niche that isn't going away any time soon: making it easy and natural to write readable, straightforward, more-or-less imperative, slightly boring code of the typ…

Totally out of left field here, but I got some auditory synesthesia from watching this, especially on high speed. If any of you did as well and are interested why, it's probably th…

That's pretty neat. Clearly some level of parsing needs to happen before run time, or else it couldn't even balance braces to know where the function body ends. So it must be that …

That's pretty much what Tcl is, even to this day. Ousterhout saw scripting languages as extremely high level tools used to issue commands to the low level code that does the heavy …

Interestingly, Tcl was parsed the same way all the way up until Tcl 8.0 introduced a bytecode system in 1997. Each line was parsed right before execution with no separate parsing s…

This kind of thing makes me wonder if there are dozens or hundreds of other cases where people were lost at sea and survived for many months and thousands of miles, but never made …

I love writing small, elegant programs--under 500 lines, say--that do one thing well. Scrape a website and dump the data to a CSV; take a directory full of video files and rename t…

This raises an interesting problem--could we find the word even faster by using something other than a standard binary search? The first thing that comes to mind is skipping past l…