Viewing profile — pansa2

Has the conversation that originally led to the counterexample been released? Surely it was similar to this one, also driven by a highly knowledgeable mathematician. No AI would ha…

I always liked the fact that 10! (10 factorial) is exactly the number of seconds in six weeks. 6 weeks * 7 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds: 6 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 = 6 * 7 *…

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more …

So is LuaJIT resuming active development after a decade or so of only maintenance? Great! A lot of these changes make sense (although some of them are a bit too TIMTOWTDI for my ta…

Lua is the same IIRC: open source but not open development. It’s MIT licensed, and the maintainers are always grateful for bug reports, but all the code in the project was written …

> The C interface to ruby is just superb. How does it handle garbage collection? AFAIK GC is the main reason behind Lua's stack-based API: it's designed so that C code never needs …

I guess it alludes to “The Dark Side of the Moon”

Mojo?

`npm isntall`

> they intended to make it compatible with existing Python code That was the original claim, but it was quietly removed from the website. (Did they fall for the common “Python is a…

> New Zealanders are forced to pay a sky high TV licence There’s no TV license in New Zealand

The PEP for this change is here [0] and discussion of it is here [1]. Both are very long and seem to represent a huge amount of complexity, apparently to make installing Python eas…

In a similar vein, see this page about the performance of the interpreter for the dynamic language Wren: https://wren.io/performance.html Unlike the Zef article, which describes im…

Yes, Smalltalk's syntax fits on a postcard - and it's possible to go even more minimal than that, e.g. Lisp or Forth. OTOH Ruby doesn't need a postcard, it needs a full poster.

> all the encoding/decoding functions default to utf-8 Languages that use UTF-8 natively don't need those functions at all. And the ones in Python aren't trivial - see, for example…

> Wouldn't this get the funding back? The funding was Microsoft employing most of the team. They were laid off (or at least, moved onto different projects), apparently because they…

The Python devs didn’t want to make huge changes because they were worried Python 3 would end up taking forever like Perl 6. Instead they went to the other extreme and broke everyo…

Maybe they could have two versions of the interpreter, one that’s thread-safe and one that’s optimised for single-threading? Microsoft used to do this for their C runtime library.

There isn’t a dev mailing list any more, is there? Do you mean the Discord forum?

>> Python 2->3 transition > taking backwards compatibility so seriously Python’s backward compatibility story still isn’t great compared to things like the Go 1.x compatibility pro…

Crystal’s syntax is similar to Ruby’s, but AFAIK the similarity more-or-less ends there.

You’re right, of course: even Guido seems to have been moved off working on CPython and onto some tangentially-related AI technology. However, Faster CPython was supposed be a 4-ye…

PyPy is a fantastic achievement and deserves far more support than it gets. Microsoft’s “Faster CPython” team tried to make Python 5x faster but only achieved ~1.5x in four years -…

Fundamentally, CPUs use 0-based addresses. That's unavoidable. We can't choose to switch to 1-based indexing - either we use 0-based everywhere, or a mixture of 0-based and 1-based…

The reason many languages prefer `length` to `count`, I think, is that the former is clearly a noun and the latter could be a verb. `length` feels like a simple property of a conta…