Viewing profile — petalmind

> to just copy a bash command from a website and run it (sometimes with sudo! O.o ) to install software. how is that different from the good old days of wget ftp://ftp.something.or…

Claude Epitaph

I think I understand this "Cartesian product" reasoning behind 4NF/5NF, I just find it irrelevant I guess. Cartesian product is explained in Kent: case (3) in https://www.bkent.net…

Thank you, your take on the evolution from spreadsheets to proper databases is englightening.

Could you share an example of writing stule that you enjoy?

> Might it be a consequence of lack of disk space in those early decades A plausible explanation of "normalization as a process" was actually found in https://www.cargocultcode.com…

I have so many questions about that. Should that normal form basically replace 5NF for the purposes of teaching? Why do they hate us and do not provide any illustrative real-life e…

Imperative mood "normalize" assumes that you had something not-normalized before you received that instruction. It's not useful when your table design strategy is already normaliza…

Yeah, no NULL is ever equal to any other NULL, so they are basically unique.

> Someone, somewhere writing down a list and that list being blessed with the imprimatur of Academic Approval (TM) One problem is that normal forms are underspecified even by the a…

Frankly I don't think that overcounting is solved by normalizing, because it's easy to write an overcounting SQL query over perfectly normalized data. I tried to explain the real c…

One day I hope to write about denormalization, explained explicitly via JOINs.

Do you know if Redex could be a tool that would be useful in my situation? Claude suggests it, but I need to learn a lot of Redex to understand how to apply it. I have a general un…

You reimplement `while` in terms of `loop`, but do you know that `loop` is also a method :)

Even Ruby `parser` gem uses S-expressions in their documentation: https://github.com/whitequark/parser/blob/master/doc/AST_FOR...

> on the 'reflection' level, where most languages have specific keywords that cannot be used 'first class' with the rest of the language. In Ruby this is also the other way around,…

Yeah, I was also going to say that conflating trivial syntax and "supremely easy to learn" is a very weak flex. The first Smalltalk-80 book you randomly find is 560 pages. Also, th…

> Ruby has syntax sugar, no need to remove the funny parts. This is just an intermediate representation, it's not meant to be used directly (even though you can do that, of course)…

> Lisp? Then I would use Lisp... Lisp has completely different runtime semantics. Even the lexical scope in Ruby is extremely peculiar. One of the hard parts of writing this docume…

Question: but how many different numbers can you fit in 64 bits using your encoding (sorry I understand the general approach but I have no idea how that fast hierarchy works). I gu…

Fantastic. Each case is basically an SCP object.

https://archive.ph/iMdvd