Viewing profile — thegenius2000

Ken Thompson's famous paper on implementing regular expressions is surprisingly simple and yet extremely sophisticated at the same time. The "heart" of the method he proposed was t…

A hack is when a user manipulates a tool in a way, or in order to do something, which the creator of the tool never anticipated or even deliberately cautioned against. In so doing …

He emphasized in the article that he was talking about patterns, not individuals. So there's no way you could draw the conclusion that he meant to suggest that his female colleague…

That is preposterous. What if they're just more interested in other things? Why do you assume a priori that men and women share the same interests internally? What evidence do you …

I don't mean to be offensive or inflammatory, but how is this a discovery? Yes, money and success don't buy you happiness; living in a complete community is healthy. How was this n…

Yes, to dismiss theology along with alchemy -- in the same sentence -- as altogether useless is childish oversimplification. Rejecting Biblical faiths is one thing, but to ignore t…

Another point is that a lingua franca is a common tongue for communication between people with different mother-tongues: not a replacement for native languages. For example in East…

I couldn't disagree more strongly. DSLs are at the heart of efficient programming because they encourage separation of concerns; that's why the Unix shell is so powerful, fundament…

Very fair point, but what about the fraction of people who not only consider it an expense, but an affront to moral dignity? For example, Politico did a poll which showed that 46% …

I agree, in fact taste might rightfully be defined as that which is obvious to an experienced developer in the environment. Code which simply relies on conventions and avoids compl…

Worse even, the "once removed" notation has no notion of direction, so it's inherently ambiguous. I'm also pretty sure that less half of the people I hear using it know what it mea…

Why use a file tree when you have a terminal? It's been shown to be the most effective (and before you shoot, by "effective" I mean fast) way to manage files, and that way you can …

> A GUI editor can do everything a terminal based emulator can; there are lots of things a GUI editor can do that a text editor can't. Really? I'd like to see sublime handle text m…

I don't think you've mentioned a single thing that can't be done by Emacs/Vim, with minimal customization. Personally I use Vim, which has great auto-completion (it's minimalist an…

> By real autocompletion dropdowns, I mean dropdowns which are different from editing buffer. Fair point, it's my biggest gripe with Vim's autocomplete--which I love. That being sa…

Then open source the system from the beginning, so you literally lack the ability to insert secret backdoors.

> How are generics related to OOP or tool chains? Generics have a strong grounding in type theory and are used equally successfully in both OO and functional languages. Once again,…

> The lesson Go seems to have learned is that, since C++ and Java burned their fingers, clearly fire is too dangerous for humans. I think that's a little bit unfair, since Go intro…

I clearly stated that Go is lacking on the generics front. The cliff is forced, rigid OOP and complicated tool-chains. > Personally I couldn't live without generics, and would neve…

Well put. Though I would add that though generics are convenient, they are not as needed nearly often enough to be a crucial missing feature in a language. Yes, it's uncanny to cop…

I'll grant that Go is lacking in generics, but IMHO, the opposite is true. Go is thriving because although not perfect, it is one of the few languages which seems to have learned l…

Agreed, but remember that Language == Thought-space >= Implementation, so you want to maximize your language's expressiveness.

Language simplicity? I disagree, Java is only agreable if you're comfortable with (1) being forced to work in an OOP-only environment and (2) using the JVM. And while you can argue…