281–290 of 338 posts
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I don't think that's true with Perl at least, unless something has changed dramatically very recently.
If you use it to glue/pipe bunch of tools written in C it can easily be faster.
The other approach is pure Python and then using PyPy's JIT.
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While I'm not particularly keen on revisiting PHP, given the bad taste it left me with, I can believe the language has changed for the better, however programming cultures, like all cultures, are way more inertia-prone, and I'm really sceptical about whether the duct tape mentality I've known PHP devs to exhibit has gone away
Duct-tape mentality remains. Just poke around the mailing list.
Im in the EDA industry and use Tcl. It's easily the worst language I've ever used and I firmly believe that the entire semiconductor industry is being held back years due to the stranglehold of Tcl. Everything in Tcl is a string. This is just one example of the idiocy of this language.
Even as a fan of rich type systems, I can think of much worse design choices for a language than "everything is a string". "Everything is an object whose class is determined at runtime" comes to mind. And as a former Tcl dabbler, that's also definitely not the first thing I'd pick on. `upvar` is a far more egregious violator of sanity, and I seem to recall that parsing optional arguments to a function is quite the ad…
The only language I use these days at work is Tcl, as it's the embedded scripting language in the app we use for post-processing finite element analysis [1] results. Thus I use it for small scripts to make various data extraction and processing faster. It's main strength is also it's main weakness: the whole everything is a string concept, even code. It makes the language both very simple to grasp at first and then a…
Can you use 8.6? TclOO makes objects a lot more wieldy: they're still commands, but you get automatic cleanup, destructors, some nice options for inheritance/delegation and so on. "emulating objects with procs" sounds like you're not taking advantage of any of the previous OO extensions (snit, itcl, xotcl ...), which has to be making life harder than it should be :(.
And, to be entirely honest, most of the gripes above are likely more due to the poorly designed API than to the language itself.
The only language I use these days at work is Tcl, as it's the embedded scripting language in the app we use for post-processing finite element analysis [1] results. Thus I use it for small scripts to make various data extraction and processing faster. It's main strength is also it's main weakness: the whole everything is a string concept, even code. It makes the language both very simple to grasp at first and then a…
Can you use 8.6? TclOO makes objects a lot more wieldy: they're still commands, but you get automatic cleanup, destructors, some nice options for inheritance/delegation and so on. "emulating objects with procs" sounds like you're not taking advantage of any of the previous OO extensions (snit, itcl, xotcl ...), which has to be making life harder than it should be :(.
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Even as a fan of rich type systems, I can think of much worse design choices for a language than "everything is a string". "Everything is an object whose class is determined at runtime" comes to mind. And as a former Tcl dabbler, that's also definitely not the first thing I'd pick on. `upvar` is a far more egregious violator of sanity, and I seem to recall that parsing optional arguments to a function is quite the ad…
You wanna know something worse? It parses braces inside comments. I spent a day debugging a compilation error because i had a random { in a comment.
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Non-ASCII characters are indeed messed up. I wrote the HTML parser about 15 years ago. Back then my programming style was so bad, that I'm afraid nothing short of a complete rewrite of the parser will be able to fix it. The Archive.org crawl is way too old to be of any use. And the Common Crawl corpus is only marginally bigger than what I crawl myself. There are currently just over a billion pages in my search-index…
Ah. 2001 was... the era of HTML4, more or less, so it's still seeing the majority of page content, but... no Unicode. I see. I figured old data was uninteresting, but TIL that crawling data yourself is not impossible. I mean you have to come from a thousand IPs, browser UAs and cookie states to find everything thanks to the sad state of things, but wow, I didn't realize 200Mbps could do so much. :D As for the errors…
I use the Alexa top-1-million sites as seed-list for the crawler. The errors that do appear during the crawl are either sites that have an outage or more likely simply dead-links. Oh, and URLs that turn out to be blocked by robots.txt. There are a lot of sites out there which block anything but Google and Bing from crawling them.
Cloudflare is not an option for me. It would let Cloudflare know what my users are searching for. VERY big no-no. :)
I can filter out 99% of automated queries. Luckily they are still pretty dumb at the moment and give me enough fixed clues to identify them.
I like your idea of keeping the API free with a very low request-rate. That could work. I would have to find a way that they can't just generate many API-keys though. Using captchas for API-key requests won't stop them from doing that.
I posted a "Show HN" about a year ago. Brought in about 1500 extra visitor that day. Got up to 9th place on the HN homepage that day.
New webdesign is already done. I have a German site too. https://deusu.de which actually gets 90% of traffic. That site already has the new design.
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I tried Smalltalk recently, but I couldn't get into it: 1. The (basically mandatory) UI was keyboard unfriendly 2. They removed multiple inheritance from the language. That's not still Smalltalk, is it?
As far as I know, Smalltalk never had "real" multiple inheritance, but merely an experimental hack implementation around doesNotUnderstand (cf. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?MultipleInheritanceInSmalltalk ). So I wouldn't agree to the sentiment that it has been removed from the language, but I'm too young to judge how essential it once was. Personally, I don't miss it at all. Which Smalltalk did you try exactly? There are h…
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It'd certainly be interesting to relate a multi-decade software project from the outside :-) I will have to talk to my father about this... and explain why folks on the internet must hear his stories. In the interim, would anyone happen to have an example of a good secondhand account of a software project? A basis or, at the least, an inspiration for how to proceed.
My example is not explicitly software-related, but it's very very close. https://www.reddit.com/user/36055512/submitted Start oldest first, bottom of the list, and go upwards for chronological order (identical titles are to different subs, so only comments will be different). Last I heard a book was in the works. I'm not yet sure if it's surfaced yet, but these posts make for a good few hours' reading. They're great.…
Perl and C here mostly. C89, that is. Both are widely used languages, just not in the startup space. a lot of our stuff is built on those languages so it wouldn't make sense to rewrite a lot of the stuff at this point unless there was a business case for it.