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The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

erikbern.com

71–80 of 193 posts

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#71
post #34

The research methodology in this blog post is fundamentally flawed. The author only counts how many people move from X to Y, but he doesn't count how many of them do not move at all. The whole diagonal of his (sample) transition matrix are actually missing values, but he treats them as zeroes. This greatly distorts the equilibrium distribution. As a result, he misinterprets each equilibrium probability as the "future…

I wonder if the data could be normalized against usage statistics somehow. Maybe not perfectly effectively, but at least better than as-is, precisely because the number of people "switching" is so much smaller than the number using a given language.

Normalization would be extremely helpful indeed. C, C#, C++, Java, and Python are all very popular languages and have large values in both dimensions, which isn't particularly useful.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#73
post #54
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly getting rid of C means getting rid of UNIX, as they are symbiotic and UNIX vendors will surely never rewrite them in anything else or replace POSiX standard.

C and say, rust or c++ can interface. You don't need to rewrite, just stop writing extra stuff in C, maybe when you do a really big refactor in C, port it. In the end, we can migrate away from C gradually. That makes me wonder, is there any chance in hell we get some RUST in the Linux source code?

The problem isn't technical rather political.

If you want to fix UNIX security issues related to C, first you need to convince kernel developers across all UNIX variants to move away from C.

Then even a fully modernized UNIX kernel needs to provide support to unsafe POSIX APIs.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#74
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C and say, rust or c++ can interface. You don't need to rewrite, just stop writing extra stuff in C, maybe when you do a really big refactor in C, port it. In the end, we can migrate away from C gradually. That makes me wonder, is there any chance in hell we get some RUST in the Linux source code?

Upstream? Likely never. Out of tree? https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko/blob/master/README.md

I recall that Linus once said on the LKML that he could see himself accepting Rust code into the kernel. But I cannot find the source right now.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#76
post #11
post #4

Well the fact that C is going so strong guarantees we'll be dealing with easily preventable bugs for the next 100 years

Sadly getting rid of C means getting rid of UNIX, as they are symbiotic and UNIX vendors will surely never rewrite them in anything else or replace POSiX standard.

Maybe, I think it would be possible to take a BSD or Linux (tech not a UNIX) and port the kernel space to Rust and user space to Go?

Not all UNIXs are closed source.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#77

The research methodology in this blog post is fundamentally flawed. The author only counts how many people move from X to Y, but he doesn't count how many of them do not move at all. The whole diagonal of his (sample) transition matrix are actually missing values, but he treats them as zeroes. This greatly distorts the equilibrium distribution. As a result, he misinterprets each equilibrium probability as the "future…

Great. We'll wait for you to come up with a better research then.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#78
post #13

I appreciate that the author wanted to implement their own eigen vector/value method, but really they should use: numpy.linalg.eig(x)[0] numpy.linalg.eigvals(x)[0] Numerical stability can be hard to get right...

Yes, but... The matrix has all non-negative entries, and the author is after the highest eigenvalue/vector so I think this means stability is just not an issue. The only possible issue is time to convergence. The nice thing about the power method is its conceptual simplicity. In cases like this, it's quite hard to screw it up. And it will scale far beyond those numpy functions (not that this is needed for this exampl…

Me: https://twitter.com/tmarkhor/status/842347955390685184

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#79

The research methodology in this blog post is fundamentally flawed. The author only counts how many people move from X to Y, but he doesn't count how many of them do not move at all. The whole diagonal of his (sample) transition matrix are actually missing values, but he treats them as zeroes. This greatly distorts the equilibrium distribution. As a result, he misinterprets each equilibrium probability as the "future…

I assumed it was a joke.

Re: The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y”

#80
post #4

Well the fact that C is going so strong guarantees we'll be dealing with easily preventable bugs for the next 100 years

C is a tadpole in the ocean of easily preventable bugs.

SEL4 is written in ... C.
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