Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 291 posts

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#141

Post by brandmeyer »

kaba0 wrote: post #131
IlliOnato wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it easy to type, but does it make it easy to read/maintain? As they say, it's already way too easier to write code than to read it. A programmer should make every effort to make code more readable. An editor should make it relatively easy to enter special symbols (especially if you can specify a limited set); it is totally solvable problem. An editor can only help you so far with reading code...

I believe it is most definitely easier to read/maintain -- restricted to that small domain-specific function. Some greek letters have very specific meanings, replacing them with long-ass names straight up worsens readability. Writing out density, velocityX, etc will quickly fade the core logic of that function.

I don't think that there is a single example of a greek letter which has been universally adopted by all of the different engineering and mathematics communities to have a single non-overloaded meaning.

The use of greek letters in academic writing has a single purpose: Compact notation. It has nothing to do with abstract readability.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#142

Post by Noe2097 »

lucsky wrote: post #24

> My disappointment with Rob Pike's Go language is that the rest of the world has moved on from ASCII, but he did not. Um, the Go reference explicitly states that "Source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8" [1], so I'm not sure what the hell this guy is talking about. The language itself maybe? Well contrary to the author of the article I'm really no fan of Rob Pike and I think he's a massive arrogant prick, but i…

> I am not sure what the hell this guy is talking about

Have a look at the APL language the author is mentioning, you will see you missed the point of his article.

The point of the author is not just about having more characters supported for identifiers or within strings (as the part of the golang specifications you are pointing to). He has more operators and related constructions in mind, which could benefit from more elaborate characters, e.g. the whole set of mathematical operations.

The issue I see however in his reasoning,is that precisely in the case of APL, dedicated keyboards had been built for it. The reason for limiting character set to ASCII, is there immediate accessibility on everybody's keyboard

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#143

Post by slx26 »

>> For some reason computer people are so conservative [...]

Well, one of the underlying reasons for the lack of imagination might be... keyboards. If keyboard keys were small e-ink displays, easily configurable and accessible by programs, programmers would have come up with a lot of interesting stuff already. We do it with function icons in regular interfaces. If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely take advantage of it.

Now, there might be many more reasons. The article also mentions subroutines displayed horizontally and other stuff. That could definitely be done too, but... while we aren't there yet, many interfaces definitely make good use of horizontal screen space.

The main problem is that to do any of these, you kinda require coordination beyond the scope of solving a single technical problem. Unless the right hardware is available to enough people, custom symbols and keys and whatever would only work experimentally. And it would be a worthy experiment, but developing a language is already enough work to also have to add a custom revolutionary IDE to the mix, in the context of experimentation. In the current economic system, when the path to market is long and unclear most good ideas die anonymously.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#144

Post by auggierose »

tyingq wrote: post #122
auggierose wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashing, like in Git I guess built-in things get fixed names / hashes, and the hashes of everything else follow from that. They need a mapping from content/hashes to human-friendly names, obviously. Not sure if they gained anything here, but they seem to think so, so might be worth checking this out.

Sounds like C++ name mangling.

No, because the mangled names still depend on the names ...

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#145

Post by benjaminjosephw »

Causality1 wrote: post #78
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

This is just the English/Esperanto problem again. Do you do the thing that's the most fair or do you do the thing that's unfair but has the most benefits for everyone involved? Yes, it's unfair to limit people to ASCII but it's also the only way their code is going to see widespread engagement.

> it's also the only way their code is going to see widespread engagement

Wow, what a claim! I can see how this may have some anecdotal evidence behind it since programming has had such a strong English bias but it's conjecture to say that this is the only path. Not only does that claim lack evidence, it also lacks imagination. The future doesn't have to follow the same patterns of the past.

The technical constraints of ASCII have long been irrelevant and its only the cultural imposition that remains. While this has been the case the size and importance of computing has exploded everywhere (e.g. 4 billion people worldwide use the internet).

Can you really say with confidence that global "widespread engagement" is (and will always be) a desirable property for code projects? Is software produced in this way and at this global scale really likely to be better quality for everyone?

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#147

Post by josephg »

vanderZwan wrote: post #35
ggm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels a bit gratuitously rude. He has strong opinions, and literally decades of experience. He is said to dislike time wasters. As one of a very small set of people who built much of the modern development stack from the ground up, it would be tedious in the extreme to have to deal with every headstrong tyro determined to make their (likely highly pedestrian, repetitive) point. Never met him, never really dealt…

I understand where you're coming from, but in the case of Rob Pike I get the impression that he enjoys having the reputation of a contrarian, and is not above trolling once in a while. Just look at the history section of the Mark V. Shaney wiki page. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V._Shaney

I've met him. His desk was a couple meters away from mine while I was working on Google Wave, and he was working on early versions of Go. Over 6 months or so I had a lot of little interactions with him. He's an interesting guy. He's quiet and hard working, but he has some great stories. And lots of strong opinions that he's spent a long time thinking about.

I agree with the GP. Calling someone you've never met "a massive prick" with no evidence is rude and pretentious. Especially given how much he's contributed to computing.

He is a bit of a contrarian - but so what? All the interesting people are. There's a lot of daylight between someone being "a bit of a contrarian" and being "a massive prick". One does not imply the other.

You don't have to like Go. I sure don't. But have some respect for the people who have poured their lives and souls into making computing what it is today. Our industry wouldn't exist without them.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#148

Post by lucsky »

nsajko wrote: post #121
lucsky wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This feels a bit gratuitously rude Agreed, and I 100% believe that meeting him in person would most likely change my mind. I also 100% believe that he has every right to be an "arrogant prick" for all his contributions and achievements to the field. But that doesn't make him any less insufferable, unfortunately.

You're missing the point. You're just throwing insults around (again in this comment), without even letting HN readers know what are you referring to. Why do you think Rob Pike is an arrogant prick, or insufferable? Also note that HN has guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Why do you think Rob Pike is an arrogant prick, or insufferable?

Well alright then. How about when he called syntax highlighting "juvenile spitzensparkenblinkelichtzen for kids"? How is that not condescending to pretty much 99% of his peers? And again, how about when he said that the Go language has been designed to allow poor dumb Google engineers to not shoot themselves in the foot with languages for adults like C++?

Rob Pike might be able to design three new languages between breakfast and lunch, but yes, I will definitely have a hard time being "kind and not snarky" (see, I read the guidelines ;)) when his name shows up.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#149

Post by tyingq »

auggierose wrote: post #144
tyingq wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like C++ name mangling.

No, because the mangled names still depend on the names ...

Not sure I get the distinction. Hashes "depend" on the name as well. You perhaps can't (easily) unmangle, but it's still a derivation.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#150

Post by taeric »

harikb wrote: post #136
eterevsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a degree in math and I disagree with this. ω_0 definitely looks better than omega_0, but it is much harder to enter unless you have a special keyboard setup. Suppose you write a function that uses a variable ω_0, and somebody else wants to change it. Unless they have the same keyboard setup as you, they will have to just copy-past it everywhere. And what if you have several variable with special names?

Keep in my that in Unicode there are several symbols that look alike. It is not just the character set that matters, but how many of such things we have. May be instead of arguing for Unicode, community needs to come up with a unambiguous smaller set of symbols languages should support.

I dread the day when I edit some code that has both \Sigma and \sum in the same scope.
Post reply on HN