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

221–230 of 291 posts

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

#221

Post by astrange »

brandmeyer wrote: post #141
kaba0 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Greek letter abuse rarely happens in CS but there are a few cases. Try to guess what "lambda calculus" and "pi calculus" are without looking them up.

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

#222

Post by dang »

lucsky wrote: post #148
nsajko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please don't.

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

#224

Post by slownews45 »

lucsky wrote: post #148
nsajko wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good lord.

Pike's developed a language designed to be easy "to understand and easy to adopt."

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical." – Rob Pike

They are not researchers, they are engineers.

Do I think Pike could develop a language for researches filled with special unicode characters that do magic things? Of course.

But this practical approach to a language doesn't make him a giant prick. As someone who has played with "Fancy" languages you get tired of them (and the people using them) after a while.

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

#225

Post by leephillips »

umvi wrote: post #210
leephillips wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if my Julia code ever gets to the point where other people want to edit it, the community has embraced Unicode, so there won’t be a problem there. More generally, I’ll turn my comment into a question: how are people using computers without already having them set up to easily type these characters?

> how are people using computers without already having them set up to easily type these characters? Current solution for most people is google + clipboard For example, to type the word "cliché" here, I googled it, then copied it, then pasted it.

That’s not what I would describe as “easily type”.

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

#226

Post by astrange »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #71
arp242 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much an intentional design choice. Fun fact: the first commit in the Go repository is from 1972. In B. https://github.com/golang/go/commit/7d7c6a97f8 Followed by a commit from 1974 to convert it to C, and 1988 to convert it to ANSI C: https://github.com/golang/go/commit/0bb0b61d6a https://github.com/golang/go/commit/0744ac9691 https://github.com/golang/go/commit/d82b11e4a4

Which is horrendous. In the forty years since BCPL (go was 2008?) the best way we could coordinate groups of developers in developing applications is to type streams of ASCII text and save them on disk with 0x0A indicating "the human wants a new line here". FML. Imagine if, to change the graph of your Facebook feed, you had to checkout myname.person, add "friend Bob { ... }", and then try to commit it. But far more c…

https://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter

Your image computing system isn't better than text files, much like your online file storage system isn't better than emailing things to yourself.

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

#227

Post by inglor_cz »

Zababa wrote: post #139

> And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint? I'm colorblind, please never do that. Syntax highlighting is fine…

"And no new letters have been added to English or French lately."

Counterpoint: €

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

#228

Post by 8note »

ttt0 wrote: post #67
selfhoster11 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? English is a convention only, not a law of computing.

The Tower of Babel. If the source code is proprietary or for education then it doesn't matter, but for the open source world it'd mean division onto multiple different languages where no one can understand and learn from each other. No one is going to learn 5 different alphabets and 12 different languages just so they can understand the source code.

That's also a good reason to standardize all open source code in C.

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

#229

Post by tgbugs »

slx26 wrote: post #143

>> 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…

Sadly these did not take off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboard

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

#230

Post by fortran77 »

eterevsky wrote: post #45
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…

English is not my first language and my native language doesn't use Latin script, still all the keyboards that I ever saw supported entering ASCII characters. As far as I know all the keyboards that are in active use support English layout. We shouldn't dismiss this as "cultural imperialism". Instead we should use this to our advantage. Currently source code written in China or in Russia can be read by developers in…

Agreed. My first language didn't use latin script--it didn't even read left-to-right. But I'm not offended that programming languages all do use latin script and a constrained character set.
Post reply on HN