211–220 of 229 posts
It may be big because of industrial applications, but as a discipline does it deserve to be bigger than a section in an applied math dept or elec engg dept in universities?
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This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.
Whereas "AndrewKemendo" provided first-hand testimony, which added value in the form of a datapoint, I struggle to see how your opinion of his testimony added any value, other than negativity. It's fine to dislike something - and just move on.
So did the "In this moment I am euphoric" guy.
I am with biggestbrain here. The post reads like "I'm just like Dijkstra, I solve problems".
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People buy special keyboards because they enjoy using them, not because they’re faster to type on.
What baffles me is that some people aren't willing to buy nice peripherals. I don't know about anybody else, but I spend 8-18 hours a day attached to a mouse and keyboard. I'm not going to use one that doesn't feel good to me.
Buying nice peripherals is like buying nice clothes.
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There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain. I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that…
Why are you using a Markov process though to model time-dependent likelihood pathways ? Doesn’t make sense. Your next step depends on much more than just knowing where you are at S. One needs to account for the history of where you were before. Or maybe you’re just using technical words with precise meanings to describe a vague imprecise heuristic?
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This is perhaps the most verbose and ridiculous way of saying "I think about how to solve the problem". It feels like a parody with the prompt of: how a person who scored 170 on an online IQ test would describe how their brain works.
Why does my description threaten you??
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"understand the starting point, the desired end point, and identify the path between them" That is the definition of problem-solving. If there was any nuance in the original comment, we both failed to find it.
Twisol's point that you failed to find is that you could choose to give AndrewKemendo the benefit of the doubt. Clearly there is something novel about the way Dijistra thought and worked. Most of us don't do things that way - formulate our thinking, then work towards one perfect first draft. AndrewKemendo saw that and said "I identify, I'm the same way", and tried to describe what his way of thinking sounds like. If…
The comment just comes off as mere posturing (eg. "I know because I have the same type of brain") and if you actually think about what is written down all i see is empty verbiage and something which could have been said simpler and more directly (for example there is no need to bring in "Markov Processes" here).
Dijkstra's (and Floyd/Hoare's) programming techniques are hard enough to learn that such comments merely obfuscate the essential ideas and pushes people away from trying to study it because it "appears too hard". Things should be made as simple as possible to motivate people to study and learn.
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There’s no other way to do it for this type of a brain. I know because I have the same type of brain. I spend 90% of my time formulating descriptions of the problem and the desired end state Hallucinating futures where the state of the world is in a state that I either wanted to be or that somebody’s asking me to build Once you know your final end state, then you need to evaluate the current state of the things that…
Interesting. I try to do something like this, but way simpler and my productivity is low right now. Maybe more practice will help. Would you say you're usually good at doing this and getting results?
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That's a bold claim, do you have any evidence to back that up with? To be clear, I agree that it could be a reason, along with a multitude of others. I think that discerning which is the most substantial reason (if any such exist) is hard if not impossible.
I don't, I just have the feelings and impressions of various programmers, which is anecdata. I think the pattern that emerges is that the popular languages I listed are multi-discipline, they can be adapted to whichever paradigm you prefer, even if it's a little cumbersome, and over time they adopt the key features of other languages, while retaining their existing benefits. In other words... you can get the best fea…
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It was controversial at the time. Dijkstra advocated "single entry, single exit" for each control block. Programs should be composed of such blocks. Makes for very neat flowcharts. Good for entry and exit conditions. Single entry wasn't that controversial. Single exit, though, means no "break", or "continue" for loops, and no early returns from functions. This forces a rather convoluted style. Try writing a loop of t…
The single exit style works great in a language with TCO, nested functions and no looping primitive at all. No such language is widely available. But the style works really well and can be simulated in languages like scala if you ignore the while keyword and express all loops as tail recursive functions. This style does not work well in c (particularly due to the lack of nested functions) and similar languages. It is…
There's Scheme. There may be constructs like DO and WHILE (though I don't remember if these are standard or just common extensions of Scheme), but they're often just macros implemented using inner functions and tail calls.
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Interesting. I try to do something like this, but way simpler and my productivity is low right now. Maybe more practice will help. Would you say you're usually good at doing this and getting results?
Are you trying to learn Dijkstra/Hoare/Floyd style programming techniques or are you trying to understand the idea of usage of "Markov Processes" (totally unnecessary) in the comment?