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Talks that changed the way I think about programming

opowell.com

61–70 of 103 posts

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#61
post #14

The theological second half of this is bizarre - I've never heard of this being considered a "problem", heaven (in the Christian tradition) is not a hall of fame that one nominates figures for. And the Mormon tradition of proxy-baptising people who are dead and never showed any sign of adherence to their tenets is highly questionable.

Mormons consider baptism a gate - proxy baptism opens the gate, the post-mortal individual can choose to enter the path via the gate, or not.

This necessitates a lot of other background beliefs - immortal soul, individual will, and significant ordinances, to name a few.

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#62
post #2

> Iterating over a two dimensional array by row is much faster than by column. Another fun fact is staggering array accesses is faster then linear acesses.

Can someone elaborate on this? I tried searching and wasn't having any luck. I always thought sequential linear access was fastest?

This will technically only work on pipelined architectures of which all major CPU architectures are one. You will be able to see a significant boost to performance given the following are all true:

   * You have no inter dependancy of information across the lines
   * All your data is in the cache
   * You don't have instructions generated between the two lines that will require some sort of operand forwarding
Basically, if you already have the stuff in the cache, the calculation is invarent to the last calculation, and you have a processor capable of it you'll see a large speed improvement.

There is a great talk about this [0] (for the exact moment go to [1]). If you're interested further I'd very much recommend finding some sort of GOOD computer architecture class. Luckily now we have a fantastic resource to locate these such courses [2]. This seems like dark magic and many programmers refuse to come to terms with it's existence. Check out `dreta`'s comment to see an example.

Now I do agree with dreta, this is VERY much architecture dependant but most architectures would benifit from this sort of optimization. Pretty much all modern Intel and AMD CPU's caches are large enough, they support a big enough cache, and they also all have pipelines under the hood. Intel started this in the pentium series with a 5-stage-pipeline (which I find very funny due to the GHz wars that came from that time period desipte the pipeline being probably the pargest performance boon in most cases that you would want to brag about).

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08kOj2kISU

[1] - https://youtu.be/e08kOj2kISU?t=26m50s

[2] - https://github.com/Developer-Y/cs-video-courses#computer-org...

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#63
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used this mess of a library, which provides no clear interface and corrupts data https://github.com/johnbywater/eventsourcing

A faulty implementation doesn't necessarily invalidate the idea. I also strongly suggest looking into statically typed languages. Python is very poorly suited to working with data.

> Python is very poorly suited to working with data.

This does not seem to be true, based on widespread industry and scientific use of Python generating, managing, and analyzing data.

Perhaps you meant in some specific way, like "Python does not enforce objects' data schema" or some such?

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#64
post #14

The theological second half of this is bizarre - I've never heard of this being considered a "problem", heaven (in the Christian tradition) is not a hall of fame that one nominates figures for. And the Mormon tradition of proxy-baptising people who are dead and never showed any sign of adherence to their tenets is highly questionable.

[deleted]

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#65
post #17

I really like that my two favorites from Rich Hickey are present. If you don't watch any of these you should at least watch 'Simple made easy'.

I clicked the link just to see if I was correct in predicting that "Simple made easy" was on the list. It's on my list, and seems to be on everybody's list. It reminds me of that quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." (Mark Twain)

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#66

tried listening to why OOP is bad and it was painful. 10 minutes in and 0 insights. He kept saying things like "encapsulation doesn't work" and then moving on. Not willing to stay another 20 min to find out why.

There are many talks about why OOP is "bad" but they tend to come from the FP camp The decent talks of this nature are backed up by firm, fundamental reasoning showcasing the power of "better" abstractions. I, personally, find both OOP and FP compelling, depending on what I'm trying to model. Wish I could link a few examples, sorry.

[deleted]

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#67
post #47
post #38

He mentioned a lie of: Code should be designed around a model of the world but I didn't hear any reason why not to? The Key/Value pair being the only reason, but besides that being a optimization / preoptimization in high performance applications, is there any reason to not design code around a model of the world? Seems to me it makes things easier to think about.

Apologies, haven't watched the video, but there are some pitfalls when designing around a 'model of the world', especially in OO. I think Wizards and Warriors by Eric Lippert is a perfect illustration of how our initial assumptions and models aren't often the right ones (although it's not so much about data in this case) https://ericlippert.com/2015/04/27/wizards-and-warriors-part...

Just read through those 5 posts - absolutely fantastic, thanks for the link.

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#68
post #15

Fun to see Eskil (there's a typo but that's how you spell it) on here, that talk isn't very old. It would be interesting with some more analysis from the OP, namely what was learned that changed their thinking, and how their thinking was changed.

If you haven't seen Eskil's very old video "Developing the Technology Behind 'Love'" you definitely should. In it, he describes the tech design choices he made that made it feasible for him to develop an MMO as a solo project.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#69

Anyone have a link to Alan Kay's talk, where he demos UIs and a compiler for UIs in ridiculously small # lines of code? There are a few talks like this, but there is one in particular where he goes into a lot of detail about it. I can't for the life of me find it again.

Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

Btw: The next iteration of that project live here: https://github.com/harc/ohm

Re: Talks that changed the way I think about programming

#70
post #14

The theological second half of this is bizarre - I've never heard of this being considered a "problem", heaven (in the Christian tradition) is not a hall of fame that one nominates figures for. And the Mormon tradition of proxy-baptising people who are dead and never showed any sign of adherence to their tenets is highly questionable.

Did you just criticize a religion for not making sense?

> The weirdest thing about Mitt Romney is that crazy religion. Mormons believe Joseph Smith received gold plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahw...

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