71–80 of 127 posts
"Are there any programming languages that were designed for pen and paper?" Well, I designed http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/paperalgo , and I like it okay, but I still find it a lot harder to read than more conventional languages.
[0]: https://gregorias.github.io/2014/11/22/early-high-level-prog...
> it has unit conversion built in, so 3km ÷ 26m will be evaluated to 4.62km/h, and also you can ask for m/s I’d expect 3km ÷ 26m to evaluate to roughly 115.4 (no unit). I hope it wouldn’t try to be too clever about whether “m” means metres or minutes, because such cleverness invariably goes wrong. Change it to “26min” or “26 minutes” or some such thing, please?
same with h which can either mean hour or the planck constant. units(1) does this right where one symbol corresponds to one unit only
To be fair, I think the probability of a normal person using 'h' to mean the Planck constant is low enough that "2h" meaning "2 hours" is going to be right ~100% of the time.
(Although, actually, having just learnt that `units` comes from Bell Labs, they might well have been using 'h' for Planck constant more than for hours.)
Am I the only person here with handwritting so bad that the automated recognition just completely and utterly fails? I got the latest iPad Pro with the Pencil 2 some time ago - and as much as my friends rave about the "very good and totally great" handwriting recognition in text fields, it's just totally bust for me. I can't write a single word and have it recognized correctly on first try. It takes me 10x as long to…
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Mmm, true. I started using units(1) quite recently, and “h” being the Planck constant rather than hours keeps on tripping me up. The built-in abbreviation “kph” for km/hr isn’t comfortable either. (mile/hr may be commonly abbreviated as “mph”, but km/hr is conventionally “km/h”). Ah hah! There, just created ~/.units containing `h hr`, now this will bother me no more (since I’m unlikely to ever want to use the Planck…
> Pity it doesn’t use XDG paths Yes!! Can we all just agree to make that illegal? If a developer writes an app that automatically defaults to having configs right in the home dir or if they don't separate their cache from their persistent data, they go to jail for a week to think about what they did. All joking aside, it really is a shame so many things don't stick to the standard. The ability to just copy .config to…
To be fair, I think `units` and `~/.units` predate XDG paths by a couple of decades at least (`units` was from Bell Labs, XDG paths are from somewhere around 2005-2010 as best I can find.)
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I write asterisk like that. :) But middle dot "·" works as well. Problem with "×" is that it is basically letter "x". This ambiguity applies to more characters, just a simple example – a lot of Americans write "1", "l", "I", "|" as one symbol. This is fine when you have context, e.g. a phone number, but programming language is a mixed bag where context isn't much of a help.
You don't write letter x in handwriting. You always write cursive/italic x that cleanly solves the ambiguity with × sign. Similarly, "l" is handwritten and | is "broken" in the center.
Maybe my MO of writing this down is not the standard way, but there were endless examples of a quick 2-column layout here and there, special underlines of parts of the line or single characters, arrows pointing somewhere.
Also I'd been usually writing very packed (my high school math teacher once wanted to gift me some extra paper for christmas so I'd use more space) and I'm simply not sure it would translate well. It's not really an artsy representation, but it's definitely my style that I highly prefer over how math text books look.
The same is not true for normal text, but even there I very often insert quick drawings or diagrams and I'm also not sure if the software will let me keep them in THAT place where I put them. I think it's a hard problem to solve for people who don't just write paragraph after paragraph.
Rand Grail was very cool to see on video. The fact that it's 'assembly' did not seem that bad to me. What was painful was watching the demo of writing the equation and all of those parentheses being drawn around. Maybe RPN or some other prefix would work better.
APL mentioned in the article, has a strict prefix syntax without operator precedence, which works fine.
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> Pity it doesn’t use XDG paths Yes!! Can we all just agree to make that illegal? If a developer writes an app that automatically defaults to having configs right in the home dir or if they don't separate their cache from their persistent data, they go to jail for a week to think about what they did. All joking aside, it really is a shame so many things don't stick to the standard. The ability to just copy .config to…
> If a developer writes an app that automatically defaults to having configs right in the home dir To be fair, I think `units` and `~/.units` predate XDG paths by a couple of decades at least (`units` was from Bell Labs, XDG paths are from somewhere around 2005-2010 as best I can find.)
video from the past were amazing, considering it is just in couple of decades after invention of transistor. ( I think that is because before invention of transistor, we already had mathemetical foundation of computation almost ready. ) in current era, do we have something that needs to be invent ? ( i.e. different part of the science can predict it, but the actual part of the science is falling behind ? )
Most Augmented Reality concepts are at that stage IMHO - we don’t really have light weight efficient hardware that can execute that vision yet. 20 years from now we will, and will probably look back at early experiments and concept videos from our time as “ahead” of their time.
The parsed version flashing every time a change was made was distracting… you don’t want to keep having your eyes pulled away from where you are writing. Also, having all of the input terms be integers, yet the answer returned as a floating point, seems a basic type error. In general, though, it seems to miss the mark. If you’re going with a hybrid electronic/pen approach, why not let the computer handle the annoying…
Totally.
> Also, having all of the input terms be integers, yet the answer returned as a floating point, seems a basic type error.
Spot on.
> In general, though, it seems to miss the mark. If you’re going with a hybrid electronic/pen approach, why not let the computer handle the annoying bits, like having to wrap things in parentheses that you manually need to keep balanced? Why not draw a circle around some terms, and have that get used for grouping? Why not have the entry itself be interactive, like in the works of Bret Victor?
I am familiar with Bret Victor's work, but I don't know which interaction you have in mind. I think he would despise any such notation akin to APL.