Notices by 🔏 Matthias Wiesmann (thias@mastodon.social)

@amszmidt @inthehands @quephird @jrose recursion blew in my face in production, multiple times, it should have been optimised tail recursion, it should have been bounded, the stack should have been sufficient. Of course if the code had been in the right paradigm/language/universe there would have been no problem.

@inthehands @quephird @jrose yup, I taught in that mystical time window. Compilers were going to solve all optimisation problems, parallelism was dead, multithreading was the answer. Cooperative multitasking was clearly going rhe way of the dodo.

@inthehands @quephird @jrose indeed, but I would make similar reservations about recursive structures, as they imply pointers, memory layouts yada, yada. If you had told me in 2000 that the heap / stack would be some proeminent in newer languages like Swift I would have looked at you funny (Swift even has a keyword for recursive members). Mind you, this is no criticism, more me looking at the courses I gave and thinking “Mmh”.

@inthehands @quephird @jrose I think I went full circle about recursivity: costly option to enable in Fortran, everything is recursive in Lisp or Smalltalk (which I taught at EPFL) to dangerous thing that will probably blow in your face in production. If I had a time machine, I could probably have heated debates with myself and loose.

@inthehands @quephird @jrose I think it's true and false at the same time, because the constraints and the hardware change. Linked-list made sense with relatively fast, but scarce memory, I don't see this pattern being useful ever again. Languages that can self-evaluation were so cool when I was at the Uni, blessed days before security.
There are also anti-patterns that are sadly timeless, like floating point numbers or languages that pretend they have a built-in type/class for human text…

@inthehands @quephird @jrose Well, there is the aging factor also. Pascal was *the* high level language, then it was C, then it was Java. Rust is fashionable these days…

@inthehands @jeffjarvis but does that actually work? Even if Tesla gets a carve out, its suppliers won’t. I’m sure they use many standard components.

@inthehands Are you saying we should do more dadaism?

It's interesting to compare news. On one hand, protests about the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, street are filled with people. On the other hand, the USA, nazi salutes, military deportations, threats of invasion, the glorious leader finding it interesting that LA burned down. Zero protests.

#usa #trump #fascism #serbia #protests

@lzg When I was working in a research institute in Japan, they invited us to talk to school, despite my lousy Japanese. One kid asked me 爆発はありますか？ (are there explosions), I said no (I work in computer science), I instantly stopped being interesting…

@tract_linguistes @pier344 @MarCandea En tout cas dans les Balkans, c'est surtout l'apprentissage de l'allemand qui gagne en importance, choix économique, d'abord, mais pour un serbe qui écrit phonétiquement dans sa langue, le français et son cafouillazibule orthographique…

@inthehands well Goodhart’s law applies, even if it was a crappy metric to start with.

@inthehands @stephstephking ignore the corporate aspect if you will, most people reading and writing globish are not native an don’t have the cultural bagage to understand any metaphor or any reference - and they don’t need to - so this has to go, same goes with vocabulary richness, pick one term and stick with it. The language needs to be as pretty as bulldozer, ie not at all.
Just admitting the language is not English but another related language is the first step.

@inthehands @stephstephking one misunderstanding I see is that in large coloration, you write a lot, but in corporate globish, not English. I’m not sure if English department are ready to teach that…

@inthehands @paninid it’s not about what they did but what they claimed to do. In practice the difference is academic, maybe. When you look at Orban, Erdoğan, or Vučić the behaviour looks different.

@inthehands @paninid I a weird way I disagree, nazis were evil, but believed in some form of modernism, highways, pushing forward young engineers that resulted in jet engines, rockets. Italians fascists had a weird obsession with synthetic fibres. Fascist architecture is a thing.

The current crop has nothing of that, what will we call Trumpian Art? All the evil, but without having to iron your shirt or shine your boots. You won't get an 1000 year empire, but a cheap reboot of the 50s…

@inthehands One similarity I see with the french situation is the suspicion that one party, or one faction thereof is unwilling to put its own ambitions away for the common good… Left wing candidates sacrificed themselves, those from the center, less…

@inthehands one important aspect of reading code is understanding old/weird languages/systems. I feel the current computing monoculture is a large problem in that respect.

@erincandescent @rf @mcc @whitequark @hikari that’s nothing, every 5 years we reinvent ASN.1…