Hacker News: goto11

New comment by goto11 in "Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies?"

goto11 — Sat, 04 May 2024 18:52:35 +0000

There is no "the interest of the people". There are lots of different people with different and often conflicting interests.

New comment by goto11 in "Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)"

goto11 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:21:08 +0000

Half of his clever quotes are completely bonkers though and have been disproven by history. How many of you are proving your programs correct before entering them into the computer? Because that is the only correct way to program. And remember he disparaged Margaret Hamiltons software methodology. Sure, she helped put a man on the moon, but apparently she did it the wrong way.

I suspect geeks like Dijkstra because he is "edgy" more than because he is correct.

Also, Object-Oriented programming was actually invented in Norway, even though Alan Kay of Smalltalk fame tried to take credit.

He was right about GOTO though, but many developers did not even understand his argument but just read the headline and concluded "GOTO bad".

New comment by goto11 in "Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)"

goto11 — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:12:20 +0000

The GOTO-paper is widely misunderstood though. It is making a case for blocks and scopes and functions as structures which makes it easier to analyze and reason about the execution of complex programs. The case against unconstrained GOTO follows naturally from this since you can't have those structures in combination with unconstrained GOTO.

New comment by goto11 in "Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)"

goto11 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 12:41:19 +0000

Sure, you can use parentheses everywhere, but the code would be quite noisy. Do you think this:

  ((window.location).href) == foo;

is more readable than:

  window.location.href == foo;

New comment by goto11 in "Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)"

goto11 — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 11:19:13 +0000

Thank you for this additional context.

So in short, bitwise operators have lower precedence than comparisons to allow you to write:

    if (a==b & c==d) ...

but of course, this means you can't write bitwise checks like this:

   if (addr & mask == 0) ...

The problem could theoretically have been solved when the shortcut operators were introduced, by increasing the precedence of & and | to be higher than comparisons, but have the shortcut operators be lower. So you would be able to write both:

   if (a==b && b==c) ...

   if (addr & mask == 0) ...

But this was not done due to concerns of backward compatibility with existing code, since now every expression using the old pattern would subtly change semantics. E.g. the first example would now be parsed as:

  if ((a==(b & c))==d) ...

New comment by goto11 in "Was Javascript really made in 10 days?"

goto11 — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 20:00:37 +0000

I think it would be adopted exactly as widely as JavaScript is. People choose JavaScript because it is supported by the browser, not because they think it has a beautiful syntax. If some other language has been supported instead (whether VBScript or Scheme or whatever), people would use that.

Semantic markup languages were niche until the web happened. Objective-C was a weird niche language until the iPhone app boom. People learn the languages they need to learn.

New comment by goto11 in "Was Javascript really made in 10 days?"

goto11 — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 19:51:54 +0000

Netscape had market dominance at the time so Internet Explorer had to keep bug-for-bug compatibility with Netscape to keep up. Given the amount of bugs and the lack of documentation of JS, this must have been quite frustrating for MS who was used to calling the shots.

New comment by goto11 in "Was Javascript really made in 10 days?"

goto11 — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 19:48:23 +0000

Scheme would probably be the most hated language in the world.

New comment by goto11 in "Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)"

goto11 — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:48:40 +0000

> Manage your time better.

Thank you for the advice which is no doubt well-intentioned.

But don't kid yourself. If you use your spare time for research and development to solve problems at work, then it is not really a hobby, it is just you working overtime for free. If that makes you happy, good for you, but it doesn't change the fact that time and resources are limited. The time is just cheaper in your case.

New comment by goto11 in "Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)"

goto11 — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:37:36 +0000

Are you perchance working in academia? Your suggestion seems to assume unlimited time and resources to write everything yourself, while the purpose of using third-party components usually is to save time and resources.

New comment by goto11 in "Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)"

goto11 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:58:03 +0000

> Identifying high-quality libraries and frameworks that meet your project needs

This is a really important skill that I find difficult and frustrating. Does anyone have good advice or resources?

New comment by goto11 in "Was BASIC that horrible or better?"

goto11 — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 10:11:16 +0000

But this is just computed gotos. There is no continuation passed.

Arguably the main point of continuation-passing style is that you pass a continuation along with the jump. Hence the name.

New comment by goto11 in "Was BASIC that horrible or better?"

goto11 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 08:52:29 +0000

GOTO does not pass a continuation though, so I can't see how it is similar to continuation-passing style. GOTO is just a jump like jumps in machine code.

BASIC does not have notion of a continuation as a value.

New comment by goto11 in "The teenager who lives like it's the 1940s"

goto11 — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 22:17:06 +0000

> "When I was younger, I looked at my great grandad's prisoner-of-war diaries and I just love everything about the period."

Is this some kind of understated British humor?

New comment by goto11 in "Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle"

goto11 — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 07:11:54 +0000

The Grimm Brothers didn't write the stories, they collected and published folktales. In any case they would have been been out of copyright since Jacob Grimm died in 1863.

Disney didn't mind paying for the rights if they wanted to use material still under copyright, like they did for Bambi or Dumbo or many others.

New comment by goto11 in "The Onyx Programming Language"

goto11 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 17:14:26 +0000

It is still type inference though. If 2 is an int, the compiler perform type inference to figure out that the expression 2 + 2 is also an int. It is just that traditional languages only use type inference for expressions, not declarations.

New comment by goto11 in "The Onyx Programming Language"

goto11 — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 17:03:44 +0000

But that would only help you if you assign the numeric literal directly to a variable. If you use it in an expression like `foo(10)` or `10 * bar` you would still not see the numeric type specified.

So if you want the type to be always explicit, the type specifier should be coupled with the literal like `10[i32]` or similar, so you can write `foo(10[i32])`.

New comment by goto11 in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

goto11 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:12:14 +0000

And digging a step deeper: Over-engineering often happen because you think you might need the complexity later, but it will be more difficult or risky to extend the system at a later time.

E.g. starting out with a microservice architecture even though you only have 100 users, because you think it will be too difficult to re-architect a monolith the day you hit a million user.

So you should address why it feels like the code becomes less malleable over time.

New comment by goto11 in "CSS is, in fact, awesome (2021)"

goto11 — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 06:20:53 +0000

Collapsing margins was a sane default in the original use case of CSS - text documents with sections and headers. But it is not intuitive when working with GUI components.

New comment by goto11 in "The Decomposition of Rotten Tomatoes"

goto11 — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 06:56:01 +0000

Box office across all three of the sequel trilogy moves. The same is the case for the three movies in the original trilogy btw, so I guess we should conclude that "Return of the Jedi" was the only Star Wars was movie people actually liked, since The Force Awakens is one of the most successful movies of all time?

In reality, sequels tend to be less successful than the original, but can expect a certain audience. Since only very successful movies get sequels, sequels are still safer investments than original movies.