Hacker News: grewsome

New comment by grewsome in "At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work"

grewsome — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:01:08 +0000

I've read previously that certain parts of the software industry at one point was all in on move fast and break things, but then after a while the quality of their code was so bad that they took a different course. Maybe some people didn't get their fill the first time round. I can see that LLMs are going to be quick, I can't see how their code bases are going to do anything but turn into a very bad state, probably much more so this time round.

New comment by grewsome in "Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane"

grewsome — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:46:28 +0000

Sometimes the last 10% takes 90% of the time. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and whether it will eventually get to something that could be considered a solved problem.

I'm not so sure they'll get there. If the solved problem is defined as a sub-standard but low cost, then I wouldn't bet against that. A solution better than that though, I don't think I'd put my money on that.

New comment by grewsome in "Adding keyword parameters to Tcl procs"

grewsome — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:27:39 +0000

Tcl doesn't have fewer features, it packs in a lot, probably because of its maturity, to a similar level as other mature scripting languages (OO, coroutines, event loop, slave interps, etc, etc). But it's poor when you want something to run quick, or if you want to carefully manage memory because you have a lot of data. Also there is no typing, and for large code bases that is detrimental. But by using two languages you can get the best of both worlds. But then you need to program competently in two languages, and that takes a surprising amount of experience, and the hand saw and hammer analogy isn't accurate in this case.

New comment by grewsome in "Adding keyword parameters to Tcl procs"

grewsome — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 07:16:22 +0000

Tcl is a real programming language, but it depends on what you are doing with it. There are a lot of people who have never come into contact with command languages, and so there are plenty that look at it and have a negative response. For a lot of people though, Tcl is as easy to program in as Python or any other scripting language. It's a heck of a lot _easier_ to program in than a lot of so called real programming languages. I've found Ousterhout's dichotomy to be true, using two languages for a codebase is very efficient, but again, it'll depend on what you're doing.

New comment by grewsome in "Adding keyword parameters to Tcl procs"

grewsome — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:23:28 +0000

Tcl does appear to be a command language done right, I don't think there is a better one. As it was designed after bash etc, I guess the Tcl developers could see the inconsistencies there, which helped them do Tcl right.

New comment by grewsome in "Adding keyword parameters to Tcl procs"

grewsome — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:17:23 +0000

For incorporating into Tcl I'd prefer something simpler that would also work with existing procs. Building on {*}, maybe {@} could work (to skip over arguments to a specified argument}. e.g. when calling a function: someFunc someVal anotherVal {@}someArgName yetAnotherVal