Hacker News: whatajoke

New comment by whatajoke in ""They're Made out of Meat?" Short first contact sci-fi story"

whatajoke — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:36:43 +0000

That is because it is very similar to an actual short story written by Asimov. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_is_This_Thing_Called_Love...

I can't find that story online, but it has a similar ending vis-a-vis the alien's decision.

New comment by whatajoke in "Why Lua?"

whatajoke — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:42:41 +0000

Scheme community frowns upon mutating code. R6RS even forced that by default, though the rest of the specification was a mess.

So, scheme style these days is all about pure functions, tail calls and continuations. To think about it, that really is setting it apart from common lisp.

New comment by whatajoke in "Why Lua?"

whatajoke — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:24:17 +0000

My definition of an FFI was simply about fully supporting native threads. Simplifying FFI definitions has not been a big deal for me. It is either a few hours of work, or if more than that, then I simply use Swig.

As for finalizing arbitrary objects, please see http://community.schemewiki.org/?guile-guardian

I agree on the speed part. But guile 2 is getting better. The reason guile cannot be as blazing fast as say gambitc is their need to inter-operate with all sorts of C code. Native threading included.

New comment by whatajoke in "Why Lua?"

whatajoke — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:32:59 +0000

Not criicizing lua, but worth comparing to guile.

> Integration with C (and C++ for that matter)

Guile does it better. You can use shared memory threads in guile without any penalty. Atmost you have to allow for the garbage collector to run when inside FFI functions. But that is a small price to pay in case you need to use multiple parallel-concurrent threads with a single heap.

Guile was built with FFI in mind and has an impressive history. Just take a look at guile gnome bindings.

> Speed and Simplicity

Guile 2 is extremely fast. Not as fast as LuaJIT, but it no reason it won't get there. As for simplicity, take a look at the partial evaluator in trunk of guile 2.

> Education

Guile is good old scheme.

> Functional

Can't get more functional than scheme :)

> Everything is a Table

Well, almost everything is a pair in guile. Vectors and hash-tables are trivially available. Though I recommend to sticking to functional programming in scheme style.

> Consistent

As before, can't get more consistent than scheme.

> Portable

Guile is available on n900. So there.

To continue, guile has continuations (delimited or otherwise), and macros (hygienic or otherwise), both of which are effectively missing in lua.

And guile offers all of this while supporting native threading with a single heap. Sweeet.

New comment by whatajoke in "The dumbphone strikes back"

whatajoke — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:08:32 +0000

If only Nokia hadn't buried N900 and N9, more people would have experienced what a true mini laptop feels like.

New comment by whatajoke in "On a New Road : James Gosling on Apple and Java"

whatajoke — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:22:40 +0000

> I respectfully submit that the man who thought AWT was an acceptable GUI toolkit doesn't have a leg to stand on here.

Where did Gosling say that? I remember reading that AWT was a botched job because they had very little time to ship out a UI toolkit. They replaced it with Swing later.

And if you think Swing also sucks, then try developing swing apps in groovy. Java language sucks even in SWT UIs.

New comment by whatajoke in "London Stock Exchange smashes world record trade speed with Linux"

whatajoke — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:35:28 +0000

Is this the same system that replaced the failed Microsoft platform? http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

Microsoft had run huge ads on how LSE was using .NET and Windows in critical financial applications. Within a year LSE had suffered crashes in the same critical areas.

New comment by whatajoke in "Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?"

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:43:45 +0000

The excellent research done under Jikes project in IBM cannot be forgotten. It to contributed to IBM's patent portofolio.

Bad to reply to own comment, but can't edit it anymore.

New comment by whatajoke in "Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?"

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:35:22 +0000

> What's wrong is that Oracle won't (ever) allow Harmony to be called Java Compatible, even though it is.

The same can be said of a fork. It will not be allowed to run the Java test suite (I forget the name) and certify itself Java.

Edit : Typo

New comment by whatajoke in "Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?"

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:54:14 +0000

What is wrong with http://harmony.apache.org/ ?

It is a from scratch implementation of the JVM. And is backed by IBM AFAIK.

New comment by whatajoke in "Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?"

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:51:54 +0000

Much of high performance modern VMs (not just JVM) are built on Self project and StrongTalk acquisiotion by Sun. I think Oracle would have quite a few key patents due to this.

Though the Visual works contribution to VM technology cannot be discounted. And it is owned by IBM. So probably IBM and Oracle will not use these patents against each other.

New comment by whatajoke in "Java as we know it is over. Time to fork?"

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:48:11 +0000

It also has multiple backends. I think a debian dev had coded a llvm backend for it. And a cambridge student coded an ARM backend.

Edit : grammar. Also forgot to mention that the ARM backend run on n900, my precious.

New comment by whatajoke in "Did you know that China is run by engineers? I didn't."

whatajoke — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:41:38 +0000

Indian here. There are a few leaders in India who can't speak one coherent sentence in english, even though they have a masters degree in english,

New comment by whatajoke in "Why I Love the Khan Academy"

whatajoke — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:38:58 +0000

I had the same impression. Nothing can educate like a good teacher who coaches you directly. Looks like many americans (or britons) are not getting this individual attention in their schools and colleges.

Some professors are able to teach you complex things in such simple terms that it damn well blows you away. I remember being tought van der walls equation's proof using some very basic concepts and the taylor series. I can't find that simple a proof on wikipedia now, and unfortunately I have forgotten much of physics. SICP is also a good example of a good teacher making complex problems simple.

CANCERING: Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation

whatajoke — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:10:55 +0000

Article URL: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html#text1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742619

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by whatajoke in "Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions"

whatajoke — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:14:05 +0000

I have never used gentoo. Does gentoo patch packages as much as Debian? Or is their build process sophisticated to allow parallel install of multiple versions of say postgresql?

New comment by whatajoke in "AMD to Retire the ATI Brand Later this Year"

whatajoke — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:15:07 +0000

Good. With their upcoming fusion product line, ATI name on AMD CPUs would have only confused.

New comment by whatajoke in "The Original 'Lambda Papers' by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman"

whatajoke — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:17:00 +0000

A google docs link to original scheme manual, in case the site bogs down. http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Frepository.re...

The Original 'Lambda Papers' by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman

whatajoke — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:15:09 +0000

Article URL: http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630801

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by whatajoke in "The $35 indian tablet isn't vaporware"

whatajoke — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:12:07 +0000

You are reading it wrong. It means that the end customer (student) will get it at 50% subsidy, which will be 17.5$