Re: [fonc] Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram Language

On 9/24/2014 6:39 PM, David Leibs wrote: I think Stephen is misrepresenting the Wolfram Language when he says it is a big language. He is really talking about the built in library which is indeed huge. The language proper is actually simple, powerful, and lispy. -David I think it is partly

Re: [fonc] Modern General Purpose Programming Language

On 11/6/2013 3:55 AM, Chris Warburton wrote: BGB writes: it is sad, in premise, that hard-coded Visual Studio projects, and raw Makefiles, are often easier to get to work when things don't go "just right". well, that and one time recently managing to apparently get on the b

Re: [fonc] Modern General Purpose Programming Language (Was: Task management in a world without apps.)

On 11/5/2013 7:15 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.comwrites A fun, but maybe idealisti

Re: [fonc] Macros, JSON

On 7/21/2013 12:28 PM, John Carlson wrote: Hmm. I've been thinking about creating a macro language written in JSON that operates on JSON structures. Has someone done similar work? Should I just create a JavaScript AST in JSON? Or should I create an AST specifically for JSON manipulation?

Re: [fonc] Natural Language Wins

On 4/6/2013 12:13 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote: On 6 April 2013 18:09, Eugen Leitl > wrote: On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 12:08:35PM -0500, John Carlson wrote: > The Lord will return like a thief in the night: > http://bible.cc/1_thessalonians/5-2.htm > Is this predi

Re: [fonc] Natural Language Wins

On 4/6/2013 10:59 AM, John Carlson wrote: When I was studying Revelation in the 1980s. We thought this same scripture referred to the European Union. We also thought that Jesus had to return by 1988, because that was one generation past when the Jews returned to Israel in 1948. It seems tha

Re: [fonc] DSL Engineering: Designing, Implementing and Using Domain-Specific Languages

On 1/25/2013 10:11 AM, Kurt Stephens wrote: Don't know if this has been posted/discussed before: http://dslbook.org/ The 560-page, book is donationware. Lots to read here. :) nifty, may have to go read it... it does make me wonder: how viable is donationware as an option for software, vs,

Re: [fonc] deriving a POL from existing code

On 1/9/2013 11:53 AM, David Barbour wrote: On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 9:37 AM, John Carlson > wrote: I've been collecting references to game POLs on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_entertainment_language That's neat. I'll definitely peruse. int

Re: [fonc] Current topics

On 1/3/2013 7:27 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: Whoa, I think you just invented "nanotech organelles", at least this is the first time I've heard that idea and it seems pretty mind-blowing. What would a cell use a cpu for? mostly so that microbes could be programmed i

Re: [fonc] Current topics

On 1/3/2013 2:25 AM, Simon Forman wrote: On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:35 PM, BGB wrote: On 1/2/2013 10:31 PM, Simon Forman wrote: On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Alan Kay wrote: The most recent discussions get at a number of important issues whose pernicious snares need to be handled better

Re: [fonc] Current topics

On 1/2/2013 10:31 PM, Simon Forman wrote: On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Alan Kay wrote: The most recent discussions get at a number of important issues whose pernicious snares need to be handled better. In an analogy to sending messages "most of the time successfully" through noisy channels

Re: [fonc] Wrapping object references in NaN IEEE floats for performance (was Re: Linus...)

On 1/1/2013 6:36 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: On 1/1/13 3:43 AM, BGB wrote: here is mostly that this still allows for type-tags in the references, but would likely involve a partial switch to the use of 64-bit tagged references within some core parts of the VM (as a partial switch away from

Re: [fonc] Incentives and Metrics for Infrastructure vs. Functionality

On 1/1/2013 2:12 PM, Loup Vaillant-David wrote: On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 04:36:09PM -0700, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: On 12/31/12 2:58 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: 2. The programmer has a belief or preference that the code is easier to work with if it isn't abstracted. […] I have evidence for this

Re: [fonc] Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug - Slashdot

On 12/31/2012 10:47 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: On 12/31/12 8:30 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: So, I guess another meta-level bug in the Linux Kernel is that it is written in C, which does not support certain complexity management features, and there is no clear upgrade path from that because C+

Re: [fonc] Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug - Slashdot

On 12/30/2012 10:49 PM, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: Some people here might find of interest my comments on the situation in the title, posted in this comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3346421&cid=42430475 After citing Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 "The Computer Revolution Has Not Happened

Re: [fonc] Falun Dafa

On 12/23/2012 3:48 PM, John Pratt wrote: Respectfully, go read Zhuan Falun and then comment on this thread. eastern religious stuff is not compatible with my religious background, so I will decline... (more so, this group is theoretically more about science and computers than it is about e

Re: [fonc] Falun Dafa

On 12/23/2012 11:25 AM, John Carlson wrote: On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 12:37 AM, BGB <mailto:cr88...@gmail.com>> wrote: On 12/22/2012 9:11 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: I think you've missed the point. The point is... you need to use your body and your emotions as

Re: [fonc] Falun Dafa

ions). but, keeping going is still better than falling into despair, even if everything does eventually all amount to nothing. or such... Julian On 23/12/2012, at 1:52 PM, BGB <mailto:cr88...@gmail.com>> wrote: On 12/22/2012 5:52 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Thank you, captain

Re: [fonc] Falun Dafa

On 12/22/2012 5:52 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Thank you, captain obvious. Man is a three-centered (three-brained if you will) being. Focussing on only one of the brains is by definition imbalanced. Bring back the renaissance man. so, if, say, a person likes computers, but largely lacks eit

Re: [fonc] How it is

On 10/3/2012 2:46 PM, Paul Homer wrote: I think it's because that's what we've told them to ask for :-) In truth we can't actually program 'everything', I think that's a side-effect of Godel's incompleteness theorem. But if you were to take 'everything' as being abstract quantity, the more we

Re: [fonc] How it is

still requires "intelligence" to put the pieces together, and design the various ways in which they may interoperate... I really don't know if this helps, or is just me going off on a tangent. Paul. ---

Re: [fonc] How it is

On 10/2/2012 5:48 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: BGB writes: On 10/2/2012 12:19 PM, Paul Homer wrote: It always seems to be that each new generation of programmers goes straight for the low-hanging fruit, ignoring that most of it has already been solved many times over

Re: [fonc] How it is

On 10/2/2012 12:19 PM, Paul Homer wrote: It always seems to be that each new generation of programmers goes straight for the low-hanging fruit, ignoring that most of it has already been solved many times over. Meanwhile the real problems remain. There has been progress, but over the couple of d

Re: [fonc] Deployment by virus

On 7/19/2012 7:32 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 02:28:18PM +0200, John Nilsson wrote: More work relative to an approach where full specification and controll is feasible. I was thinking that in a not to distant future we'll want to build systems of such complexity that we need t

Re: [fonc] Deployment by virus

On 7/18/2012 9:14 PM, John Nilsson wrote: Random as in where it's applied or random in what's applied? I was thinking that the viral part was a means to counter the seeming randomness in an otherwise chaotic system. Similar in spirit in how gardening creates some amount of order and predictabili

Re: [fonc] Component-based software

On 7/18/2012 4:04 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: Tomasz Rola wrote: On Sun, 15 Jul 2012, Ivan Zhao wrote: By "Victorian plumbing", I meant the standardization of the plumbing and hardware components at the end of the 19th century. It greatly liberated plumbers from fixing each broken toilet from s

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

r subject anyways. but, yeah, probably this topic has gone on long enough. On 17/07/12 17:18, BGB wrote: an issue though is that society will not tend to see a person as they are as a person, but will rather tend to see a person in terms of a particular set of stereotypes. "Societ

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/17/2012 8:56 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: BGB writes: but you can't really afford a house without a job, and can't have a job without a car (so that the person can travel between their job and their house). Job is an invention of the Industrial era. AFAIK, our great g

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/17/2012 11:12 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Pascal J. Bourguignon a écrit : BGB writes: dunno, I learned originally partly by hacking on pre-existing codebases, and by cobbling things together and seeing what all did and did not work (and was later partly followed by looking at code and

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/17/2012 9:04 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: David-Sarah Hopwood writes: On 17/07/12 02:15, BGB wrote: so, typically, males work towards having a job, getting lots money, ... and will choose females based mostly how useful they are to themselves (will they be faithful, would they

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/16/2012 8:59 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote: On 17/07/12 02:15, BGB wrote: so, typically, males work towards having a job, getting lots money, ... and will choose females based mostly how useful they are to themselves (will they be faithful, would they make a good parent, ...). meanwhile

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/16/2012 3:15 PM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: BGB writes: and, one can ask: does your usual programmer actually even need to know who the past US presidents were and what things they were known for? or the differences between Ruminant and Equine digestive systems regarding their ability

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/16/2012 11:22 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: BGB writes: general programming probably doesn't need much more than pre-algebra or maybe algebra level stuff anyways, but maybe touching on other things that are useful to computing: matrices, vectors, sin/cos/..., the big sigma not

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/16/2012 8:00 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: Miles Fidelman writes: Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: Miles Fidelman writes: And seems to have turned into something about needing to recreate the homebrew computing milieu, and everyone learning to program - and perhaps "why don't more peopl

Re: [fonc] Historical lessons to escape the current sorry state of personal computing?

On 7/14/2012 5:11 PM, Iian Neill wrote: Ivan, I have some hope for projects like the Raspberry Pi computer, which aims to replicate the 'homebrew' computing experience of the BBC Micro in Britain in the 1980s. Of course, hardware is only part of the equation -- even versatile hardware that en

Re: [fonc] memristors and the changing landscape of systems architectures

On 7/11/2012 4:25 AM, Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: BGB writes: On 7/10/2012 8:53 PM, Daniel Gackle wrote: I watched the video and got excited too. Petabits of on-chip non-volatile storage? that also can do logic? That's more than a game changer. same here, it seems li

Re: [fonc] memristors and the changing landscape of systems architectures

On 7/10/2012 8:53 PM, Daniel Gackle wrote: I watched the video and got excited too. Petabits of on-chip non-volatile storage? that also can do logic? That's more than a game changer. same here, it seems like an interesting technology. large+fast non-volatile storage, effective FPGAs, neural-n

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 2:20 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: a problem is partly how exactly one defines "complex": one definition is in terms of "visible complexity", where basically adding a feature causes code to become harder to understand, more tangled, ... another de

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 1:39 PM, Wesley Smith wrote: If things are expanding then they have to get more complex, they encompass more. Aside from intuition, what evidence do you have to back this statement up? I've seen no justification for this statement so far. Biological systems naturally make use of o

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 11:36 AM, Randy MacDonald wrote: @BGB, by the 'same end' i meant tranforming a statement into something that a flow control operator can act on, like if () {...} else {} The domain of the execute operator in APL is quoted strings. I did not mean that the same end wa

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 11:36 AM, Randy MacDonald wrote: @BGB, by the 'same end' i meant tranforming a statement into something that a flow control operator can act on, like if () {...} else {} The domain of the execute operator in APL is quoted strings. I did not mean that the same end wa

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 10:05 AM, Randy MacDonald wrote: @BGB, if the braces around the letters defers execution, as my memories of Perl confirm, this is perfect. With APL, quoting an expression accomplishes the same end: '1+1' no, the braces indicate a code block (in statement context),

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/16/2012 9:19 AM, Randy MacDonald wrote: On 6/10/2012 1:15 AM, BGB wrote: meanwhile, I have spent several days on-off pondering the mystery of if there is any good syntax (for a language with a vaguely C-like syntax), to express the concept of "execute these statements in paralle

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/15/2012 12:27 PM, Paul Homer wrote: I wouldn't describe complexity as a problem, but rather an attribute of the universe we exist in, effecting everything from how we organize our societies to how the various solar systems interact with each other. Each time you conquer the current comple

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/14/2012 10:19 PM, John Zabroski wrote: Folks, Arguing technical details here misses the point. For example, a different conversation can be started by asking Why does my web hosting provider say I need an FTP client? Already technology is way too much in my face and I hate seeing progra

Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies

On 6/9/2012 9:28 PM, Igor Stasenko wrote: While i agree with guy's bashing on HTTP, the second part of his talk is complete bullshit. IMO, he did raise some valid objections regarding JS and similar though as well. these are also yet more areas though where BS differs from JS: it uses diffe

Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas

On 6/4/2012 12:59 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: On 6/4/2012 6:48 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: and, recently devised a hack for creating "component layered JPEG images", or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps

Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas

On 6/4/2012 6:48 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: and, recently devised a hack for creating "component layered JPEG images", or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps, specular maps, and luma maps (as an essentially 16-comp

Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas

On 6/3/2012 8:31 PM, Shawn Morel wrote: I'm a very visual learner / thinker. I usually find it mentally painful (yes brow furrowing, headache inducing) to think of hard (distant) ideas until I can find an image in my mind's eye. Understood that not everyone thinks like this :) I guess I often

Re: [fonc] The problem with programming languages

ke flowcharts, as I personally tend to see them as often a very wasteful/ineffective way of representing many of these sorts of problems. despite both being visually-based, my thinking is not composed of flow-charts (and I much prefer more textual formats...). or such... Cheers, Jaros?aw Rz

Re: [fonc] The problem with programming languages

On 5/8/2012 2:56 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Isn't this simply a description of your "thought clearing process"? You think in English... not Ruby. I'd actually hazard a guess and say that really, you think in a semi-verbal semi-phyiscal pattern language, and not very well formed one, either. T

Re: [fonc] The problem with programming languages

On 5/7/2012 11:56 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: Naming poses no problem so long as you define things a bit. :P Humans parsing documents without proper definitions are like coders trying to read programming languages that have no comments (pretty much all the source code I ever read unfortunately

Re: [fonc] The problem with programming languages

On 5/7/2012 7:26 AM, Carl Gundel wrote: People do that every day without using a programming language at all. ;-) I think pretty much every field does this. programmers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, ... all have their own specialized versions of the language, with many terms particular to th

Re: [fonc] Quiet and light weight devices

On 4/21/2012 1:57 PM, Andre van Delft wrote: TechCrunch has an interview with Linus Torvalds. He uses a MacBook Air (iOS, BTW): sure it is not OS X?... although, it is kind of funny that he would be using a computer not running his own OS... [Start of Quote] I’m have to admit being a bit

Re: [fonc] Article "Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software"

On 4/12/2012 4:50 PM, Andre van Delft wrote: FYI: Michael Nielsen wrote a large article "Lisp as the Maxwell’s equations of software", about the famous page 13 of the LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual; see http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/ The article is d

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/11/2012 11:14 PM, Josh Gargus wrote: On Apr 8, 2012, at 7:31 PM, BGB wrote: now, why, exactly, would anyone consider doing rendering on the server?... One reason might be to amortize the cost of global illumination calculations. Since much of the computation is view-independent, a

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/9/2012 10:53 AM, David Barbour wrote: On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 8:25 AM, BGB <mailto:cr88...@gmail.com>> wrote: Running on a cluster is very different between having all the intelligence on the individual clients. As far as I can tell, MMOs by and large

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/8/2012 8:26 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: On 4/4/2012 5:26 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: Not so sure. Probably similar levels of complexity between a military sim. and, say, World of Warcraft. Fidelity to real-world behavior is more important, and network latency matters

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/4/2012 5:26 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: Not so sure. Probably similar levels of complexity between a military sim. and, say, World of Warcraft. Fidelity to real-world behavior is more important, and network latency matters for the extreme real-time stuff (e.g., networked

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/4/2012 1:06 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: On 4/4/2012 9:29 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: - game-like simulations (which I'm more familiar with): but these are serious games, with lots of people and vehicles running around practicing techniques, or experimenting with new weapon

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/4/2012 9:29 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: On 4/4/2012 6:35 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: still not heard the term CGF before though. If you do military simulations, CGF (Computer Generated Forces) and SAF (Semi-Automated Forces) are the equivalent terms of art to "

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/4/2012 6:35 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: still not heard the term CGF before though. If you do military simulations, CGF (Computer Generated Forces) and SAF (Semi-Automated Forces) are the equivalent terms of art to "game engine." Sort of. "military simulat

Re: [fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

On 4/3/2012 9:29 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: On 4/3/2012 10:47 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: Hah. You've obviously never been involved in building a CGF simulator (Computer Generated Forces) - absolute spaghetti code when you have to have 4 main loops, touch 2000 objects (say

[fonc] Physics Simulation (Re: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future)

(changed subject, as this was much more about physics simulation than about concurrency). yes, this is a big long "personal history dump" type thing, please ignore if you don't care. On 4/3/2012 10:47 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: David Barbour wrote: Control flow is a source of much implicit

Re: [fonc] Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future

On 4/3/2012 9:46 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: David Barbour wrote: On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: It's not just imperative programming. The superficial mode of human cognition is sequential. This is the problem with all of mathematics and

Re: [fonc] Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future

On 3/27/2012 6:16 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: granted, language-design may still need some work to find an ideal programming model for working with concurrent systems, but I still more suspect it will probably end up looking more like "existing language with better concur

Re: [fonc] Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!: A Wild Screed about the Future

On 3/27/2012 12:23 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote: karl ramberg wrote: Slides/pdf: http://www.dynamic-languages-symposium.org/dls-11/program/media/Ungar_2011_EverythingYouKnowAboutParallelProgrammingIsWrongAWildScreedAboutTheFuture_Dls.pdf Granted that their approach to an OLAP cube is new, but

Re: [fonc] OT? Polish syntax

On 3/19/2012 5:24 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: but, hmm... one could always have 2 stacks: create a stack over the stack, in turn reversing the RPN into PN, and also gets some "meta" going on... Uh, I'm afraid one stack is one too many for me. But then again, I'm not sure I get what you mean. in t

Re: [fonc] OT? Polish syntax

On 3/18/2012 6:54 PM, Martin Baldan wrote: BGB, please see my answer to shaun. In short: _ I'm not looking for stack-based languages. I want a Lisp which got rid of (most of the) the parens by using fixed arity and types, without any loss of genericity, homoiconicity or other desirable fea

Re: [fonc] OT? Polish syntax

On 3/15/2012 9:21 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: I have a little off-topic question. Why are there so few programming languages with true Polish syntax? I mean, prefix notation, fixed arity, no parens (except, maybe, for lists, sequences or similar). And of course, higher order functions. The only exam

Re: [fonc] Apple and hardware

On 3/14/2012 3:55 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote: If you have a good version of confinement (which is pretty simple HW-wise) you can use Butler Lampson's schemes for Cal-TSS to make a workable version of a capability system. The 286 protected mode was good enough for this, and was extended in

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

On 3/14/2012 11:31 AM, Mack wrote: On Mar 13, 2012, at 6:27 PM, BGB wrote: the issue is not that I can't imagine anything different, but rather that doing anything different would be a hassle with current keyboard technology: pretty much anyone can type ASCII characters; many other p

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

On 3/14/2012 8:57 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Michael FIG wrote: Loup Vaillant writes: You could also play the human compiler: use the better syntax in the comments, and implement a translation of it in code just below. But then you have to manually make sure they are synchronized. Comments ar

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

ject-orientism of individual parsing elements. This takes a while to understand, I think. Formats here become "languages", protocols are "languages", and so are any other kind of representation system you care to name (computer programming languages, processor instruction sets,

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

On 3/12/2012 9:01 PM, David Barbour wrote: On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 8:13 PM, Julian Leviston <mailto:jul...@leviston.net>> wrote: On 13/03/2012, at 1:21 PM, BGB wrote: although theoretically possible, I wouldn't really trust not having the ability to use con

Re: [fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

On 3/12/2012 6:31 PM, Josh McDonald wrote: Since it's your own system end-to-end, why not just stop editing source as a stream of ascii characters? Some kind of simple structured editor would let you put whatever you please in strings without requiring any escaping at all. It'd also make the pa

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/12/2012 10:24 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: that is a description of random data, which granted, doesn't apply to most (compressible) data. that wasn't really the point though. I thought the original point was that there's a clear-cut limit to how much redundancy can be eliminated from computin

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

case logic and optimizations and similar. (BTW: now have in-console text editor, but ended up using full words for most command names, seems basically workable...). Best, -Martin On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 7:53 PM, BGB wrote: On 3/11/2012 5:28 AM, Jakub Piotr Cłapa wrote: On 28.02.12 06:42,

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/11/2012 5:28 AM, Jakub Piotr Cłapa wrote: On 28.02.12 06:42, BGB wrote: but, anyways, here is a link to another article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%27s_source_coding_theorem Shannon's theory applies to lossless transmission. I doubt anybody here wants to reproduce every

[fonc] Block-Strings / Heredocs (Re: Magic Ink and Killing Math)

On 3/10/2012 2:21 AM, Wesley Smith wrote: most notable thing I did recently (besides some fiddling with getting a new JIT written), was adding a syntax for block-strings. I used<[[ ... ]]> rather than triple-quotes (like in Python), mostly as this syntax is more friendly to nesting, and is also

Re: [fonc] Magic Ink and Killing Math

On 3/8/2012 9:32 PM, David Barbour wrote: Bret Victor's work came to my attention due to a recent video, Inventing on Principle http://vimeo.com/36579366 If you haven't seen this video, watch it. It's especially appropriate for the FoNC audience. although I don't normally much agree with

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

On 3/9/2012 7:59 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 03:00:35PM -0800, Casey Ransberger wrote: Books? First, the smell. Especially old books. I have a friend who has a Kindle. It smells *nothing* like a library, and I do think something is lost there. Some people get olfactoricall

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

On 3/8/2012 12:34 PM, Max Orhai wrote: On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 7:07 AM, Martin Baldan > wrote: > > - Print technology is orders of magnitude more environmentally benign > and affordable. > That seems a pretty strong claim. How do you back i

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

On 3/8/2012 7:51 AM, David Corking wrote: BGB said: by contrast, a wiki is often a much better experience, and similarly allows the option of being presented sequentially (say, by daisy chaining articles together, and/or writing huge articles). granted, it could be made maybe a little better

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

ransmissions and paring knives are still with us and going strong in this era of ubiquitous automatic transmissions and food processors. Facility and convenience doesn't always trump simplicity and reliability. Especially when the power goes out.) Remember Marshall Mcluhan&

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

w often and negatively many people depict "nerds" and similar...). ultimately, whoever makes up the fields, controls the fields, and ultimately holds control over how things will be regarding said field. so, books are controlled by "literature culture", much like computers re

Re: [fonc] OT: Hypertext and the e-book

On 3/7/2012 3:24 AM, Ryan Mitchley wrote: May be of interest to some readers of the list: http://nplusonemag.com/bones-of-the-book thoughts: admittedly, I am not really much of a person for reading fiction (I tend mostly to read technical information, and most fictional material is more oft

[fonc] on script performance and scalability (Re: Error trying to compile COLA)

not a high-priority though, ...). not really sure if stuff related to writing a JIT is particularly relevant here, and no, I am not trying to spam, even if it may seem like it sometimes. On 3/2/2012 10:25 AM, BGB wrote: On 3/2/2012 3:07 AM, Reuben Thomas wrote: On 2 March 2012 00:43, Julian

Re: [fonc] Sorting the WWW mess

On 3/2/2012 8:37 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: Julian, I'm not sure I understand your proposal, but I do think what Google does is not something trivial, straightforward or easy to automate. I remember reading an article about Google's ranking strategy. IIRC, they use the patterns of mutual linking b

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/2/2012 3:07 AM, Reuben Thomas wrote: On 2 March 2012 00:43, Julian Leviston wrote: What if the aim that superseded this was to make it available to the next set of people, who can do something about real fundamental change around this? Then it will probably fail: why should anyone else ta

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/1/2012 3:56 PM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Le 01/03/2012 22:58, Casey Ransberger a écrit : Below. On Feb 29, 2012, at 5:43 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Yes, I'm aware of that limitation. I have the feeling however that IDEs and debuggers are overrated. When I'm Squeaking, sometimes I find myse

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/1/2012 2:58 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote: Below. On Feb 29, 2012, at 5:43 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: Yes, I'm aware of that limitation. I have the feeling however that IDEs and debuggers are overrated. When I'm Squeaking, sometimes I find myself modeling classes with the browser but leavi

Re: [fonc] Can semantic programming eliminate the need for Problem-Oriented Language syntaxes?

On 3/1/2012 10:25 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: Yes, namespaces provide a form of "jargon", but that's clearly not enough. If it were, there wouldn't be so many programming languages. You can't use, say, Java imports to turn Java into Smalltalk, or Haskell or Nile. They have different syntax and dif

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/1/2012 10:12 AM, Loup Vaillant wrote: BGB wrote: there is also, at this point, a reasonable lack of "industrial strength scripting languages". there are a few major "industrial strength" languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc...), and a number of scripting languages (Pyt

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 3/1/2012 8:04 AM, Reuben Thomas wrote: On 1 March 2012 15:02, Julian Leviston wrote: Is this one of the aims? It doesn't seem to be, which is sad, because however brilliant the ideas you can't rely on other people to get them out for you. this is part of why I am personally trying to work

Re: [fonc] Can semantic programming eliminate the need for Problem-Oriented Language syntaxes?

On 3/1/2012 5:25 AM, Martin Baldan wrote: Hi, What got me wondering this was the fact that people, as far as I know, don't use domain-specific languages in natural speech. What they do use is jargon, but the syntax is always the same. What if one could program in something like ACE, specify a

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 2/29/2012 4:09 PM, Alan Kay wrote: Hi Duncan The short answers to these questions have already been given a few times on this list. But let me try another direction to approach this. The first thing to notice about the overlapping windows interface "personal computer experience" is that i

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 2/29/2012 5:34 AM, Alan Kay wrote: With regard to your last point -- making POLs -- I don't think we are there yet. It is most definitely a lot easier to make really powerful POLs fairly quickly than it used to be, but we still don't have a nice methodology and tools to automatically supply

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 2/28/2012 5:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 29/02/2012, at 10:29 AM, BGB wrote: On 2/28/2012 2:30 PM, Alan Kay wrote: Yes, this is why the STEPS proposal was careful to avoid "the current day world". For example, one of the many current day standards that was dismissed imme

Re: [fonc] Error trying to compile COLA

On 2/28/2012 2:30 PM, Alan Kay wrote: Yes, this is why the STEPS proposal was careful to avoid "the current day world". For example, one of the many current day standards that was dismissed immediately is the WWW (one could hardly imagine more of a mess). I don't think "the web" is entirel

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