It's not immediately clear from reading this what this means for ACM books, both older ones and new ones. I'm a fan of a lot of their older books, such as the Turing Award Lecture anthology they published in the early 1990s. I'm also interested in some of the newer books they've published in the last several years (The tributes to Dijkstra and Hoare especially stand out). I really hope these are included as well.
Readit Newsalgernonramone commented on Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access dl.acm.org/openaccess... · Posted by u/Kerrick
algernonramone commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
> There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.
When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.
Seems somewhat related to Iverson's 1979 Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...)(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25249563)
algernonramone commented on Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly? mathenchant.wordpress.com... · Posted by u/jamespropp
I am willing to admit that I find matrix multiplication ugly, as well as non-intuitive. But, I am also willing to admit that my finding it ugly is likely a result of my relative mathematical immaturity (despite my BS in math).
algernonramone commented on Why I code as a CTO assembled.com/blog/why-i-... · Posted by u/johnjwang
I've always wondered: Why did we switch to "code" instead of "program"?
I don't know, but I hate it.
algernonramone commented on Locally hosting an internet-connected server mjg59.dreamwidth.org/7209... · Posted by u/pabs3
TIL
Me too, at first I thought it was a takeoff on "Heathkit". Silly me, I guess.
algernonramone commented on The Age of Chiplets Is Upon Us eetimes.com/the-age-of-ch... · Posted by u/jnord
Back in 1997, if you brought a Pentium 2 [1] you didn't just get a single chip with all the cache made by the same process. Instead, the chip and the cache were made by different processes, tested, then integrated into a 'cartridge' you plugged into the 'CPU slot'
I always thought that was a cool idea, and I was disappointed when it was essentially abandoned after the PIII. I still think there’s value there for things like customizing processors for certain applications (having a standard base chip and external interface, but being able to customize the rest of the the processor board).
algernonramone commented on 21 Algol 60 Compilers in 1962 shape-of-code.com/2024/12... · Posted by u/elvis70
One cool thing about Algol is that, while the language itself is over 60 years old, most modern programmers can have a decent understanding of source code written in it. It's a bit like reading 17th century English. You don't quite understand everything, but you can grasp most of it.
I wonder why the retrocomputing crowd hasn't done much in ALGOL. Perhaps because it's just easier to write in BASIC, which was influenced by it.
I think ALGOL nowadays would likely work best as sort of a lingua franca psuedocode, I don’t think it would be too difficult to make that work. It kind of was already for a long time, as much of the Collected Algorithms of the ACM were originally written in it IIRC.
algernonramone commented on Towards Idempotent Rebuilds? blog.josefsson.org/2024/0... · Posted by u/JNRowe
Coming from maths, I am confused by use of the term "idempotent" here. Unless we are talking about bootstrapping a compiler and I do not see how it applicable here. Am I missing something?
I feel that "deterministic" is probably a better word here than "idempotent".
Mostly I just find these arguments to be evidence that 'measure theory is not very interesting', that is, it's concerned with proving things about mathematical objects that you won't find in reality and therefore I don't care about.
I wonder sometimes if there is a concrete version of the statement: 'there is an infinite number of interesting theorems', which would suggest that perhaps doing 'all the math' is not a good idea and we should only do the math which we find important.
(of course, others would disagree that measure theory is unimportant, anyway. Shrug.)
The main problem with a statement like that is that "interesting" is extremely subjective. Personally, I often find math and CS to be more interesting when it's further from reality. To each his own, I suppose.
This is great, and I will download it, but I might be missing something because I don't see the PDF? I guess I will stick to the epub.