robacarp (u/robacarp)

robacarp commented on Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence quantamagazine.org/crucia... · Posted by u/theafh

robacarp · 3 years ago

I'm not at all worried that particle physics will slow down (...heh) because of this. It sounds like the one guy has been doing an incredible job of service maintenance over the years, sure, but these folks write software all the time.

I have a hunch that FORM is not made up of easy to grok software designs or it would probably be true that other folks would have contributed in a bigger way regardless of academic stimuli. If that is indeed the case, as is common in research-academia software product, then tie a bow on it and send it off to the Smithsonian.

I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica.

robacarp · 3 years ago

having now poked at the source code on github, yeah this is not at all maintainable by modern standards. it's the kind of code you're unable to modify until you memorize every last line and the whole problem domain.

robacarp commented on Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence quantamagazine.org/crucia... · Posted by u/theafh

zokier · 3 years ago

> Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today’s students learn to program. Experienced users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice, many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are off-limits — too difficult to handle. So particle physics will stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest calculations.

This seems very pessimistic view. FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even improved in the process; its not some irreplaceable artifact descended from heavens.

On the other hand, I imagine it would take bit more than just maintenance to make the 30 year old C codebase welcoming for new physicists to work on.

robacarp · 3 years ago

I'm not at all worried that particle physics will slow down (...heh) because of this. It sounds like the one guy has been doing an incredible job of service maintenance over the years, sure, but these folks write software all the time.

I have a hunch that FORM is not made up of easy to grok software designs or it would probably be true that other folks would have contributed in a bigger way regardless of academic stimuli. If that is indeed the case, as is common in research-academia software product, then tie a bow on it and send it off to the Smithsonian.

I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in Mathematica.

robacarp commented on Tailwind is a leaky abstraction jakelazaroff.com/words/ta... · Posted by u/jakelazaroff

confidantlake · 3 years ago

I don't really get Tailwind. Whenever I am looking at a layout, I am doing it in the inspector tools, not in the stylesheet or the html file. I don't care if the class is called top_bar or foo_bar or if the styling is done inline. I do care that is had a border-radius of 10px,. With tailwind I have to somehow know that border-radius is supposed to be "rounded". I have to learn a whole new language and constantly translate back and forth.

A lot of people seem to like tailwind though so I am probably missing something.

robacarp · 3 years ago

> I have to somehow know that border-radius is supposed to be "rounded".

Yeah I agree with you there. If you're writing tailwind you have to constantly have the tailwind docs site open.

robacarp commented on Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use? · Posted by u/smarri

robacarp · 4 years ago

Neat question, I've enjoyed the replies so far.

I've built tons. Most of them don't stick for long. One that has is a file-cabinet organization tool - https://github.com/robacarp/place

- it moves files into place within my filing system - renames the file so that even if it's moved _from_ the filing system I can see where it came from (eg sent in an email) - uses a custom TUI engine I built for this specific task https://github.com/robacarp/keimeno

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Another is a clean, bare bones, web-extension mode "picture on a new tab" extension. When I came back to firefox a few years ago I couldn't find one amongst the clutter on AMO so I put together https://github.com/robacarp/photographic_start

robacarp commented on Open-sourcing Sorbet: a fast, powerful type checker for Ruby sorbet.org/blog/2019/06/2... · Posted by u/abhorrence

the_duke · 7 years ago

It's been funny to watch how more and more static type systems are getting bolted on to dynamically typed languages in recent years.

Typescript (with stellar adoption), native type annotation support in Python, Sorbet, PHP 7, Elixir + Dialyzer, ...

I wonder why there isn't a popular gradually typed language that natively allows writing both dynamic and type-safe code, allowing quick prototyping and then gradual refactor to type safety.

I guess in part because it's a big challenge to come up with a coherent type system that allows this, the bifurcation in the ecosystem, and often a somewhat leaky abstraction. Eg in Typescript you will often still run into bugs caused by malformed JSON that doesn't fit the type declaration, badly or insufficiently typed third party libraries, ....

Google's Dart is the only recent, somewhat popular language (only due to Flutter) that allows this natively - that I can think of right now.

I do think such a language would be very beneficial for the current landscape though, and projects like this show there is a clear need.

Edit: just remembered another option: Crystal. Also Julia, as pointed out below.

robacarp · 7 years ago

> a popular gradually typed language that natively allows writing both dynamic and type-safe code, allowing quick prototyping and then gradual refactor to type safety.

You mention it in your edit, but Crystal has been exactly that for me. A rubyist for a decade I found Crystal to have the type system I was expecting all along.