Why has this post been flagged? Category theory is extremely relevant to programming and this post has plenty of points and comments. Any thoughts dang?
Readit Newswwalexander commented on Vanishing Culture: Punch Card Knitting blog.archive.org/2025/02/... · Posted by u/HieronymusBosch
I don’t know what I thought CNC stood for (something with Cutting in the name presumably) but I definitely didn’t think it stood for Computer Numerical Control.
wwalexander commented on The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017) mathoverflow.net/question... · Posted by u/IdealeZahlen
> My most-used programming language is Go, but I’ve been writing mainly Swift for the past year or so. While there’s a lot I like about Swift, its verbosity leads me to waste an inordinate amount of time pondering what the correct verbiage ought to be, and I often miss Go’s more terse, often single-character naming convention.
Huh. I was expecting that comparison to go the other way given Go's notorious verbosity in terms of error handling, generics etc.. Maybe people compensate for verbosity in one area by being more concise in others (though that doesn't explain e.g. APL).
I would say that Go is extremely explicit, but I wouldn’t say it’s verbose.
Or, I suppose you could say that Go is semantically verbose (explicit error handling, no/low use of generics, no operator overloading), but syntactically concise (short variable names). Swift is the opposite, being semantically concise (extremely heavy use of generics, default arguments) but syntactically verbose (labeled arguments, English-like clauses, result builders).
wwalexander commented on The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017) mathoverflow.net/question... · Posted by u/IdealeZahlen
As somebody who spends a fair amount of time studying math heavy material that uses math that I never studied formally, this stuff is the bane of my existence. It's one thing to see a random Greek letter, where at least I very likely know what the character "is" (eg, "rho" or "psi" or whatever) and can at least pronounce it to myself and make a mental note "go back and see what rho stands for in this equation". But exactly like you say "squiggle that looks like a cursive P" doesn't easily admit a mental placeholder, AND it's hard to look up later to find out exactly what it is. I've really wanted to tear my last hair out over this a few times. And I am pretty sure one recent such occasion involved this exact character, so this really hits home!
And never mind that cognitive load that comes from managing the use of symbols that are the "same symbol" modulo something the typeface. Trying to read something like
"Little b equals Fraktur Bold Capital B divided by (q times Cursive Capital B) all over Gothic Italic B", blah, blah... then throw in the "weird little squiggle that looks kinda like a 'p' but not quite". It's insane.
I also find it frustrating, but I’ve come to appreciate that it’s a way to at least partially sidestep the hard problem of naming things. There are still idioms and choices to make, but using abstract symbols makes it easier to play with the abstract concepts being presented.
My most-used programming language is Go, but I’ve been writing mainly Swift for the past year or so. While there’s a lot I like about Swift, its verbosity leads me to waste an inordinate amount of time pondering what the correct verbiage ought to be, and I often miss Go’s more terse, often single-character naming convention.
wwalexander commented on The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve
>tcgetwinsize
>_POSIX_C_SOURCE
>TIOCGWINSZ
>SIGWINCH
>TIOCSWINSZ
Jesus christ, this whole fashion among the C and linux people focused on writing shorter, but unreadable names is really terrible habbit
I believe this stems from C originally only having 8 significant characters for identifiers.
wwalexander commented on An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers lwn.net/SubscriberLink/99... · Posted by u/MrBuddyCasino
Alyssa Rosenzweig deserves a Turing Award!
wwalexander commented on Apple Introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/griffinli
I was a huge Swift fan but SwiftUI and the changes supporting it in the language got me to switch to Rust for all my personal projects
I’ll admit the builder DSL stuff is a bit of a Turing tarpit for me. I may have wasted the day yesterday trying to implement a BNF grammar DSL.
wwalexander commented on Apple Introduces M4 Pro and M4 Max apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/griffinli
I'm happy that Apple continues to push forward, but I suspect my M1 Max from 2021 will last me a decade or more. It's just a beast of a machine.
I hope they're also working on redesigning the MacBook Pro to feature a display without a notch. I'd buy that instantly.
Seriously, I keep waiting for the FOMO to kick in but the M1 is still so great that I don’t have any.
The only hiccups I ever have are resolving Swift result builder types…perhaps SwiftUI is just a big ploy to burn up all the extra CPU cycles.
16GB base RAM, they finally did it.
They also did move the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse to USB-C.
> They also did move the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse to USB-C.
Only for the bundled peripherals, it seems. The Apple Store now only lists the full-size Lightning keyboard without Touch ID in white, which is even worse than before when you could get various permutations of tenkeyless, Touch ID, and black.
Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can.
I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates.
But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.