Readit Newszogrodea commented on C# almost has implicit interfaces clipperhouse.com/c-sharp-... · Posted by u/mwsherman
F# has an interesting way to achieve a similar function in Statically Resolved Type Parameters (SRTP)
Palatable blog post: https://www.compositional-it.com/news-blog/static-duck-typin...
Official docs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
That's an interesting feature I didn't know F# had. It sounds similar to row polymorphism (which I found a good description of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829766 ).
zogrodea commented on Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point mihaiolteanu.me/defense-o... · Posted by u/molteanu
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
That specialist interfaces make you productive?
Sketchpad was just a cad tool, one of the first ones to be sure, but still a design tool.
We have substantially better ones today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIa4LpqI2EI
So in 62 years have we improved the state of the art in design by as much as between 1900 to 1962?
Yes. I'd say we have and more.
I'm just putting this Alan Kay question (from Stack Overflow) here because of relevance.
In that question, he's considered not with implementation or how good the execution of an idea is (which is certainly one type of progress), but in genuinely new ideas.
I don't think I personally am qualified to say yes or no. There are new data structures since then for example, but those tend to be improvements over existing ideas rather than "fundamental new ideas" which I understand him (perhaps wrongly) to be asking for.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...
zogrodea commented on Show HN: OCaml-like pattern-matching with vanilla JavaScript (no transpiler) · Posted by u/aylmao
That looks pretty great! I would love to use this at work if functional programming idioms were already familiar to the team and I didn't face resistance introducing them. Thank you for sharing and developing the library.
Unless I'm misunderstanding: isn't the JVM's virtual threads another instance of this colorlessness?
I think you're right. People describe Java as being colourless.
Two functions that are identical up to one of them being async and using "await" to call another function foo_async, and the other that is sync and calling foo_sync (a synchronous version of foo_async) without await?
My experience with this is in .NET, which has methods like readFile (which is async) and readFileSync.
.NET doesn't really need to provide two separate utility methods like this though, because you can use Task.wait to block until the async task is done.
Long-time JS/TS/Node programmer here.
Knowing ahead of time which functions are async is a feature.
It's a big neon sign that says "hey, this function call is expensive". This is a good thing for programmers to easily see and know at the call site.
If you make multiple calls with async/await in a row, the performance issues are plainly obvious at the call site. With "colorless" functions, this information is hidden in a deeper layer. You have to know what the function does on the inside to even know what its performance impacts are.
Also, a nitpick - you can call async functions from sync ones, you just can't access the return value. Sometimes, you don't need to.
I had the same opinion with async/await, that it's nice to know a function performs IO and will wait before continuing. Makes it clearer when to use Promise.all to make multiple requests in parallel and wait for all of them to finish before continuing (faster than making calls sequentially).
I kind of wish the languages I use had Haskell's IO monad too, to separate functions in terms of the type system, but that's slightly different.
You might like this article (which is my personal favourite about function colouring). https://www.tedinski.com/2018/11/13/function-coloring.html
zogrodea commented on Microsoft says EU to blame for the worst IT outage euronews.com/next/2024/07... · Posted by u/matthewmorgan
The headline is clickbait.
Microsoft is saying why they couldn’t secure the kernel against such an attack, and are right in saying that the EU prevents them from closing it off to third parties.
They are not saying the EU is the root cause of the failure, just that they cannot close the hole currently due to the EU.
What they leave out is that they could choose to integrate Defender into the OS for free, thereby removing it as a product to compete against. They could also move Defender to not require kernel hooks either. Neither are options they want to consider currently.
Integrating Defender sounds like it would create an antitrust issue? If I remember correctly, MS was in the past taken to court and forced to sell some product or other separately, when they previously provided it for free.
No comment about being able to move Defender to not require kernel hooks (I don't know).
zogrodea commented on Copying is the way design works (2020) matthewstrom.com/writing/... · Posted by u/innerzeal
> I broke into his house
Not fun at all. Microsoft is like Disney, they steal from others and trounce others for stealing from them.
Absurd people.
I'm not doubting, but can you give a few examples of Microsoft trouncing others?
I do recall Disney (a main reason copyright laws last so long, and who didn't want Steamboat Willie to enter public domain).
I also think of Amazon (which the creator of the Elm programming language describes as having "the Jeff problem" because they steal smaller people's/team's ideas), although that's a different problem.
I can't say anything comes to mind right now about MS, though, which is most likely a failure of my memory/knowledge. So I'd appreciate some examples.
This accessible paper reminds us that reasoning is not dispassionate and that we should attend to aesthetic matters as well.
The paper itself is in the context of education and seeks how to convey to students the importance and value of a subject matter.