David R. MacIver - Latest Comments

Re: Comments on Disqus

David R. MacIver — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:09:12 -0000

By way of determining annoyingosity, this is a comment.

Is it annoying? We shall see.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

George — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:21:07 -0000

Hi David,

You stated that Scala's standard library is pretty embarrassing. Why? In which sense?

Re: Living on the edge of academia

Robert Daland — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:48:52 -0000

I second the comment about an electronic subscription to a university library.
Through Northwestern University's library I can get electronic access to almost everything that has published since 1996 which is worth reading. A subscription costs something on the order of 120 USD/year.

Also, about publishing code, consider the incentive structure.
The citation distribution follows a power law, meaning that a few papers get many citations but most papers get few citations or none at all. In other words, the probability is high that no one will care about your code. Since academics are often ashamed to release an inferior product, they feel they must make a cleaned-up version for public release. And the expected return on this is negative, since the probability is so low that anyone actually cares.
Academics would publish their code much more freely if they were rewarded for it, and those rewards were clear and tangible. For example, if released code factored into tenure decisions, you would see a quantal change in how much open-sourcing goes on.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

Basu — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:18:31 -0000

I'm currently working on a moderately sized python project, so I would like to add:
Good:
1. The module/package system is clean and easy to use.
Bad:
1. The standard GUI toolkit sucks.
2. The explicit reference to self can be a syntactic pain in the ass when you're doing heavy OO.

Re: Not really LÖVING it

Florian — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 06:14:45 -0000

I have not yet found the time to test it, but this may be relevant for your project to write something in
scala: http://technically.us/code/...

Re: Criticizing programming languages

david — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:35:58 -0000

Just as a heads up: Comments so far have been fine, but I will actively delete comments that look like they're turning into a languages flame war.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

Daniel Weinreb — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 08:27:28 -0000

There are eleven currently-maintained implementations of Common Lisp. See my survey paper at http://common-lisp.net/~dlw.... I work at ITA Software, where we are building a high-availability, high-performance, full-function airline reservation system, whose core layer is written in Common Lisp, about 500KLOC. There are many, many Common Lisp success stories (see the paper).

The parentheses are something you get used to very quickly, and Lisp development environments such as Emacs make them far easier to use. Nevertheless, I know they look weird to people who haven't used them.

Regarding the Paul Graham paper, those of us who have used a lot of languages and do understand the more advanced ones don't think any language is "best". There are lots of tradeoffs. When I was a teenager at the beginning of the Lisp machine project at MIT, I was a Lisp bigot, but no more. Lisp is great; I do all my work in it these days, and I am general chair of the upcoming International Lisp Conference (ilc09.org - register now!!), but I respect a lot of other languages. I recently starting learning Haskell, which everybody should do: it's mind-blowingly cool, and very different from anything else. Next up: Clojure.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

mikiobraun — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:51:57 -0000

I really like your list. I think when you start learning to program, you still believe that there is "the best programming language ever". But then, you start to understand that each programming language stands for a certain view on computation, and it's hard to say that a one is uniformly better than all others for all kinds of uses.

C++

Good
- As fast as C
- Gives you quite a few tools for abstraction (e.g. templates, object oriented programming)
Bad:
- Painfully verbose (retype full declarations in header file and implementation file?)
- Basically an experiment how much abstraction you can put into a language and still compile it to assembly code.

LISP

Good
- really old (extra coolness factor)
- gives you about every cool concept that has ever been invented (e.g. GC, macros, functions as objects, object-oriented programming)
Bad
- Parenthesis everywhere
- Is there any maintained implementation besides Emacs?

Also, you mind find this older post by Steve Yegge interesting: http://steve.yegge.googlepa...

Paul Graham had also an interesting chapter in his book "Hackers and Painters" claiming that you always believe that your current programming language is the best one because it obviously is better than everything you've used so far, and you yet don't understand the more advanced programming languages.

Re: New site design

david — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:45:21 -0000

TK: I couldn't persuade OpenCalais to figure that tag out. :-)

Re: New site design

TK — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:34:39 -0000

I thoroughly approve of the new design (happily working in elinks), although I'm shocked to see just the one post in "Rambling Nonesense"...

Re: Not really LÖVING it

david — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:08:10 -0000

Villane:

On further investigation, Slick looks rather interesting. I should definitely have a play with that.

Re: Not really LÖVING it

david — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:07:50 -0000

rude:

Thanks for the tip about 1. Dare I suggest that "eat 100% of the CPU" is not a good default, even if it's circumventable. :-)

2 is hard to reproduce reliably, but was particularly noticeable with pidgin - often existing pidgin instances would crash when love started up or closed (problem observed both under linux and windows xp).

Re: Not really LÖVING it

rude — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 17:49:36 -0000

Heh, you should start a competitor called HÄTE. :3

Two things:

1. Yes, LÖVE will take all the CPU it can get by default. Sleep a few milliseconds in the main loop if you don't like it.
2. Randomly crash other applications? This is the first I've heard of this happening. If you have any more information, it would be cool if you could send it to me.

Re: Not really LÖVING it

Villane — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:35:29 -0000

I haven't looked into LÖVE, but I'm working on 2D games in Scala.

I'm using the Slick Java library (recommend it!) and my Scala port of JBox2D physics engine as the foundation. However, I don't think the level of abstraction provided by those libraries is enough to implement a game, so I'm writing a game entity system on top of those, plus some other goodies. It takes advantage of some Scala's modularity features (traits most of all) and I think it's going to be awesome :) I will release an early version of the engine (source code) in a few months.

A video of an early game prototype in action is available: search for "Orbitum" on youtube.

Re: Not really LÖVING it

Villane — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 07:19:05 -0000

I haven't looked into LÖVE, but I'm working on 2D games in Scala. Here's a crappy webcam video of a current prototype: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

I'm using the Slick 2D engine and Box 2D for physics (the latter I ported to Scala). In a few months, I hope to release both a demo and make the source of the engine available.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

david — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:54:15 -0000

It would probably improve its readability dramatically. :-)

Re: Criticizing programming languages

J.Suereth — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 11:46:35 -0000

You jest now... Wait until the scala eclipse plugin is written in lolcode for improved stability!

Re: Criticizing programming languages

david — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:02:17 -0000

With most people I'd question whether they'd really written enough lolcode to justify contributing it to this list. I think I'll take your word for it though. :-)

How's the work coming on rewriting the lolcode eclipse plugin in lolcode?

Re: Criticizing programming languages

J. Sueeth — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:59:20 -0000

True... It also taunts when when it makes u a cookie, but eated it.

Sometimes it can WTF.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

david — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:56:39 -0000

Surely there's at least one bad feature of lolcode: It can take ur bukkit.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

J. Sueeth — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:47:59 -0000

You missed a few of my favorites:

Zombie

Good:
- Inherently evil
- Summon minions to do thy bidding
Bad:
- Inheriently evil
- Summons minions who may not do thy bidding.

LOLCode

Good:
- Hilarious
- Furry-Feline-Friendly
Bad:
- There are no cons with LOLCode

Haifu
Good:
- Incredibly poetic and beautiful
- Perfectly in balance with the universe
Bad:
- Must be a Zen Master to balance the Yin and Yang and elements to create executable code.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

david — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:21:46 -0000

You're cheating, both of you. Two items per list only! :-)

But thanks for the contributions anyway.

Re: Criticizing programming languages

James Iry — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:56:28 -0000

C++

Good:
- All the performance capabilities of C
- Far more abstraction capabilities than most languages out there

Bad:
- So complicated no two compilers, let alone programmers, understand the same language
- High abstraction and manual memory management are a poor mix (please don't mention RAII, smart pointers, or Boehm garbage collector - they're either too restrictive or too conservative or both)
- Very difficult to avoid doing massive re-compile on seemingly small changes

Assembly

Good:
- You can do anything you want
- Make hardware your bitch

Bad:
- You can do anything you think you want to do but mostly you probably really shouldn't want to
- It takes 16 pages of inscrutable code to do it

Scheme

Good:
- call-with-current-continuation
- gentle learning curve
- hygienic macros

Bad:
- call-with-current-continuation
- the standard is too small so each Scheme implementation adds its own incompatible "batteries included" language and library extensions
- everything is mutable whether you want it to be or not which is odd in a functional language

Re: Criticizing programming languages

Daniel — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:34:19 -0000

Nice list. Let me add 2:

C#
Good:
- Mainstream language that actually incorporates new shiny features
- Helps you to earn money
- Best Tool chain I have ever seen
Bad:
- Microsoft/Windows Only
- Generics were put in as an afterthought / Every object can be null

Delphi
Good:
- Nice toolkit
- High performance
Bad:
- Archaic language
- IDE, compiles - all of them are buggy as hell

Sounds like a nice StackOverflow Question ;)

Re: Cleaning up a set of tags, part 1

david — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:09:41 -0000

Also I'm glad you're finding it interesting. :-) I don't expect that much of what I'm doing will see use on these sites - it's not really for that. It's more for building data analysis on top of a noisy tag set.