TheRealDevonMcC's comments

I found the pictures in this article to be confusing - are they showing two shots of the same place or two shots of contiguous areas?

As a 61-year-old with almost 50 years of programming experience who recently got a new job, I can testify how almost no one wants to hear from an old person. I program for fun, too, and could be doing that full-time if I weren't working.

I'm only employed now because I'm proficient in an older language (APL). Never mind my decades of experience in many other languages and extensive domain knowledge in finance, not that I'm bitter or anything.

APL by Ken Iverson, as well as its descendants.

I read a review of the book "Becoming Trader Joe" by Joe Coulombe who founded the Trader Joe's supermarket chain. One of the very smart things he did was understand how expensive turnover is, so he oriented the company around keeping his employees motivated to stay.

Maybe it's because you cannot separate things that neatly. I see people here complaining that it's not all about tech but what is tech without the world that we live in and our effect on that world?

Without context, tech alone is a very sterile discussion.

Considering how diverse California's demographic composition is, as opposed to say, Vermont, they deserve credit for doing better than the country as a whole.

A programmer, an engineer, and a physicist are in adjacent hotel rooms. Each has a pitcher of water beside the bed. A fire starts in the wastepaper basket in each room.

The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, estimates exactly how much water is needed to put it out, and pours exactly that amount from the pitcher, dousing the flames.

The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, pours the entire pitcher of water on it, then refills the pitcher and douses it again to be safe.

The programmer wakes up, sees the fire, sees the pitcher of water, decides it's a solvable problem, and goes back to sleep.

More idiomatic J might look like this: +/a#~a>3 .

The preceding discussion is a good example of "whoosh!" because it fails to understand that APL is an array language. It eschews scalar representation like "A1x1 + A2x2 ...". In APL, you would write this as something like "A +.× x".

The same lack of understanding of the array context also underlies the earlier comment favoring "standard" order of operation that works well for maybe five functions with three levels of precedence but quickly becomes unwieldy for more functions.

Someone else already alluded to this lack of scalability but the power of a strictly positional precedence - not "no precedence" - shows up in array operations. For example, consider reduction by a non-commutative function like "-/A".

In the "standard" order of precedence, since all the subtractions are at the same level, this can be restated as the first item in A minus the sum of the remaining items. This is not particularly interesting or useful.

However, positional precedence interprets this expression as an alternating sum: (2-3) + (5-9) (for the "A" above). Alternating sum is a common, useful construction in mathematics.

It's also likely that his usage preceded the more common one prevalent now.