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conner_bw's comments

conner_bw | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is coding like speaking another language?

When it comes to code, English speakers like to talk about how good, pure, or expressive a code language is. For example, ask people up in here to describe PHP and you'll get bile. Ask them to talk about Closure and you'll get accolades. Usually summarized as "because the language is bad the result will be bad"

...the irony is that the discussion will be in English. One of the worlds most inconsistent, awkward, written languages. [1] Further more, most code is English. Example: it's usually "if/else" not "si/sinon" or "と/又は"

IMHO I don't think the analogy holds. However, I don't know of a better way to describe it.

PS: I'm bilingual (French/English)

[1] http://aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu/content/english-language...

conner_bw | 14 years ago | on: HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS

I work for a company that pulls in five million dollars in sales a day. I upgraded all our servers to HTML9 Bootsauce and it broke everything. What the fuck?! Cross dressed in a unitard compatible my ass! We're losing money by the character I type! How do I revert?! Can't trust anything these days.

conner_bw | 14 years ago | on: PHP Sucks But I Like It

Hating on PHP because it has too many functions is like hating on Chinese because, instead of 26 letters that you can combine to write anything, functional literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters and that's just sloppy language design!

Also, why not just call them an API to procedures written in C and realize that none of us scripters are coding in anything.

I code in Lua.

conner_bw | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

Again, you are confusing "right tool for the job" with your silly prejudices.

Take me for example, I know Stockhausen because I studied him in my fine arts undergraduate degree in Electroacoustic studies at university.

To recap, the question was somewhere along the lines of "how do you prototype music, I have a casio?" not "how do you write a serialist score for a chamber ensemble?"

Even then, The Linux Laptop Orchestra based in the music department at Virgina Tech uses trackers. Of course this isn't the score to Star Wars and a house in Malibu; it is very left field stuff, but it can't be denied that this is serious contemporary practice for anyone in the know.

Regards,

conner_bw | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions?

There's a delay column in Renoise that make triplets trivial.

The Lua API and users writing scripts, such as this "Fractional Notes Generator" makes it even more trivial:

http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/28248-allow-fl...

I thought this was hacker news were people actually knew how to code? Musically educated in what? Last time I checked we're not troubadours performing occitan lyric poetry in the high middle ages.

Trackers aren't for everyone, some things are clearly not reasonable to do in them (recording a live band comes to mind), but the "musical education" and "crutch" comment is without foundation.

conner_bw | 14 years ago | on: Facebook is scaring me

Just want to address your "500,000 daily Android activations" comment.

During the C64's lifetime, sales were around 15 million units in total. The C64 was "relevant" between 1981 and 1991. So, roughly 125,000 units sold a month. "Making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time." -Wikipedia, with sources.

Computers have never sold as much as phones. Phones of any variety. So what?

I don't equate "Skateboard = Automobile" because they both have wheels. I don't change my thinking from skateboard to car because cars sell more.

I like skateboards. I like computers. Neither are going away any time soon.

I think you are confusing "relevant" with "popular" or "big piles of money i'd like to take a bath in." I applaud developers who broaden what they are doing. I applaud investors who want to make money investing in whatever makes money. But, businesses come and go. Commodore, in fact, is a perfect example of botching the business, while others continued to make the product, improve the product, and the product is still relevant.

Furthermore, Facebook didn't invent the "generation gap". It's the same thing over and over and over dating back thousands of years. "Being social" is "being human" and not necessarily "being Facebook." There's a bigger picture here.

Regards,

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