jsjolen's comments

jsjolen | 5 years ago | on: Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions

>[...] but quietly so they don't have to admit it's a change of course.

Where exactly does this come from? Sweden has no need to save face. We've been transparent and had open discussion from the beginning with the spoken assumption that we may, in fact, not be doing the right thing and that we may have to alter course as the situation changes.

The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now. They're the ones who are making a big sacrifice and need to motivate it with the fact that "it's a necessity", seeing Sweden succeed otherwise would be a big blow to their egos and their personal sacrifices.

I will also say that voluntary compliance is still occurring here, which is notable both in what private companies are doing in adapting to the situation, and how the average person has changed their behaviour. This doesn't mean 100% compliance for everyone, which is unfortunate.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

Mutual intelligibility for the sake of information exchange is good, but we can have both. Most Europeans already have both. In the EU (the organization) it's Euro English.

The person above you has not said that mutual intelligibility is bad.

You want people to share their culture with you, yet you are fine with them throwing away something which acts as one of the backbones of their cultural history for the sake of an imagined increase in cooperation.

And also, why does everything have to be useful? The useless things in life are often the best. Like ice cream, poetry, wasting an afternoon away, or hacking. In fact that's why I work, to enjoy the useless things in life.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet

1. They can do both, learning a separate script that's as simple as the Latin one is not a huge investment.

2. You're talking about people who immigrate to an English speaking country, correct? Good advice for people living in Mongolia surely is available in Mongolian.

Mongolians today learn English, at least the guy who went to Sweden to work as a chef that I talked to a couple of years ago did.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Language Design: Use [ ] instead of < > for Generics

All of what the author said is what Scala does (author likes Scala).

I've written a decent amount of Scala, it's fine.

I've also written a lot of Common Lisp, where array access is done using aref. That was also fine.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang

I have no issue with that decision at all and find it akin to Go forcing users to adhere to gofmt, and I don't use Zig. A good error message would be nice (EDIT: A zigfmt would be even better).

How many developers who try out new languages are even using Windows? I'd imagine most are on a UNIX-like. Regardless, I don't think it's a big deal either way. You could always make a merge request with a fix if you feel so strongly about it.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Native Applications with Racket

Sounds slow to use RPC with JSON for communication.

It seems that Racket does allow for C-to-Racket calls. You could write a glue program that generates C code that calls Racket functions and returns data, Swift code can then be generated to call that C code. That might be faster.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Seven deadly sins of talking about “types” (2014)

Sure, but the general idea that you should disallow undefined operations are a core application of type systems.

You don't need too advanced of a type system to implement what you're talking about. With the caveat that doing it in Java would make the code tedious to write ;-).

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: W3C recommends WebAssembly

I'm not sure that WASM actually is that analysis-resistant. It's more high-level in some aspects than the JVM bytecode for example.

For example, it doesn't support arbitrary computed goto:s. Instead it supports block-based control flow, where the semantics can either create blocks or jump out of them to lower down blocks. This makes it possible to construct a CFG statically, which isn't possible if it did support arbitrary computed goto:s.

jsjolen | 6 years ago | on: Startup failures are only a matter of point of view

That failure can be a teachable moment is well-known and is applicable in all aspects of life, it is not particularly interesting to read about that in this specific context. In some ways, it is also insulting.

For some there are real-world (often financial) consequences to failure, and that an article about why their egos shouldn't be bruised when facing a failure is the least of their worries.

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