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peaton | 11 years ago | on: Kotlin: Statically typed programming language targeting the JVM and JS

I agree with the positivity. It is always easiest to critique and stick with the familiar.

Something we can quantitatively take away from the slur of new languages is that new languages are easier now than ever to create/implement. This should be a good thing. This means faster iteration can occur. Even if that iteration is not necessarily taking place, the creation of new languages verifies this ability.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Named parameters in C

Wow, that's really interesting. I had no idea this was possible. Do you know of any links to tutorials or blog posts on this? I'd love to see a more detailed example.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed

Ah yes, I forgot about Gates. (And Elon, and a number of other such CEOs I'm sure.) Good call!

But you're definitely completely right about medium-sized companies. I had totally forgotten about that category.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Sobrr

No I agree. As soon as I heard the music I instantly started thinking about it. "Is music always this distracting? Is this louder than normal? What is he saying. Oh well, I'm sure it's just me." But I'm glad you pointed this out. Definitely worth a reshoot.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed

It seems the case that the life of a company also follows the Dark Knight quote "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." That is, when a company starts, we all invest because we want our chance to become majority stake holders in the next big monopoly destroyer. Once a company accomplishes this, it becomes a target just as the company(ies) it replaced. I'm no expert and I could be overly generalizing, but am I the only one that sees a problem with the fundamental form company growth takes today?

peaton | 11 years ago | on: XPlain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us

I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I really just meant it as a comment. Hacking the layout just reminded me of those good old myspace profile days. No I'm not "hating". Everybody does this these days. I just think it's interesting.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Adopting a new programming language

I definitely agree. Furthermore, I think being multi-lingual in terms of spoken languages also helps understanding and being open to new paradigms and idioms. And this works both ways. After spending a semester programming in Scheme, I was much more open to the idioms and syntax of Chinese. I think this effect is super exciting and not discussed enough.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Don’t Be Scared Of Functional Programming

I knew I was making a strong assertion when I mentioned function composition. I'm grateful for your feedback, but perhaps you could elaborate? I don't see why they have to be "very different". I think you called me on a certain case, but an example like this demonstrates that they are not so "very different":

    def a(b):
        m = 0
        return b(m)
Or even:

    def a(b):
        m = b(1)
        return m+7
I don't see how these are not a form of function composition. I'm definitely no expert. But I'd really appreciate an elaboration so I can learn from any mistake I'm making.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Don’t Be Scared Of Functional Programming

> The literature relies on somewhat foreboding statements like “functions as first-class objects,” and “eliminating side effects.

I personally find this view a little overbearing.

In "lay programmer's" terms, functions as first-class objects can often come down to being able to pass functions to other functions or function composition. Most of us learned about function composition in Algebra 2... So that's pretty straightforward even at its worst.

Eliminating side effects is equally straightforward in that all it means is that any variables outside the scope of a given function are not changed by the function.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Dependently Typed Programming

Hmm, I don't believe so. My prof went on about a group at Penn using dependent types to prove the security of server applications. But that is definitely an interesting paper too. Thanks for sharing!

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Dependently Typed Programming

Ah, I see. That last bit is especially interesting.

I would argue that there are many languages (and no reason they couldn't) act otherwise with regard to that second quote. However, the line between pure functional and not starts to become fuzzy as well.

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Dependently Typed Programming

UPenn has a ton of really interesting work on extending the Haskell type system to support dependent typing. Some of the coolest pieces I've heard about had to do with guaranteeing the security of a server application through dependent typing.

I never found out what the actual paper or project was that accomplished this. But these two papers[1][2] seems pretty interesting - having to do with guaranteeing safety of database access.

[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/%7Eeir/papers/2012/singletons/paper...

[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/dfuzz-popl2013.pdf

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Dependently Typed Programming

That's a little vague, I think. Pure functional programming has no side effects. Isn't that as succinct & thorough as it gets?

peaton | 11 years ago | on: Dependently Typed Programming

> In a functional language, you describe the problem to the computer, and it solves it for you.

Isn't this the definition of a declarative programming paradigm? (I.e. SQL?)

peaton | 11 years ago | on: A 30-minute Introduction to Rust

Are there specific implementation models or areas or systems programming that favor (or have come to use more exclusively) Rust or Erlang?
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