Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

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".. if you think the good version is overly clever, you probably have a very fundamental problem with your abstract reasoning.."

Just to show that you're talking out your ass, here's a code snippet where I did the address of address thing in precisely the same "remove from linked list" situation. In a VM and programming language and operating system that I wrote from scratch[1].

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/a90faae990/edit/003-shor... [2]

Moreover, I lived with it for months before I decided it wasn't worth the cleverness[3]. In this case. So I have some plausible claim to having found the "simplicity on the other side of complexity" in this case[4].

As a general rule I'd recommend not reaching conclusions about people from things they write in a comment on the internet. You're looking at them through a tiny peephole into their belief system. When in doubt, ask questions. "Excuse me sir, do you have much experience with C?", "Are you saying pointers to pointers are always bad?", and so on.

(Clever analogy there about 0. Totally agree with it. Utterly non-applicable in this instance.)

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

[2] Hard to read, I admit. There's a colorized version at http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/edit/003-shortcuts.mu.html, but I only host the most recent version there.

[3] https://github.com/akkartik/mu/commit/ea5e7fd4cb from Apr 2016. The previous version was from Sep 2015.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari

> Just to show that you're talking out your ass, here's a code snippet where I did the address of address thing in precisely the same "remove from linked list" situation. In a VM and programming language and operating system that I wrote from scratch[1].

I'm no sure what exactly that code/that change is supposed to tell me, so I can't tell whether it's a good argument. Mind condensing it down/pointing out what specifically you mean?

> As a general rule I'd recommend not reaching conclusions about people from things they write in a comment on the internet. You're looking at them through a tiny peephole into their belief system. When in doubt, ask questions. "Excuse me sir, do you have much experience with C?", "Are you saying pointers to pointers are always bad?", and so on.

Well, that depends on whether you want to make a point for other people in the discussion or discuss some issue with a specific person. As such, that was not really a judgement of your person, but rather a general statement about a group of people (which obviously might be wrong in some cases).

> (Clever analogy there about 0. Totally agree with it. Utterly non-applicable in this instance.)

You mean not applicable in the case of your code, or in the code in the article, or what else?

(edit: and yeah, I realize how the wording might give the impression that I was talking specifically to/about you, but I really wasn't, I was just using what you wrote as the opportunity, so I ended up addressing you :-)

:) Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah my link is in a strange syntax, but mostly I just wanted to point at the specific line containing address:address, which is the same as a pointer to a pointer. That line is in a function called delete-before-cursor which uses a (doubly) linked list to maintain the state of a text editor.

I came up with this syntax for a teaching environment: http://akkartik.name/post/mu

I love your project! The of testing pervading the whole system is a very good one. I also like parameters being immutable unless they're a product, that's a great way of making passing references hurt less.

I still prefer the version Linus recommended. It's not for speed - I think it's more understandable. It's more simple (in the way Richard Hickey says, one strand rather than many) and there is less of it. Proving it correct would be easier, not that I actually would.

When people say "clever" to me, I think of code that is being tricky about something. (My canonical example of clever code is Duff's Device.) Linus' example doesn't read as tricky to me, it reads as very straightforward.

Thanks! I'm very happy that you noticed that little feature about immutability so quickly. I'd love to hear from you off-thread if you have any more questions or comments about Mu (email address in my profile).

I tried in my original comment not to bring Linus into it. I didn't want to be just another person on the internet poking holes at a famous person. If the examples had both included a guard for the end of the list I'd have been like, "eh, no accounting for taste, but ok," and moved on in silence. But we shouldn't be teaching/encouraging people to focus on minor considerations like the number of `if`s when there's a larger problem with undefined behavior. Since you already took a look at Mu, here's a place where I try to elaborate on this belief system: https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/07b54625f7/001help.cc#L7...

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