Qcombinator

Now there’s a blast from the past! (It really ought to have a warning that it’s full of obsolete code.)

  #! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
  
  use Lingua::Romana::Perligata;
  
  maximum inquementum tum biguttam egresso scribe.
  meo maximo vestibulo perlegamentum da.
  da duo tum maximum conscribementa meis listis.
  
  dum listis decapitamentum damentum nexto
      fac sic
          nextum tum novumversum scribe egresso.
          lista sic hoc recidementum nextum cis vannementa da listis.
      cis.

And people say Perl requires too much punctuation!

Yes, indeed — I should have said "scalar element of the array var..." or something.

I think explains a lot of the polarised reactions people have towards Perl. It's trivial to understand the difference between the scalar var $foo and the array var $foo[0] if someone explains it to you or you read it; but if you're trying to Google-as-you-go, you don't even know what to search for. Those in the former group are more likely to find Perl delightful, while to the latter it's just frustrating.

You don't have to be "wrong". You just have to be not exactly the same as everybody else. And of course, nobody is exactly the same as everybody else, therefore there is not possible for there to be such a thing as The One Perfect Language. The right tool for the job; but also the right tool for the workman.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to check out P6. It's stable enough and has a lot of cool features if you want to learn something new.

It even has built-in multi-dispatch command-line arg-processing: https://docs.perl6.org/language/create-cli

Then it should have been called "1.0". Calling it "DEFINITELY NOT 1.0" while deciding that that is secret P6 code for "really means 1.0" is awfully bad marketing.

(More seriously, slow performance, missing features, bugs, etc. were part of the reason for not calling it "1.0", but I would agree that to be really successful, the language needs a release that is called 1.0 and acts like it.)

A lot of languages — in fact, a lot of software in general — is designed to make things easy for the computer/programmer: "This is how it works and you just have to adapt, deal with it." Larry Wall put a lot of effort into making Perl try to adapt to the way the user already thinks instead, including taking advantage of having studied linguistics to figure out how the "language" part of a computer language fits (or doesn't fit) the way our brains process languages.

The result was a language that has a lot of power and flexibility. People who like Perl tend to love it, because it fits like a tailor-made suit instead of all those off-the-rack languages. People who dislike Perl tend to hate it, because all that power and flexibility can be easily abused (even when you're trying not to — there's a reason so many people buy off the rack instead of making DIY suits).

•https://bigthink.com/videos/why-perl-is-like-a-human-languag...

•https://www.perl.com/pub/1999/03/pm.html/

•https://www.perl.com/pub/2007/12/06/soto-11.html/

No, P6 was intended to fix as many Perl 5 problems as possible, and being eminently parseable was considered very important (and important in deciding to forsake backwards-compatibility, I believe). In fact, a key design-goal is having the language defined by a well-formed grammar that it actually uses to parse itself — and thus that can be used by tools such as editors to parse it just as easily.

>The world has moved on.

Except that it hasn't. What other language does everything P6 does? (Or even tries, let alone does it as well or better.) What language does "most" or "a lot" of it? To be honest, I would have expected that after a couple of decades, there would be other languages that stole a lot of P6's thunder, but if there is anything remotely comparable, I haven't heard of it.

P6 is an surprisingly ambitious project. (I think even surprisingly so to its creators.) Apparently it just takes this long to do something that big and powerful.

As just another Perl hacker, your "not real Perl" made me laugh. And no, let me reassure you that that snippet of line-noise is not, in fact, syntactically valid Perl after all.

...you have to transpose a couple of characters for that:

  cat nocarrier.pl
  !$#foo->_%[]
  
  perl -c nocarrier.pl
  nocarrier.pl syntax OK

(And yes, that genuinely does make me love Perl a tiny bit more. I guess you and I are just different that way, and that's OK.)

This applies to Macs as well. Or at least it used to, in some situations — now that I think about it, I can't really recall the last time I did that. The standard behaviour now seems to be scrolling faster the farther the mouse is from the edge of the pane (which is clearly a deliberate, and useful, UI decision).

>You have to click the speaker icon once to bring up the bar, then look at it and drag it to the desired position.

Actually, you don't — tap the "button" and just start sliding your finger. Same for the brightness control.

I think it is one of those cases Apple sometimes has where they come up with a good interface, but people are so used to bad ones they don't even realise that a better way might work.

I'm not surprised that I've seen a lot of complaints about the touchbar; if you're used to physical keys, a touch-screen is no substitute. (Fortunately, I was already weaning myself off Fkeys, so I don't really miss them.) But I am surprised that I haven't seen more discussion of what it gets right. A slider that you can actually slide is a good UI metaphor for volume (as opposed to tapping fake keys repetitively). The touchbar also can show buttons from dialog-boxes, letting you "type" them instead of having to move your hand to the mouse. It isn't always used to great effect, but it's clear that some real thought was put into it, and I appreciate the attempt to take advantage of what it can do.

The way command-tabbing brings all an application's windows forward always bugged me too. Fortunately, there is LiteSwitch (http://sysbeep.com) that lets you switch to the frontmost window only.

While I'm at it, I'll also plug https://manytricks.com/witch which I find invaluable for switching between windows and just got an update.

Doesn't seem very ironic for an institution that, whatever you think of it, has been a prominent supporter and driver of science ever since the days when it was known as "natural philosophy".

Various reasons, of course, but a key one is that we're lazy: formal logic needs to be applied to something, but apparently accusing the other guy of fallacies is more fun than the boring old job of taking time to define one's terms. How many arguments have you seen that keep going back and forth because each side is using slightly different meanings or understandings of some concept. Yet almost never does anyone stop to say, "Hey, what exactly do you mean by X? I'm using it in this sense…"

I made no reference to a subject either. For "my" experiences to be not really "anybody's" experiences is a somewhat separate problem. As is a belief that I don't really have any beliefs, and so on. Any attempt to eliminate qualia or self or intentionality, etc. as being fundamental realities runs into the problem that all these things are more fundamental to my understanding than any proposed alternative.

>…device makers build in pattern learning so devices can recognize when they're been compromised. A coffee maker that suddenly starts sending out email, for instance, would be suspicious and should set off alarms.

Or, you know, don't install an e-mail server in your coffeepot to begin with.

(You'd think that would be a lot easier, too, but I guess the other way they can charge more for "machine learning".)

>Materialism can classify qualia as an illusion

But can it? To say something is an illusion is to say that is really an experience of something else. And qualia are qualitative experiences, so the claim is that certain experiences are not experiences… which is problematic. Of course, a proper argument needs to be fleshed out more than that, but eliminativists face a real difficulty, unless they broaden the definition of materialism (which would take us closer to Aristotle).

And for making keyboard input do things you didn't know were possible, OS X has Karabiner (http://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/). Advanced stuff has a steep learning curve, but the author's really helpful.

I'm tempted to file this as another "Humans think oversimplistically, says oversimplistic study". The world is a massively complicated place, and nobody can come close to understanding it all. If your intellectual background tells you that vaccines don't cause autism and somebody comes to you with a study that purports to say they do, is rejecting it "confirmation bias" — or is it in fact the rational thing to do, even if you lack the medical expertise to explain where the study goes wrong?

Of course, your background beliefs are never going to be perfect, so sometimes you will reject the wrong things, but that's not because our reason is "broken" per se, it's an engineering trade-off: we have to take certain shortcuts, make certain assumptions, apply certain guesses, because working everything out in full mathematical detail just isn't possible.

(That said, I'm certainly not claiming that most people are brilliant thinkers — the line "Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking" would come as news to everyone from Aristophanes to Zamyatin.)

Of course, one man's "reasoning should be about outcomes, not ideology" is another man's "the ends justify the means"….

>The perl example cited here kind of blows my mind compare to the trivial python approach

That's because the Perl version is a two-for-one deal: just for fun, Cestith threw in a non-recursive version too. The 'trivial' recursive approach is more or less equivalent to the Python:

  sub flatten { map ref($_)? flatten(@$_) : $_, @_ }

We draw elephants with trunks like trumpets ( https://media.giphy.com/media/Qms9I3pAiN2la/giphy.gif )… why shouldn't they?

Wikipedia should never have existed.

Encyclopedias exist to provide (a) access to information, (b) organisation, and (c) some guarantee of expertise. It's easy to take for granted how amazing it is to have a world of information at our fingertips, but the Internet itself provides greater access to more information than any encyclopedia ever could. (And of course Wikipedia deliberately eschews original content anyway.) We already have tools to organise and find information on the Internet: it's called Google. Or DuckDuckGo. Or etc. How much authority an encyclopedia has depends on how much you trust its editors to be, or be able to find, experts in the relevant subject matter. A search engine doesn't provide any guarantee of accuracy in its results, but then neither does Wikipedia — most people point out that it's up to you to follow the references and evaluate them. The things Wikipedia is good at are the things that the Internet itself is good at; and the things that the Internet on its own is bad at (e.g. vetting accuracy) is not something that can really be fixed short of turning into Britannica Online.

It's not quite that simple, of course. In theory, anyone can throw up a webpage on hemovanadin for the world to see, and it is relatively easy to do so, but it could be easier. What isn't so easy is collaborating — Wikipedia's greatest strength is also its Achilles' heel: anyone from anywhere in the world can contribute, constructively or destructively. But easier collaboration is a technical issue. There's no reason in principle that a centralised body should be required to manage all that. It's just that the availability and user-friendliness of the necessary software currently provide too much friction to ignore.