117 karma · joined October 16, 2024
yeah one of the most helpful realizations I’ve read is that tracing and ref counting are essentially two formulations of the same problem - one is finding objects that are alive (by tracing), and the other is finding things that are dead (i.e. their ref counts reach zero). and of course, every object is either dead or alive!
It's unfortunate that we have to do this extra work, compared to, for instance, researchers in academia or, say, a Linux maintainer, who "own" their work (or at least get credit for it).
3 years for a EE PhD is extremely impressive.
All these things that supposedly "help" us code end up limiting us in severe ways because we aren't forced to think anymore. Typing, syntax checking, and recalling function definitions isn't the bottleneck to programming. If they are, maybe you're not programming.