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bear8642on My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992

> In the middle 70s it was COBOL, when COBOL'74 came out it became king of in-house programming for IBM

I thought IBM were still focused on APL in the 70s…

bear8642on Semiconductor Lifeline Keeps Fighter Jets in the Air

> "[Phoenix] repackages off-the-shelf semiconductors into devices that are virtually identical to the phased-out chips."

I'm slightly surprised that _virtually_ identical chips are allowed. I expected truly identical chips to be required…

bear8642on Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

Thanks for sharing that!

bear8642on Mythical Man Month

> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.

A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…

bear8642on A Letter from Dijkstra on APL (1982)

How so?

I'm struggling to see how Roger's manipulation of the expressions without executing each line validates Dijkstra's point...

bear8642on War on Raze

For a smaller example, try the J Incunabulum[0] various explanations are available [1][2]

It's been discussed here before too.

[0] https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum [1] https://blog.wilsonb.com/posts/2025-06-06-readable-code-is-u... [2] https://tony-zorman.com/posts/j-incunabulum.html

bear8642on AWS engineer reports PostgreSQL perf halved by Linux 7.0, fix may not be easy

> I'd argue a 50% hit to performance [...] is ... quite the regression

Indeed! Especially if said regression happens to impact anything trade/market related...

bear8642on Big-Endian Testing with QEMU

> daily drivers (ppc64le, Apple silicon)

How come you're running ppc64le as a daily driver?

bear8642on Big-Endian Testing with QEMU

> the only relevant big-endian architecture is s390x

The adjacent POWER architecture is also still relevant - but as you say, they too can afford a support contract.

bear8642on Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough

oh, thanks! I didn't know that Prolog was still used commercially.

bear8642on Smalltalk's Browser: Unbeatable, yet Not Enough

Likely because whilst it didn't work out commercially, the ideas smalltalk, prolog and other more esoteric languages (forth, apl) focus on are themselves very interesting.

bear8642on The Saddest Moment (2013) [pdf]

> Humans trust. Their systems should too.

And indeed as Thompson showed, you've got to trust at some point...

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/2223/R209/Reflections-Trus...

bear8642on Sins of the Children

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by

I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines

bear8642on NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power

Cool story - thanks for sharing it!

bear8642on JVM exceptions are weird: a decompiler perspective

This is exceedingly nasty. Well Done!

bear8642on An Algebraic Language for the Manipulation of Symbolic Expressions (1958) [pdf]

more the names then the functions themselves

bear8642on Vectorizing for Fun and Performance

They sort of did with the Cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)

bear8642on "Learn APL" Notes

huh, can you not use the Xkb APL symbols file?

I thought that compose definitions as well as the shifted layout…

bear8642on Zoo of array languages

Right, thank you!

I recognised the " as rank but got confused by the _ reading https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/under, it seemed to be 'rank negative' and didn't see what that did.

> second nature once you internalize J, but so so foreign until you do.

Indeed!

bear8642on Zoo of array languages

> Vs=: 4r3p1"_ * ] ^ 3:

What's the "_ for?

bear8642on Zoo of array languages

Average is zero

     empty =. 0$0 NB. zero length array
     +/empty
  0
     #empty
  0
     0%0
  0

bear8642on IBM Intellistation 185 AIX workstation (2016)

Yep, the office has a p9 box and normally the only times it's needed rebooted is after a power cut.

Very solid boxes!

bear8642on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review

> PRs are emails to your team and to your future self.

Indeed! I've found many point on this discussion answered by the linux kernel idea of mailing lists where a change is discussed then approved, often with feedback acknowledged

bear8642on Go has added Valgrind support

Remember, simple is not the same easy

bear8642on UTF-8 is a brilliant design

5 characters?

I thought it was normally six 6bit characters?

bear8642on Left to Right Programming

> Sometimes it is called a fluent-interface in other languages.

Where've you heard it called that? I've normally heard tacit programming

bear8642on Left to Right Programming

>Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what `.split(None)` would do?

Reading the docs [0] it seems `.split(None)` returns an array of the indivual characters without whitespace - so something like [c in list(s) if not whitespace(c)]

[0] https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/stdtypes.html?highlight=...

bear8642on Mostly dead influential programming languages (2020)

> How is it to read and write?

Fairly straight-forward once you've learnt the character set.

See here for details: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Typing_glyphs

bear8642on Ask HN: I want to install a non-Windows OS on an old laptop. Recommendations?

If you want some excitement, 9front might be fun :)

Thinkpads tend to be well supported

bear8642on I made my VM think it has a CPU fan

> simply making a normal OS look like a virtual machine

Or perhaps the other way around?

That is making VMs totally unaware they've been virtualised, as I believe IBM's lpars work…