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bradrnon Returns: Brings functional programming to Python land

I completely agree with you. As a Haskeller, I find it immensely irritating when people try to force ‘FP’ into programming languages where it doesn’t fit. It just ends up putting people off functional programming, which is a very nice paradigm in languages which properly support it. I feel that the best code is that which adheres to the general paradigm and style of the language it is written in, and these kinds of libraries go against that.

What’s worse, these versions of ‘FP’ often bear very little resemblance to actual functional programming and its advantages. Rather, people seem to fall into the trap of confusing functional programming with ‘those fancy words I hear from Haskell’. Now, I may like Haskell, but its concepts are only useful because of the rest of the language — you can’t just port ‘monads’ and ‘IO’ into some random language and expect them to be usable. It looks like this library partly avoids that fate, in that it does have more than just ‘monads’… but yes, the monads are still there, and they’re just as clunky as you’d expect from Python.

</rant>

bradrnon Earth-1217: where every CSV file has two header rows: column names and units

> combine multiple tables with the same visual page

In fact, this is why I asked — I’m actively working on an program which allows just this. In theory, it should be sufficiently flexible to allow for the kind of markup you mention… one more thing to look into!

bradrnon Earth-1217: where every CSV file has two header rows: column names and units

This sounds interesting, but I’m not sure I understand your proposal fully… what do you mean by ‘interpolating’ formatting?

bradrnon Perun2 Programming Language

I’m only a novice myself, really. Rebol and descendants tend to have little documentation, but poking around the websites [0] [1] should be enough to get started.

[0] http://www.rebol.com/docs.html

[1] https://www.red-lang.org/p/documentation.html

(NB. Red is a descendant of Rebol; they’re not the same, especially with more advanced features, but they’re still similar enough that the documentation transfers over easily.)

bradrnon A quantitative test of Diamond’s axis of orientation hypothesis

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.34

bradrnon Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’

The post you’re replying to seems to be taking ⅓e as the basic unit of charge.

bradrnon Perun2 Programming Language

No, Rebol is not stringly-typed at all. Quite the opposite — like I said, it relies on having a large range of built-in datatypes.

bradrnon Perun2 Programming Language

Yes, that’s the approach it takes — having an unusually large range of literal syntax. That’s different to what Perun2 seems to do, but it’s still ‘similar in spirit’ like I said.

bradrnon Perun2 Programming Language

That sounds quite similar in spirit to Rebol and descendants, which also have built-in datatypes and dedicated syntax for a wide range of things [http://www.rebol.com/r3/docs/datatypes.html].

bradrnon The Catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell (2002)

https://misterirvine.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/explain-entran...

[Thanks goes to @autophagian who linked this in another comment]

bradrnon Maze proof establishes a 'backbone' for statistical mechanics

You might enjoy this: https://www.jamisbuck.org/mazes/. The section headers link to his (IMO really excellent) articles about maze generation algorithms, plus there’s a more comprehensive book you can buy.

(I doubt kid’s mazes are made using these precise algorithms, but either way they’re interesting!)

bradrnon Incentives and the Cobra Effect

However, a very similar story has been proven true (or so Wikipedia claims): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

bradrnon History of Vietnamese Typography

The ‘Sinosphere’ is the cultural and linguistic area which has been influenced by China. This area includes the Vietnamese language, which has undergone heavy Chinese influence. At the same time, Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language by descent, related to other Austroasiatic languages like Khmer (as you note), Mon and Santhali. Most other Austronesian languages are not part of the Sinosphere, but Vietnamese is.

bradrnon I don't always use LaTeX, but when I do, I compile to HTML (2013)

I honestly don’t see the point of using LaTeX if you’re generating HTML. The great strength of LaTeX, in my view, is the precise control it provides over typography and formatting. As such, it works best with an output format which can faithfully render these documents — such as PDF. For an output format like HTML, which encourages reflowability over faithful rendering, I’d much prefer to use an ‘easier’ document format like Markdown or reStructuredText.

bradrnon Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source

No it isn’t — evil-mode is a great text editor!

bradrnon Gene therapy allows an 11-year-old boy to hear

Helen Keller had already learnt a ‘home sign’ system, which was presumably language-like enough to allow her to learn English later.

bradrnon Responses to unicycling

OK, I’ll bite… was it hard to learn?

bradrnon Responses to unicycling

(2007), though I suspect things haven’t changed much since then.

bradrnon Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type

I don’t think it’s a myth at all. Arabic was written with a reed pen or ‘qalam’ [0], and that can certainly be seen in the modern script (e.g. [1], to take the first random example I found). But its ‘joined-up’ nature seems to have been a regional style — it’s also found in scripts like Syriac, Avestan, Mandaic, Manichaean, and even the delightfully bizarre Bactrian Greek (there’s some nice samples in [2]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalam

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mppajQ7TLGs

[2] https://greekasia.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-bactrian-language...

bradrnon Smalltalk simplicity and consistency vs. other languages (2022) [video]

This is correct. After trying out Smalltalk, I realised that Emacs has very much the same design: a minimal interpreted language which is used to implement a large program, where you can inspect and modify the program at any time. The major difference is that Emacs isn’t image-based.

bradrnon Perception: A back-port of Observable

This appears to be a different Observable (for Swift).

bradrnon Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python

For a more thorough exploration of Markov text generation, I like this article: https://zompist.com/markov.html

bradrnon The case for a pipe assignment operator in R

In Haskell, you put it in the pipeline: for instance,

    y = h (f (traceShowId (g x)))

(Haskell is normally pure, but these functions from Debug.Trace are a notable exception.)

bradrnon Show HN: Rem: Remember Everything (open source)

Very interesting, thanks! I’d better add this to my list of things to look into…

bradrnon Show HN: Rem: Remember Everything (open source)

> It archives for offline use and fully indexes every page you visit.

Oh, I also made a tool to do this! Never open-sourced, since it’s an utter pain to set up and the UX is terrible, but amazingly useful all the same.

Incidentally: how does DownloadNet work? My tool uses a browser extension to send the full-text of each webpage to a server, but yours doesn’t seem to have a corresponding extension, so I can’t see how it would retrieve the text.

bradrnon Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers

> Oh, I haven't seen orgmode before, so I don't know what its features are.

Essentially, it’s an environment for writing+outlining+task tracking+time management. It’s incredibly useful — you should definitely try it since you’ve used Emacs.

bradrnon Wayland vs. X – Overview

What you gain is that programs render at the native resolution of both displays. In terms of appearance, it looks noticeably clearer, since no downsampling or upsampling necessary. But the nicest thing is that it just works — I don’t need to configure any settings to prevent windows from being displayed unreadably small or gigantically large.

bradrnon Wayland vs. X – Overview

Odd, I use Arch (well, EndeavourOS) with Sway and have experienced no problems. Quite on the contrary, my setup with a high-DPI laptop + external monitors is far nicer with Wayland than with X.

bradrnon Grindavik [video]

Ah, thanks! Found an English translation [0] which has the story on pp 48–49 (PDF pages 98–99).

[0] http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Text%20Series/IslKr.p...

bradrnon Grindavik [video]

I can’t find that story in this translation: https://sagadb.org/brennu-njals_saga.en