jejones3141

> If you have errors in your program, does it matter that much if those errors are caught during runtime or compile time?

The passengers on the fly-by-wire jet running the program might well say that it matters.

Yes. Bring back the killfile, so the user can decide.

Hmmm... I wonder whether the modulator did anything about upspeak or vocal fry. Those might give away a woman despite changes in pitch.

Orthogonality has been recognized as desirable at least since the days of Algol 68. Once you couldn't pass a struct as a parameter in C. Now you can.

In a way it did. Tandy offloaded every possible function onto the processor to lower part count and hence cost, resulting in the infamous bit banger serial port and the equally infamous high resolution mouse adapter, which made the CPU time the discharge of a capacitor to figure out where the mouse pointer was, so you learned quickly to keep the mouse at the top left, minimizing that time, unless absolutely necessary. DMA for disk I/O? Only with third party hardware.

In Algol 68, you can do that; it's part of the standard prelude. I think that some people who'd worked on Algol 68 in the Netherlands also worked on the ABC language, where it's "1" ^^ 4301, and Guido worked on ABC before Python.

Remember the Christmas wreaths made of carefully twisted and stapled together punched cards painted green or gold?

Seriously, I wish I'd kept one deck of a program I wrote in Algol W and my program drum card (A and B).

About Tycho: it might help to give him his golden nose.

No, it's not just you, and yes, it's definitely changed as I've aged, though I lack the data to say whether it's purely the result of aging, or perhaps it's depression.

These days, disparate impact is taken as evidence of discrimination, so it's easy to find "discrimination".

See the section of Coders at Work where the author interviews Frances Allen.

I think my favorite was "Why did Simon Le Bon cross the road?" "To get to the other microphone."

I'm not sure how English "tall" would be considered untranslatable/hard to translate.

That's why I got a Dvorak skin for my TypeMatrix keyboard. I know QWERTY well enough I don't have to look for it, and I can switch to Dvorak and be able to peek if need be.

That's why I used OS-9 and BASIC09 on my CoCo.

No kidding. My wife lamented that she couldn't see the original (modulo dubbing) Iron Chef... and poof, now there's a Pluto TV channel running nothing but that.

Take an initial guess at where f(x) = 0; call it x1. Then you generate what you hope is a better guess x2 by finding where the line through (x1, f(x1)) with slope f'(x1) hits zero. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Things can get ugly--say, if the derivative is zero at your guess--and if your initial guess is bad, or f is wonky (say it has several zeroes near one another) it may take a long time. But as people have said, if you have a good guess, convergence is quadratic, doubling the number of good bits each time, so for floating point square root, peek at the exponent and take half that (multiply by sqrt(2) if it's odd). log2(#mantissa bits) iterations and you're as good as it gets.

Apparently this new method avoids the nasty cases and is still fast. Cool stuff.

How is not giving something to someone equivalent to taking something from someone?

Something fun in that regard, speaking of minimal...the TRS-80 Color Computer community now has a version of awk that runs on NitrOS-9, a variant of OS-9/6809 originally written for the Hitachi 6309. (64K address space, no separate I and D space.)

That's more the New England pronunciation of "Bob". Here in the Midwest it's shorter. It was a fun part of _This Old House_ back when Bob Vila was on; he'd ask a subcontractor (this was in Boston) how things were going, and they'd say "Well, Baawhb..."

Yes, and everyone should watch Scott Meyers's awesome presentation at a D conference with the title "The Last Thing D Needs". (tl,dr version: The last thing D needs is someone like him, really to be so insanely convoluted, as C++ is, as to need someone like him.) Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAWA1DuvCnQ

I take rat poison as medicine--warfarin, just in much smaller doses than the rats get. For that matter, the most toxic substance known to man, botulism toxin, is being promoted for various medical and cosmetic uses.

All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go, considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime with the infamous gnome-screensaver.

Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a link to. 2. https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.

o = "octet" (byte), so Go = gigabyte, Mo = megabyte.

Amen about compiling large codebases. It took the better part of a day to compile MAME. zram is your friend.

Sigh. I'd finish my filk of "Heartbreak Hotel", but it seems to be taking forever.

Would I be correct in suspecting that you don't get interest on overpaying, but get charged serious fees for having to pay too much on tax day?

Here in far west West Des Moines, they have LOTS of checkout lines, which once had a fair number of people behind the registers. Now, you're lucky if two of them have people. I think they are really nudging you to go through the self-checkout or to order via the web and either pick it up or have it delivered. The number of aisles occupied by people either stocking or shopping for online orders also seriously encourages you to go away and order online.

I wouldn't hazard a guess about the general population based on the people I know. I can, though, talk about my experience.

I grew up in what's called the "Bible Belt", so that may have something to do with my not drinking. I had what might be a common experience--as a child expressing curiosity about a beer a relative was drinking, being offered a sip, and spitting it out in disgust, with no interest in a second taste.

Much later, a friend invited me and other friends over to a very nice dinner with appropriate wine served with each course. It was good, and all seemed well... until I noticed that I was singing Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" at high volume. The next day what freaked me out was that at every stage I thought myself under control, but clearly I had lost it. I did not want a repetition.

Since then I found that there is good tasting beer; I tried a little at a restaurant where they brewed it themselves--but I only tried it the once and didn't finish it. Later I heard that occasional red wine was supposedly good for one's health, and for a while ordered a glass periodically, but I couldn't make myself finish it. Haven't had any for a long time, and now the prescriptions I take preclude further drinking. (Maybe aging baby boomers on prescription drugs bend the curve?)

If it could be a faster SuperPET I'd be interested.