loqi

Might want to take "somewhat faster" with a grain of salt. I just tried it on a smallish program (CPU-bound, mostly string operations) and got a 20x slowdown.

When is quicksort not quicksort? When it's not in-place: http://augustss.blogspot.com/2007/08/quicksort-in-haskell-qu...

I love me some Haskell, but this particular example is kind of a bait-and-switch.

Defining an instance of "concatenable" (eg, Monoid) for some type in Haskell is pretty much isomorphic to overloading some free function (or operator) on some type in C++. It's the same "amount of polymorphism" either way, namely ad-hoc polymorphism.

RFC 4180 is close enough for me.

It's been sorta mentioned elsewhere on the thread, but there is another (IMO simpler) mathematical intuition behind 0:1 :: false:true that doesn't involve any lambda fundamentalism. It's the algebraic analogy disjunction:conjunction :: addition:multiplication :: union:intersection :: ... which also turns up pretty often in computing.

For instance, if you've got anything like regular expressions, then you've got something with a structure where the "unit" (trivial match) is an identity for sequencing, and the "zero" (failed match) is an identity for disjunction and a zero for sequencing. It's not exactly a formal argument for preferring booleans to loobeans, but a failed regex match sure feels like a "false" to me.

I don't doubt that it's not worth changing at this point, but don't throw the semiring baby out with the lambda bathwater.

> My feeling is that this statement translates fairly directly into "all user data is available to any corporate entity or state security agency for any purpose"

Speaking as a semi-informed bystander who's been following Urbit for a while now, it certainly seems like one of the problems it's trying to solve is the typical notion of "user data" as something controlled by third parties. Eg [1]:

> Where is Joe's financial data in mint.com? In, well, mint.com. Suppose Joe wants to move his financial data to taxbrain.com? Suppose Joe decides he doesn't like taxbrain.com, and wants to go back to mint.com? With all his data perfectly intact? [...] Imagine the restfulness of 2020 Joe when he finds that he can have just one computer in the sky, and he is the one who controls all its data and all of its code.

[1]: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/10/persona...

That said, the current implementation has been explicitly called out (in past incarnations of the docs, at least) as not-remotely-trustworthy with sensitive private data.

Would you use software from some anti-gay-marriage person? Do these types of policies sound at all pathological to you upon further reflection?

And yet we keep voting for candidates who support the drug war. This kid's blood is on our hands.

I don't, except to note that bad presentation is way more annoying when paired with high-quality content. If it was just about anyone else, I'd have closed the tab.

If enough people complain this time, maybe I won't have to waste a couple minutes clicking "Inspect Element -> display: none" on all the animated junk before reading the next article.

let nan = 0.0/0.0 in nan == nan

It's a shame there's no accompanying rationale for any of these (cf. Google's C++ style guide [1]). Seems like a real challenge to maintaining relevant guidelines when change invalidates their underlying assumptions.

[1]: https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide....

In the generator case you can define a poor man's let like this:

    def let(x):
        yield x

And use it by "iterating":

    ...
    for x in range(1, 101)
    for divisible_by_5 in let(x % 5 == 0)

Still not as nice as having actual syntax for it.

I'd love to see it used for partial application - f@a instead of functools.partial(f, a). If wishes were better functional programming support in Python...

Yup. No Ukraine on my globe as a kid in the 80s, just "U.S.S.R.".

Assuming one agrees that filesystems map really well to that kind of GUI in the first place. It's not obvious to me that they do.

I've been told that credit card companies simply forbid this sort of thing as part of their contractual agreements with merchants. Comcast appears to have similar leverage, so I imagine they would do likewise.

...for certain values of "us".

This is good advice, but it is sometimes difficult to tell whether or not expert opinion actually exists.

While we're dreaming of database ponies, I'd love to see this taken even further - a database that lets you register queries (read-only sprocs) in a language that allows specifying worst-case asymptotic run-time. (Eg, "this should be logarithmic in the size of table foo".) The database would be responsible for establishing any indexes needed to meet the requested performance bounds.

Indeed. I don't see how we can even get a reasonable bound on the exponent of P(alien life). That kind of uncertainty behaves counter-intuitively - multiplying it by the size of the universe leaves it essentially unchanged.

Since I too lack the lofty requisite background for it, I'll just let Mr. Crockford do the job the for me:

> The reason to use semicolons is because coding rigor tends to produce significantly better software.

My understanding is that drugs are expensive mostly because of the risks involved in drug trafficking. I doubt you'll see the same kind of risk premiums in a bitcoin market.

Upvoted for the concise answer, and for having the perfect handle under which to post it.

Perhaps nothing perfect has yet been posted?

100mg of caffeine (half a nodoz) taken 30 minutes before I need to get up. I set alarms for both events, but rarely need the second one.

> Writing a language feature is different than writing an application

True enough. But libraries can easily tend toward either of those extremes. And any obstacles to library development will eventually become obstacles to application development.

> It's not going to be the least bit inspiring to send people to Mars and plant a flag, or ride around in a rover.

Uhh... it would definitely be at least a bit inspiring.

Yup, and parens also allow comments.

It's hard to design a proof-of-work scheme that is both secure and performs "useful" work.