srean

More flexible and permissive a language the easier it is to abuse. Tcl is both very flexible and permissive.

I know.

I would hazard a guess that a significant fraction of HNers would have encountered TCL in silicon CAD and took with them a frustrating experience.

Very interesting. I was not aware at all that this was an Indianism. One that I like quite a bit is the word prepone.

You can find yourself having to work with quite unprofessionally written code. Not an uncommon experience.

Are you sure ? Tcl is almost a decade older than javascript although subinterpreters came later. Even before subinterpreters you could have multiple Tcl interpreter instances in your code.

One could call Tcl_CreateInterp() multiple times in your code and each call would return an independent interpreter.

Would this be the best place to learn about it

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Snit%27s+Not+Incr+Tcl

To be a good performance optimize yes,you need to have done it a few times to be good at it and have acquired not just the skill but the discipline and taste.

More than having done it a few times though, what is more important is to have thrived in a space that is welcoming of intellectual curiosity and play in matters of performance. That's how one becomes good at it.

Not to mention uplevels and upvar.

I have a soft corner for TCL, because of its idiosyncracies and weird dynamic stringy playfulness. I would be wary of using it professionally but to play around for the fun of it ... it's just too much fun. Upvar and uplevels are crazy.

Python is that kind of cool one behaves when visiting parents of your would be spouse for the first time. Tcl on the other hand is like playing one's secret exclusive and somewhat dangerous games with kid school bestie.

Tcl/Tk pioneered the notion of a scripting language as a library. It got threading right. You can run multiple independent Tcl interpreters in the address space of your process and they can exchange messages. Entirety of interpreter state is encapsulated inside the interpreter object, no globals. To a user an it is just a pointer to an object.

No need for GIL, no need for serialization/deserialization (pickle/unpickle) ... just within process memory copy (or no copies in case data is immutable).

And how would that staff have learned it ?

This is true of professionals in any specialized and difficult to acquire skill to be world class.

I haven't had any interaction with mathematicians that I would describe as hostile.

It indeed was a fantastic place, doors nailed to the walls, trying out the newly fledged Mapreduce and Charlie's. Good times. Good times.

s/rule/rile/g

They are a fun way to demonstrate LCM and GCD too

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_billiards

With curved reflecting boundaries and parallel rays you get the beauty of catacaustics. A familiar site in a cup of coffee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caustic_(mathematics)

No sarcasm intended, I was being literal. Me and my wife have different mother tongues. What's natural to her isn't to me and vice versa and we keep telling each other that it's easy.

Oh it seems you took it personally, whereas I mentioned "every native speaker". My intention was not to rule you, just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.

If you ever feel inclined to learn Hindi there is more to grapple with. The verb gender is sometimes set by the gender of the object, sometimes by the gender of the object. Which way this will go loosely depends on tense.

> As a native speaker of a language with genders, it's not complex

Said every native speaker I suppose.

> There are few fields as elitist and hostile as pure mathematics

Is that so ? Sounds hyperbolic.

> Why do we need any job?

If not for nothing else but to form a basis for how to distribute/share/hoard the wealth created by a society. The eternal question - who gets what.

Understanding how complex generating functions help with combinatoric counting makes one's head spin.

(Tenuous pun intended. It keep track of how spinning arrowheads align with or cancel each other)

There's Descartes dog too.

Imagine a civilization that discovers complex numbers before naturals, with naturals showing up to count the turns.

If hexagons can claim to be bestagons complex numbers have a legit claim at best numbers.

> The real question is who can sell their photos and for how much profit

Is that so ?

Maybe so, but for the good shots by the thinking guy, I suspect he would derive longer term emotional gratification from how well they came out. Effort and investment adds to the experience.

Making things easy is good as long as it is not too easy, then it's Spotify muzak.

That sounds about right.

So hindbrain is the OS kernel and forebrain the application server ?

Is it worthwhile para-droping or glide-dropping excess fuel within airport open grounds reserved for that purpose.

I understand that floating into the main theatre will be a serious problem. Current weather should allow making those calls.

There's also the aspect of saving money by purchasing fuel where it's cheap and having internal fuel reserves low enough at such airports so that it can be bought in significant quantities.

As you can see from my comments, I am a complete newbie, just a curious one.

Ah! I was talking about the abstraction of point masses, then there is the shell theorem. But now at least I understand the discrepancy.

In any case gravitational potential at infinity is formally defined as 0 in Newtonian physics.

But what's the integral of 1/r^2 from 0 to \infty ...that's the part not that not squaring up.

Newtonian gravitational potential of a point mass at origin of mass M is - GM/r so at r = \infty the potential is zero. Well, partly just by definition.

I believe we are assuming different models and I want to understand yours.