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anon_don Frege: A JVM pure functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell

Oh, nice! I setup XCompose to support rfc1345, so I have fast unicode input everywhere. I'm definitely going to experiment with that Haskell extension. I've done that manually before in ML with a preprocessor, but it was a nasty hack. A proper extension is much nicer!

EDIT: How many people still have trouble with Unicode input? Should I publish my XCompose solution?

anon_don Frege: A JVM pure functional programming language in the spirit of Haskell

Yeah, I'd like to see more languages using unicode identifiers. Seems to be a very unpopular approach, though :(

anon_don Papers and essays that every programmer should be aware of

I don't understand the XKCD. What's the joke?

anon_don GNU Typist

I love this program, I and I've been using it very heavily for years.

anon_don How well does Khan Academy teach?

Fuck that noise. If you don't like it, do it better; all this whining and nit-picking is without value. Khan Academy is innovative and game changing, but you can't innovate by insisting on perfection.

anon_don C vs GO

The C code looks very nice to me. What's the problem?

anon_don A Boggling Return to C

Yep, but remember that both of these tools are wonderful if you don't abuse them.

anon_don Of abusive behavior in programming communities

IMHO, it's just the way of things everywhere on the internet. It wont ever change, and the entire population will eventually develop a thick skin. I personally have zero tolerance for abusive verbal behavior, but I've become very comfortable with it in text.

On the other hand, user moderated communities like Hacker News and Reddit seem to cut back on this a lot. Only funny or informative abusive comments are shown.

anon_don Printed books existed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg’s Bible

I love posts like this. Between the ideas in this post and the googling of words I wasn't very familiar with, I just learned quite a bit.

anon_don "That's Why You Don't Have Any Friends."

I was home schooled, and I believe it did hinder me socially. What you say about social interaction outside the home is true, but it's still not all that much.

anon_don Linus talks about Apple laptops, Linux distributions, his work

I did all my coding one one for about 3 years. Amazing little computers.

anon_don Better Looking Hacker News

is just a basic website

Feature, not a bug. HN looks fantastic.

anon_don Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?

Standard ML. The implementations and the standard library situation both need a lot of work, but the language itself is by far the cleanest and most practical very-high-level language I've encountered.

anon_don Why Systems Programmers Still Use C (2006)

C is far from "terribly verbose".

anon_don On switching to Arch Linux

Even if my disk crashes I can set up a fully configured and working Debian with all most needed software, repos downloaded and ready to do real work in one hour flat.

I can do this with Arch Linux. I can't imagine what you could've had so much trouble with.

anon_don S-Expressions: The Fat-Free Alternative to JSON

    (or (= 0 (+ x y)) (print "hi"))
    ['or', ['=', 0, ['+', 'x', 'y']], ['print', 'hi']]

anon_don S-Expressions: The Fat-Free Alternative to JSON

native data structures regardless of what language you happen to be using

C, asm, ML, Lisp, Java, Tcl?

anon_don Reading Code: In praise of superficial beauty

And plan9. Written by by non-disjoint sets of people.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/

anon_don C Preprocessor Hell

    >> If you really want to do complicated lisp-style meta-programming stuff
    > Increases technical debt
    Yep. The sane solution is to just not do stuff like this at all. In rare
    situations it ends up being worth it.

anon_don C Preprocessor Hell

None of that has to do with build system complexity.

anon_don C Preprocessor Hell

nontrivially increases the required complexity of your build system.

No it doesn't. It only requires a single rule in your Makefile. Something like:

    %.c: %.cpre preprocess.pl; ./preprocess.pl <$^ >$@

anon_don C Preprocessor Hell

Yep. Why try to force a tool into a role it was never designed for? You use m4 or just write a preprocessor in any language. If you really want to do complicated lisp-style meta-programming stuff with C, just write another C program to pre-process your C program. It's more work, but it gives you complete control over the syntax.

anon_don Replacing small C programs with Haskell

    I think it's silly to continue this without using (better) concrete
    examples, but I'm don't think it'd be worth the effort.

    >> [Author is better at Haskell than C].
    > This does suggest that the author is right to use Haskell [...].

    Certainly.

anon_don Introduction to Unix shell

This book is excellent!

anon_don Replacing small C programs with Haskell

I love me some ML/Haskell, but the article is about small C programs. Small utility programs is the domain where C shines. C is dead-simple, ubiquitous, and fast. Just the tool-complexity of Haskell alone makes C the better choice for these kinds of programs.

Over the last several years, I've experimented with rewriting some of my small C programs in Haskell or ML, and vis-versa. Amazingly, the C programs often end up being shorter, simpler, and significantly less headache (for these small programs). I am very comfortable coding in all three languages, so I think I'm pretty unbiased.

Reading the code from the article, the Haskell code is much better written than the C code. I think the author is making a mistake in thinking the better code is a result of the merits of Haskell w.r.t C instead of just the result of the clean rewrite plus being more experienced with Haskell.

anon_don Replacing small C programs with Haskell

As such, it's critically important that the program is concise and well-defined; both properties that are quite hard to get in C code.

This is baseless FUD.

anon_don The Un-Internet

People need to be less focused on new SAAS apps in startups and more focused on technologies that make us free to communicate.

I completely agree, but how can we make money from this? All ways of making money from software involve controlling users. Like it or not, the time we can afford to spend on unprofitable side-projects is fairly limited.

anon_don Etherpad protocol support for Emacs and Vim.

I would very much love to! However, this seems like a 6+ month project; I can't afford that, and I don't see any way this could be profitable. I've been speculating lately that this is a primary reason that services like reddit/twitter/etherpad have been replacing open protocols.

anon_don Make your STDERR red

How the hell is this even remotely clean?

anon_don Can your REPL do this?

This is actually pretty cool. Shame about the title.