colomon

Nice! Now have it installed on my phone...

Do you mean Stellarium Mobile Sky Map, which is $3.50? Or are you compiling Stellarium-android?

This seems like a very odd standard to use? I understand that you wanted to compare performances of different languages, that's great.

But if you actually wanted to get the job done idiomatically, the code is one short, simple line of Perl 6. The performance, while admittedly slower, is within the same order of magnitude as your Perl 5 version.

To me, this is the magic of Perl 6. Sure, if you want to use 16 lines of loopy integer-crunching code to calculate the first N primes and you care about speed, Perl 6 should not be your choice. On the other hand, if you'd prefer to say

  (1..$N).grep(*.is-prime) 

and get the answer back in reasonable speed, Perl 6 is perfect.

For what it's worth, for maybe half of my scripting purposes, Perl 6 was already performant enough back in 2010. The big things I remember it having speed issues on were things you wouldn't normally have considered Perl 5 a solution for, like using a grammar to parse a multi-megabyte CAD file or calculate a Mandelbrot set using elegant high-level code.

Today, while those two things are still slow enough in Perl 6 I wouldn't make Perl 6 my primary language for doing them, I can't even remember the last time I wrote a script in Perl 6 and it was too slow to be usable.

Mind, I think Perl 5 is still faster on things Perl 5 was super-optimized for -- regex processing, for instance. But on a normal week, I throw together a couple of quick Perl 6 scripts to get stuff done. It's usually a joy to program in and execution speed just hasn't been a problem for me.

The older (say 2008-2015) trackpad is best -- a dream to use. The newer one is too big, alas. It's shocking how often I accidentally press it when I'm just trying to rest my palms on my laptop.

(But yes, the unix-like OS that doesn't require a lot of fiddling about and has nice GUI is the big thing for me, too.)

IMO the Touch Bar is pretty useless for serious work. The thing is, you have to look at the Touch Bar to use it! I don't know how you type, but I never look at the keyboard when I'm typing. Plus where I rest my hands on the machine, they tend to touch the Touch Bar, and you can't feel when you are actually touching it and mucking things up.

(Disclaimer: I have a MBP with Touch Bar, but I do 95% of my interacting with it with an external keyboard and mouse because I hate the keyboard / Touch Bar so much.)

Huh. Here in Michigan I live in a city of 30,000 people, with my usual grocery store open 24 hours a day and about five minutes' drive away.

I think your basic point is dead on, but I'm pretty sure ramen is significantly cheaper than potato for the same amount of calories.

For me, that Amazon page is listing it as a pre-order, without any release date. And all the other versions (Kindle, Paperback) are the 1st edition instead of the 2nd.

Very frustrating, as I considered the first edition to be essential and upon reading your comment, instantly went to purchase the 2nd edition.

Edited to add: Found a date, Amazon is listing it as October 21, 2019.

I've been running the old d20 Star Wars game for my kid, and with PDFs of all the rulebooks, one of my main game prep things is printing out the pages for the creatures / characters / spaceships I think are likely for a session.

Don't forget Ryan North's "To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure" and "Romeo and/or Juliet: A Chooseable-Path Adventure".

Guards would scream movie Nazi German snippets at you. "Achtung!" etc. Seems a bit simple now, but almost nothing else like it on the Apple II and C64 when it came out.

... it's effectively my clock. Checking what time it is when you wake up is in no way strange, is it?

I don't get the given/when part of this comment at all? given/when is exactly like C's switch/case, except the names are better and it's at least an order of magnitude more powerful.

It's 100% not added verbosity in any way. Added complexity, sure, but it's a pretty straightforward application of some of the main ideas of the language, usable in the standard C-language-family way out of the box, and powerful and flexible when you understand it.

print in Perl 6 works the same as print in Perl 5.

put/say are output functions which automatically add a newline at the end.

If you want fancier formatting, printf is available as well.

And notice the relative lengths of these names. As much as possible, p6 is organized so that the more commonly used thing will have the shorter name.

PS I don't think I have ever used put in p6. My code uses say, or print if I don't want a newline added to the output.

I'm not sure, but I've got to say, as someone with 10 years Perl 6 experience, I nevertheless learned useful new-to-me things in the second section of it.

Huh? I went several years where my insurance didn't properly cover masks / headgear / tubes etc, and I just purchased them off Amazon without any difficulty.

Every mask I've ever used automatically vented air by design. (Which yes, is really awful WRT cuddling.)

I fell asleep in the middle of conversations a couple of times...

It's not exactly the opposite of the meaning... it's more that the last three lines are framed as how he will one day describe the choice he just made, even though he has already described that choice in a way that makes clear his future description is going to be largely BS.

Literally 20% of the lines of the poem are spent saying there is NO discernable difference in how much the two roads have been traveled. Another 10% are saying the roads both look great and he'd like to travel on each of them. Then the conclusion -- the only bit most people remember -- is explicitly said to be what he will say "ages and ages hence". There is zero indication that's what he actually thinks at the time the poem is written.

The argument in this article isn't some sophisticated take on the poem. It's just a straight literal reading of what the poem says. The only bit that's in any way fancy is recognizing that when the poet says he's going to say something (instead of just directly saying that something) you might have to think about why the poet is putting things in that very roundabout way.

I got a Forth for my C64, and it was the PERFECT language for the machine: fast, compact, structured, extensible. Generally much easier to understand the code than C64 Basic, but you could also easily call into assembly language if you needed a bit more speed.

This sort of question is hard, because ... is he under-rated (or "forgotten", as the original article had it)? I would have said he was both well-respected and still remembered.

Personally, I don't think I've read more than a novel's worth from any of the authors in the article -- hadn't even heard of half of them -- whereas I've read maybe ten of Vance's? He's maybe more remembered for his fantasy than SF, but I'd say he's frequently mentioned and reprinted.

... this just made me realize I've been conflating Sturgeon and PK Dick in my head for years now. Whoops.

For your last case, isn't it just as likely the opposite would happen? If Fred don't deserve any blame for being a mass murderer, why should Sally get any credit for not giving in to her instinct to see him hang for it? And what would the point of trying to be compassionate be?

The C128 came standard with a Z80 as a secondary processor. (Would have been more useful for me if they'd also had an 8" floppy drive so I could have easily gotten stuff to my parents' CP/M machine at work.)

"The biggest problem is that multibyte arithmetic has to be processed in LSB to MSB order, with the carry propagating from one byte to the next; but on the 6502 it's so much easier to count down than it is to count up..."

Not that I've tried this (haven't programmed in 6502 assembly in 30+ years now) but doesn't that suggest he should order the bytes in the opposite direction? (ie, if I'm understanding correctly, he's using little-endian now but his comments make me wonder if big-endian might be more efficient on 6502.)

My favorite example of this was actually from my middle school days. We read Romeo and Juliet from our textbook in class, and I hated it.

In the course of getting ready for a test I read over the Cliff Notes on the play as well. Much to my surprise it it described several humorous scenes which were completely gone in the version we read. It turns out they were cut from the middle school version because they were considered too bawdy for us.

I learned C++ in 1989 using one of his earlier compilers!

I dunno what it should be called (including the possibility that "AI" is exactly right).

I do know that I focused on AI in my electives for UMich's CS degree circa 1990, and from the sounds of it the AI I studied will have literally nothing in common with what is described as AI for CMU's new degree.