dmpk2k

That is how attrition war works. Until it doesn’t.

> Some people don't, evidently. Other people do.

I like how this can be interpreted two ways, depending on whether you place loved ones above governance, or vice versa.

Pikuma.com has a good one.

Both can be true: over-regulation and bad regulation. And the West (especially the EU) is arguably suffering from both to various degrees.

At some point a regulation is no longer worth the weight in the overhead it imposes. Even if all regulation was effective, at some point the collective burden would be too high.

Sadly, this also means that some bad behaviour is inescapable at the margins. There are always a few people looking for an angle to make a quick buck in a certain way, yet not enough for a regulation to be supported.

Doing is a far better way to learn than just reading.

Could you elaborate on the model checking? You have two codebases then (model and C), or something more integrated?

It is slower, but a big cause of the slowness is a lot of copying (immutable data structures and separate heaps for every process). Nowadays the BEAM has a JIT.

If you use type guards correctly the performance can be surprisingly good. Not C/C++/Rust/Go/Java good, but not too far off either. This is definitely a corner-case though.

Crappy GC for most of them, but... fair point.

Maybe it's post-hoc?

I wanted to use OCaml since 2002, since it was a GC'd language with good performance, achieving a lot with relatively few lines of code. Being a language nerd, I was (am?) positively inclined to the language. Yet there was always something that made it notably less pleasant to solve my current problem in than in than some other language.

If it had trouble getting traction with me, that's bad news.

Meanwhile the mainstream has progressed a lot since 2000. GC is the standard, closures are normal, pattern matching and destructuring are increasingly so. While HM-style type inference is not mainstream, local type inference is (and I'm no longer convinced that global type inference is the way). Algebraic data types aren't unusual anymore.

A few years back I just threw in the towel and went with Rust; this happened after I volunteered to improve OCaml's gdb support (including DWARF hell), which went nowhere. I wish Rust compiled faster, and a GC'd language is usually more productive for my problems, but in every other regard it stole what should have been OCaml's thunder. And when popular successor languages eventually appear, they'll do it even better.

Alleged? Come now.

Beginners face the following problems: there's multiple standard libraries, many documents are barely more than type signatures, and data structures aren't printable by default. Experts also face the problem of a very tiny library ecosystem, and tooling that's often a decade behind more mainstream languages (proper gdb support when?). OCaml added multicore support recently, but now there is the whole Eio/Lwt/Async thing.

I used to be a language nerd long ago. Many a fine hour spent on LtU. But ultimately, the ecosystem's size dwarfs the importance of the language itself. I'm sympathetic, since I'm a Common Lisp man, but I don't kid myself either: Common Lisp isn't (e.g.) Rust. I like hacking with a relic of the past, and that's okay too.

OCaml has been one of those "almost there" languages since at least 2002. Most of the worthwhile ideas in OCaml will be absorbed into more popular languages by the time existing friction is sorted out. :/

Maybe my circle is unusual, but almost none of the programmers I know live down to the popular stereotypes. Most of them are popular, and a third are jacked.

You need to get out more for your own good.

Imagine what it could do with modern SIMD and many cores. Won't come close to dGPU, but still...

I liked Slackware a lot way back when. No deeper reason.

Currently leaning towards Debian Testing, but that might depend on my testing of Slackware now. I use Arch daily in WSL, but I've have had enough breakages that I don't want it as my primary OS.

How is Slackware doing nowadays? Last release was several years ago, but I need a replacement for Win 10 on my PC.

Having once been poor I understand you, but this is missing the bigger picture. If you're going to improve at mathematics you need to put serious time into it.

Instead of an hour of extra work every day, you're doing math instead. At minimum wage that's around two grand lost over a year. Even if MathAcademy was free.

Also, I recall seeing MathAcademy being free if you can demonstrate financial need.

Are you sure about boxed integers? Perhaps you mean floats? As far as I know Ocaml uses the typical integer/pointer divide.

They get the reigns when they're an adult. The prior poster did mention supervision.

Does it have a native compiler and/or types? Basically, can it get in the ballpark of SBCL's performance?

It'd be nice to have something cleaner than Common Lisp, and a much smaller image size. If it has decent performance too, I'm sold.

There is a balance though, because large organisations tend to ossify, yet the environment continues to change.

HL: Alex happened because "upper management" (aka the people with the actual power in their amorphous organizational structure) was engaged, and wanted a major title in VR. Major titles do not happen otherwise; excitement by the troops only goes so far, because there will always be setbacks and grind.

That was just an excuse by Valve. The reality was that they were unable to finish numerous HL attempts due to the shortcomings of their organisational structure and somewhat absent/aloof/fickle top management.

Maybe they’ve finally recognized and fixed the real problem. Maybe not. We will see in future performance.

I wish there was a new generation of HP-48, just with a faster core and better screen. :(

I have a SwissMicro DM-42, which when setup properly is similar to a HP-48, just minus graphing capabilities. Still want a HP-48 refresh.

I used to think the same as you about 1-based indexing in Lua... until I tried using Lua in a game engine. I was constantly getting hit in the face with problems (e.g. coordinate systems and off-by-one errors), even after spending far too much time trying to abstract around this mismatch to make these problems go away.

In theory I was okay with the indexing. In practice it was an absolute PITA.

Plus there were other numerous papercuts; it felt like Lua was actively fighting me every step of the way. I went from liking Lua to absolutely despising it.

In the end I switched to C++11, which amazingly was much more productive. As in night-and-day difference.

If that rather benign comment makes you almost throw up...

One thing I've learned watching politicians the past few decades is that laws are guidelines. If the political will exists, politicians will find a way.

I agree with the observations of the author. I have found MA much more engaging than any book I've crossed paths with. Going from a pile of math textbooks to MA was going from good intentions to good results; it's quite amazing how much I've relearned over the past few months. This is the future, as far as I am concerned, with only refinements needed.

Also: I too really hope they expand into physics.

It's trivial to justify if you're a middle-class Westerner. You'll likely spend dozens (more likely hundreds) of hours to properly refresh your knowledge; $50/mo is dominated by the time needed, unless your time is worth very little.

If everyone is reinventing the same wheel, then...

Furthermore, those wheels aren't necessarily interoperable the way something built into the standard library would be; it's not just a convenience.

The latter point is a very strong argument for a hash table implementation in the standard library.