769 karma · joined May 27, 2023
What would be an example of an async operation that doesn't perform a side-effect (thereby needing a place in the imperative shell rather than the functional core)?
I think pushing async to the shell is really a subset of pushing imperative code to the shell.
One relevant excerpt:
“A phrase seems to have been humming in his ear like a tune one cannot get rid of; it crops up in his writings over and again: there is a force in the sun which moves the planet, there is a force in the sun, there is a force in the sun. And since there is a force in the sun, there must exist some beautifully simple relation between the planet’s distance from the sun and its speed. A light shines the brighter the nearer we are to its source, and the same must apply to the force of the sun: the closer the planet to it, the quicker it will move. This is his instinctive conviction, already expressed in the Mysterium Cosmographicum; but now, at last, he has succeeded in proving it.
In fact he has not. He has proved the inverse ratio of speed to distance only for the two extreme points of the orbit; and his extension of this ‘Law’ to the entire orbit was a patently incorrect generalization. Moreover, Kepler knew this, and admitted it at the end of the thirty-second chapter,18 before he became airborne; but immediately afterwards, he conveniently forgot it. This is the first of the critical mistakes which ‘as if by a miracle’ cancelled out, and led Kepler to the discovery of his Second Law. It looks as if his conscious, critical faculties were anaesthetized by the creative impulse, by his impatience to get to grips with the physical forces in the solar system.“
[0] Games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria and online games being a minority.
Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-release patches).
Although not as drastic a case as yours, I think it's often worth being critical of what one reads here and keeping one's ideals until actual experience makes one incline one way or the other.
If one values the web being somewhat open/less monopolistic, an open source web browser would be more appealing.
I have faith in the Ladybird browser project to avoid such a situation though.
let rec eventLoop state = let input = getInput () let newState = update input state drawState state; eventLoop newState
The update function takes an existing state and an input record (key events, etc.), returning a new state (which may have nested records within itself but it is all immutable).
New state is kept by the recursion (passing new state to the same function). The only IO is getting input and drawing, which are inherently side-effecting operations.
I do have nested records, but (at each stage) they get joined into a new parent record. No mutability there.
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {...}
vs
```let rec func_name counter = if counter = 5 then print "blast off!" else func_name (counter + 1)```
I don't really need to memorise the order of operations compared to a for loop (initialise, exit condition, increment) and I don't need to memorise if the exit condition means "execute while this is true" or "break the loop if this is true". That's just me though. I think the syntax for recursion is easier but loops might conceptually be easier to understand.
I think, better than both of those for the general case (and a good introduction) are "fold" functions and "foreach"-style loops, which iterate over every element in a list. I think those are used more often, and the reason you may want to do this is clearer to a student.
Many countries punish "attempted murder" (trying to carry out the act but failing, the same way people caught in this scandal attempted but failed at adultery) so it makes sense to me to not strongly distinguish between "tried cheating on their partner but failed" and "tried cheating on their partner and succeeded".
How would you think the conversation about AM would/should be modified, in light of the fact that people were (unknowingly) talking to chatbots instead of real partners? I think I already made my views clear, but I would actually like to hear other opinions since I don't think I understand any view but my own on this. Maybe other people would prefer the conversation is about spambots on social media websites instead of what the people on those sites tried to do?
Edit: nvm. I saw (after I was already done typing) the sibling comments to my current one, and that makes more sense.
The U.S. as a national entity certainly isn't above lying, as leaks regarding them have shown.
I didn't get it at first thought, thinking of the .nds file extension for Nintendo DS ROMs.
#[1, 2, 3]
It's still not a feature you can expect all implementations to have, so OCaml is not in a bad position there I think. (Although I prefer SML most of the time.)
As a stopgap, I just made a completely unstyled alternative to that internal admin dashboard that uses Handlebars HTML templating (no Javascript) on the server. Inclined me towards dependency rejection (which is an approach I was already taking for some side projects).
Edit: I was coding it up now, but my storage is full (having trouble copying text to my clipboard and unable to save files) so I don't think I will be able to deliver on what I intended. Sorry about that.
On the HTML side, I had a code generator (in Javascript) that output `<html> <button /> <15000 more buttons.../> </html>` and wrote it to a file.
On the Flutter side, I used the default Flutter sample app (`flutter create .`) and I just used a similar code generator to put 15000 buttons in a Column widget.
I don't think I'll be able to do much else to help with reproducibility sadly.
If others try the same, I would be interested in if their results are any better than mine (with Chrome/Firefox being faster).
I once created a HTML file with just a start/end HTML tag and 50k (unstyled) button elements in between, curious to see how it performs. I tried the same in Flutter on a release build (using Material widgets so they are styled) and the HTML was much faster.
I was able to tab through (changing focus by holding tab) the buttons in both Chrome and Firefox at a consistent frame rate with no signs of any lag, while FLutter struggled and lagged quite a bit with the same.
Would anyone know why that is? Are web browsers hyper-optimised for static documents (beating a "native" GUI toolkit for static documents)? Is Flutter just comparatively slow compared to Qt, GTK and so on? Does the styling have that much of an impact on performance?
I am aware that updating DOM elements is uniquely slow for browsers but this experiment was a surprise for me and I'm curious for an explanation.
Your mileage might vary, but I've heard advice from others to learn Haskell and "go off the deep-end" because of people citing similar reasons.
"Thus everybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor. These rules are, we will grant, soundly based on genuine experience ;and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and helps his tailor to deal fairly by him. But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank. The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will manage your dealings with him by modifying the rules for tailor-situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications soon become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself."
--
From the autobiography of R.G. Collingwood. His writings often have the theme of trying to understand particular instances of a thing on its own terms, only generalising into abstractions when seeing some quality in crowds of individual instances. I've rarely regretted that same approach when it comes to abstraction in code/software, but have regretted premature abstraction many times.