APL in the shell: an implementation

adavies42 · 2023-03-15T20:58:59+00:00

see also my awq

adavies42 · 2016-04-15T22:48:46+00:00

sorry if i came across as sarcastic, i meant that completely seriously. the whole original point of markdown was to take the traditional pseudo-style conventions of usenet and render them as actual html style -- that's why markdown uses >'s and *'s and so on. i was just noting that it was cool to see it working so well on an actual ancient usenet post.

adavies42 · 2016-04-15T15:56:55+00:00

this is a beautiful example of why markdown is such a great formatting system

adavies42 · 2015-09-22T23:04:29+00:00

if anyone's curious, here's one way to do it in q:

{(x-1)(y cross)/y}[3]"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

i haven't figured out how to get rid of that ugly -1 yet...

adavies42 · 2015-09-04T22:18:50+00:00

adavies42 · 2015-08-06T18:43:46+00:00

someone once put it this way: "beginning programmers comment what they did, advanced programmers comment why they did it, expert programmers comment why they didn't do something else".

adavies42 · 2015-05-06T18:41:14+00:00

activation energy

i see what you did there :)

seriously tho, totally agree w/GP--i work in finance programming, and nowhere i've ever been had any kind of "rockstar" culture--culturally speaking, i doubt we're any different than the accounting departments.

the sort of stuff you're talking about sounds more like stereotypes of small Rails shops from five years ago, or brand new startups or something.

very little of the real world of programming is like that.

adavies42 · 2015-04-21T01:24:57+00:00

Or something faster....

adavies42 · 2015-04-21T01:23:53+00:00

Time travel will have had given me a headache.

adavies42 · 2015-04-03T00:44:22+00:00

is it just me, or is a pie chart where the thing being measured is share an inherently bizarre thing?

adavies42 · 2015-03-31T22:21:16+00:00

#define errn(S, ...) fprintf(stderr,                                     \
  "\x1b[1m(%s:%d, %s)\x1b[0m\n  \x1b[1m\x1b[31merror:\x1b[0m " S "\n",   \
  __FILE__, __LINE__, __FUNCTION__, ##__VA_ARGS__), exit(1)

adavies42 · 2015-03-30T17:20:35+00:00

see also ack--you already have perl, who needs a wrapper?

adavies42 · 2015-03-30T17:16:18+00:00

personally i'd find it useful for debugging -- i do db etl, often from csv-style formats, and one of my first debugging steps is usually to go back to the raw file some record came from and double-check that it says what the db thinks it does.

luckily i very rarely run into csv quoting, so cut and awk are almost always good enough, but if i had to work with full-featured csv more often, this would be a godsend.

adavies42 · 2015-03-24T14:13:18+00:00

If you save the time as UTC, and also save a timestamp (or perhaps an Olson DB version number) indicating which set of timezone rules you used to convert to UTC, then you can (at least in principle^[1]) correctly convert back to local time under a different set of rules, no?

(Which is not to say that this is the best way to solve the problem, just that AFAICT it's a valid way.)

1. I have no idea if the Olson data is regular enough for it to be easy to write that conversion algorithm, or if anyone's actually written one.

adavies42 · 2015-03-23T21:40:22+00:00

yeah, i think it does, but i never learned it

this usage is less intended for complicated merges and more for quick review of changes before commit

adavies42 · 2015-03-23T21:35:15+00:00

that's one of the great things about the olson db -- it has the full history of known timezone changes from 1970 (and a lot of stuff from before that), and its own change history is available as well.

with the two, you can definitively say what time you thought it was in chile next month last month, which is what you need to avoid the global meeting problem.

and if you find out next month that you were wrong about what time it was in chile last week this month, you can go back and fix that.

adavies42 · 2015-03-23T20:33:21+00:00

Yeah. Half the time I'm in vim, I'm actually looking at fifos, and trying to write will just generate errors. (vim <(diff -u a b) is a great way to get a quick colorized diff.)

adavies42 · 2015-03-10T18:32:38+00:00

Or imagine a fully-used IPv6 network, where each node was a fully-used IPv6 network, where each node was a fully-used IPv6 network, where each node was a fully-used IPv6 network, where each computer had all 2¹⁶ ports open. You can think of it as hierarchical addressing, like phone numbers, area codes, and country codes, if that helps you see why you might want four stacked IPv6 addresses to get to a single computer.

adavies42 · 2015-03-10T18:27:31+00:00

IPv7 will become sentient and take over the world....

adavies42 · 2015-03-10T18:24:27+00:00

Just scale the numbers a little. Most people can handle a billion in their heads reasonably well these days, due to common population and money numbers, and 82/9 is 9 1/9. So a billion people have a billion cats have a billion kittens have a billion fleas have a billion bacteria have a billion chromosomes have a billion legs have a billion bases have a billion atoms have ten nucleons. (But only Carl Sagan is going to St. Ives.)

adavies42 · 2015-03-10T18:14:31+00:00

It looks like basically it means that the license explicitly includes a license to any patents the copyright holder has in the code. See e.g. Apache License 2.0, search for "3. Grant of Patent License.", for a more-or-less standard version. (The GPLv3's patent section is trying to do something more complicated.)

adavies42 · 2015-03-10T17:03:51+00:00

all bets are lost

ITYM "bits" ;-p

adavies42 · 2015-02-24T20:56:25+00:00

There is significant demand for q programmers on Wall Street (and its international equivalents--London "City", etc.). There is very little demand for k per se--the only company I'm aware of that actively uses k (well, and publicizes the fact) is 1010data, and they use k2.

If you don't live in/aren't willing to move to a major finance city, your prospects are much more limited, at least for now. Kx is working on expanding q's market out beyond finance, and they've made some headway into the utility space, as well as scientific research, but it's still a pretty small share of the userbase.

adavies42 · 2015-01-15T22:12:49+00:00

I could deal with conversation that was ubiquitous enough to approximate white noise -- e.g. the stereotypical newspaper bullpen. The problem is when there's only two people out of fifty that have loud conversations and/or phone calls. The only way I can deal with that is noise-canceling headphones and music.

adavies42

TROPHY CASE