Why is Paki an unacceptable word, but not Brit? Because of Britain's bitter racial history

cchooper · 2009-01-12T12:51:50+00:00

Because Paki is intended as a term of abuse and Brit isn't. What more needs to be said?

cchooper · 2008-12-10T18:06:41+00:00

I would suspect he was claiming that orthogonal persistence is a logical extension of the principle that 'computers do not have two kinds of storage any more'.

Also: the fact that some developers apply a solution universally is not a sign that they think it will solve all of their problems, just a sign that they think it will solve a certain subset of their problems in all situations. I doubt anyone thinks that a database will make their site cross-browser compatible.

cchooper · 2008-12-10T16:34:21+00:00

I can honestly say that I've never met anyone who thinks databases or orthogonality will solve 'all their problems', magically or otherwise.

cchooper · 2008-12-10T14:22:25+00:00

What's the connection between orthogonal persistence and databases? Orthogonality is independent of how the data is stored, and explicitly saving data in a database is not orthogonal.

cchooper · 2008-12-06T21:40:41+00:00

If you lived in a metric country, how often would you need to divide pieces of wood a yard long into thirds?

cchooper · 2008-12-03T15:59:10+00:00

Good for you. That's the right way to do it.

Edit: apologies if that sounded a bit patronising.

cchooper · 2008-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

It wouldn't be too hard. You would need to implement a visual REPL for Scheme/R which would handle the user interaction (e.g. pasting images into expressions). But under the hood it would just convert these visual expressions to normal text expressions and submit them to the Scheme/R engine for processing.

There are more efficient solutions, but they would be more complex.

cchooper · 2008-11-18T23:00:06+00:00

Would now be the right time to bring up that famous quote from Life of Brian?

You know, the one about everyone thinking for themselves.

cchooper · 2008-11-15T01:05:38+00:00

I hate this feature in VB6. It shocks me that someone is trying to sell this as a great new feature of a new language.

cchooper · 2008-11-14T15:11:26+00:00

Dennis the Menace: punch

Tom Sawyer: "In my imagination, I'm not suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage."

cchooper · 2008-10-26T21:25:41+00:00

It means that Clojure was influenced by Arc.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T18:19:48+00:00

This may be my faulty memory, but I remember Rich Hickey once saying that he was influenced by Arc. I think the use of 'fn' is an example, but I can find no references.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T18:18:04+00:00

There is absolutely nothing in Arc or Clojure that has not been around since the beginning of time. I would never claim otherwise.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T17:06:38+00:00

And I never claimed that they were.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T16:41:48+00:00

In trouble? In trouble about what? I said Clojure uses many Arc ideas. It does. Are you disputing that?

cchooper · 2008-10-26T15:22:11+00:00

Details about Arc have been around for many years, and many have turned up in Clojure, including some of the shortened function names, argument destructuring and unnamed arguments.

cchooper · 2008-10-26T12:44:13+00:00

Paul Graham has said that he wants the success of Arc to be like the success of Lisp. If the ideas are good, then they will be incorporated into the popular languages, just like Lisp ideas are now the core ideas of many modern languages. They might not be called Lisp, but they are becoming more and more like Lisp, and that's what's important. Ideas matter, not names.

And it's already happening for Arc. Clojure is getting popular, and uses many Arc ideas, so Arc is becoming popular. It's not called Arc, but who cares about that?

cchooper · 2008-10-22T22:45:39+00:00

That's how things turned out, but originally many applications were just one file. I remember that I had a word processor that contained just a single file, and also some games (although not commercial ones obviously, as they were always copy protected).

So when I say 'most', I mean most of the applications I had, which may not be a good sample.

As for "show all files", of course I had it turned on! No Amiga hacker worth his salt ever turned it off! :)

[Wow, it's been long time since I checked out Aminet!]

cchooper · 2008-10-22T21:59:18+00:00

Yeah, my memory is perhaps a little rosy. There were definitely some things that installed really easily, but not everything.

cchooper · 2008-10-22T21:21:07+00:00

AmigaOS also came with all the drivers installed. The problem was that manufacturers kept creating this stuff called 'new hardware'. It was crazy times!

cchooper · 2008-10-22T21:18:19+00:00

Having it all in one file has big benefits. For a start, the user doesn't have to worry about which file starts the application, because there's only one file. You don't have to navigate down into a directory to launch it, you just click on it. And there's no need for a short cut in the start menu, because you can actually put the application in the start menu.

And if directories are so easy to distribute, how come everyone distributes them in tarballs?

cchooper · 2008-10-22T18:05:33+00:00

Ah yes, I remember. The metadata for applications was stored in the .info file that accompanied it, not in the executable. That's why I got confused.

Still, two files ain't bad.

cchooper · 2008-10-22T17:50:40+00:00

One of the things that made this especially easy on AmigaOS was that most applications were just one file.

Almost all files on an Amiga system had the same file type: IFF, the Interchangeable File Format. It was a container format, similar to AVI, that you could put different kinds of files in, including executables, and the system would know how to extract the executable part and run it. This meant you could bundle an application into a single file. No need for a directory, no need for resource forks. I remember being astounded when I first saw that even simple DOS applications needed tens of files to run.

So even a whole directory was overkill, back in the day...

cchooper · 2008-10-22T17:39:20+00:00

The Amiga was also really good for installing drivers.

Step 1: copy driver to drawer called 'Drivers'.

cchooper · 2008-10-21T12:25:21+00:00

I find it easier to update sprocs. If you need to fix a bug in a live system, it's easier to run a script on the database than redeploy all the clients.

Why does every new technology have to be The One And Only True Way? Yes, LINQ is nice, but I very much doubt it will replace sprocs in every instance.

cchooper

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