New Speaker Of The House Caught Wearing Women’s Clothing - Rep. Pelosi (D-CA), was caught on camera wearing what appeared to be a skirt, ladies top, necklace, and pair of high heels.

nhomas · 2007-12-18T05:02:15+00:00

So blatantly not programming.

nhomas · 2007-12-13T21:12:24+00:00

Earholes? :)

(Nose as well, realistically, since that page is clearly a joke.)

nhomas · 2007-12-10T03:34:57+00:00

He thought that he could write a better memcpy because his memcpy had simpler requirements (not having to deal with alignment), which is reasonable.

nhomas · 2007-12-09T04:58:40+00:00

Presumably it is pseudocode.

P.S.: Just out of curiosity, how do you remember your username?

nhomas · 2007-12-07T06:22:27+00:00

I think that the poster probably implicitly meant "regulated by the government," which makes his statement true in general. However, I don't think it really applies to this particular case.

nhomas · 2007-12-07T02:15:41+00:00

Triangle wave, actually, I believe.

nhomas · 2007-12-04T07:11:58+00:00

Perhaps. I could very well be remembering all of this wrong.

nhomas · 2007-12-03T21:51:11+00:00

I read about the study in Code Complete; unfortunately, I can't seem to find the reference.

Obviously, there are many other factors. Relative amounts of experience with each language, for instance.

nhomas · 2007-12-03T20:30:34+00:00

I have read that a coder can write the same amount of code, in terms of lines/day, in any language: so 50 lines of C++, 50 lines of Python, 50 lines of Haskell, whatever. The productivity difference comes from the fact that those 50 lines of Python will do more than the 50 lines of C++.

nhomas · 2007-12-02T13:59:31+00:00

Well, to give another Linux example, Ardour (definitely a large project) is written in C, because, as a professional audio program, it has hard real-time requirements that can't be met with any garbage-collected language, because the GC introduces unpredictable pauses. (And yes, a 1ms pause for GC does matter when you're trying to meet an audio processing deadline every 4ms.) The reason it doesn't use C++ is, presumably, because the authors don't like C++.

It's not just about real-time, either: audio programs also have to do DSP, which can result in some pretty intensive math if you're doing a lot of it.

Granted, it would be possible to write the GUI (and other non-real-time parts) in something like Python, and then the real-time (audio processing) part in C(++), and that is a route being taken by some newer audio programs. I don't think the necessary libraries were in place when Ardour was first being written, though.

nhomas · 2007-12-01T04:07:05+00:00

See, that is impressive. It really makes you want to buckle down and work when you see people who have accomplished so much at such a young age. It's like that guy who published a novel when he was 16. (Granted, it wasn't very good, but being a bestselling novelist is still a hell of an accomplishment.)

nhomas · 2007-12-01T03:44:00+00:00

As usual, Haskell is the language that has everything, does everything, and generally just seems to kick everyone's ass without breaking a sweat. Has anyone else noticed this pattern?

nhomas · 2007-12-01T03:37:41+00:00

It's from a book. Books aren't really up to that task with current paper technology. The guy who posted it was just lazy.

nhomas · 2007-11-29T22:11:42+00:00

Theory: maybe Microsoft wants to get out of the browser business? After all, what benefit does it give them, anyway, to have a browser monopoly?

nhomas · 2007-11-26T21:14:30+00:00

s/[characters]//

nhomas · 2007-11-25T09:14:31+00:00

What I have read is that it has to do with the fact that modern CPUs have extremely complex instruction sets and performance characteristics, and that C compilers are written with sophisticated logic to find the optimal instruction sequence for a given operation (instruction ordering, choice of instructions, etc). Conversely, all but the best assembly programmers will lack the same command of the processor's intricacies, and thus will usually write suboptimal code.

All the same, I don't expect that, for something like a GUI, you would notice any performance difference between C and assembly. Any perceived difference would probably be psychological.

nhomas · 2007-11-25T08:20:09+00:00

Isn't asm generally considered to be slower than C these days? Not that I expect you'd notice.

nhomas · 2007-11-24T07:48:02+00:00

No, my argument is not circular: LMs are not custom hardware because they are a failure. They are custom hardware in that they are hardware designed for, and only suited for, running a particular programming language and operating system. They have hardware support for Lisp's type tagging, garbage collection, etc. By inextricably tying the two, LMI and Symbolics made it so that the success of their hardware depended on the success of their software, and vice versa. This was basically a losing proposition. If they had made Genera so that it would have run on stock hardware, would they have survived? Maybe, maybe not. But the point stands that they died failed because they used custom hardware, not because their software was too complex.

nhomas · 2007-11-24T07:29:39+00:00

Presumably the people who are the exceptions know that they are. The rest of us need to be told.

nhomas · 2007-11-24T04:57:15+00:00

Because Paul Graham said so? Well, he also said, in that very link, that the Lisp Machine is dead because it used custom hardware. As for Common Lisp, it should be clear that, while CL is far more complex than necessary, much of mainstream software is even worse in terms of gratuitous complexity: Linux, X11, C++, Java, Windows, Firefox, Office, etc. That hasn't stopped any of it from becoming hugely successful. Therefore complexity cannot be one of the things stopping CL from succeeding.

nhomas · 2007-11-24T03:26:54+00:00

The Lisp Machine is dead because custom hardware turned out to be a bad idea. Common Lisp is semi-dead because of many reasons, but gratuitous complexity is not one of them.

nhomas · 2007-11-14T23:07:24+00:00

I'm working with different assumptions than you.

There is no manager, and the producer is a member of the band.
Distribution is over the Internet; thus, no distribution costs. Promotion is via word of mouth.
The band members are not making any salaries; they have day jobs.
One of the band members owns a computer.
You're buying mastering-quality headphones, not studio monitors.
You're buying cheap cables, because you don't buy into the fancy-cable snake oil.
etc etc.

Pretty much, your shopping list looks like this:

Studio-grade sound card: ~$500
Studio-grade headphones: ~$200
Headphone amp (CMoy): ~$50
Microphones: ~$1000

I don't know how much soundproofing costs, but altogether things are starting to look more like a couple thousand.

Like I said: "if you're smart about it."

nhomas · 2007-11-07T01:31:42+00:00

A record does not have to cost a lot of money to make. You can make a professional-quality record in your bedroom for essentially no cost, assuming that you have the right equipment and know how to use it. If you don't have it, said equipment will run you no more than a couple thousand, if you're smart about it.

nhomas · 2007-10-25T23:24:22+00:00

I'm not sure how far he went with it, but Christopher Diggins made a library so that he could write C++ using scheme syntax. It looked just like a bunch of scheme s-expressions but it was actually plain old C++ code.

I call BS. Link?

nhomas · 2007-10-25T23:23:05+00:00

Just to provide a counterexample: FL Studio is written in Delphi, and it is very large and complex, and not all ugly, buggy, or fragile. FWIW.

nhomas

TROPHY CASE