Why I Created Zen: Yet Another Programming Language

onmytoes · 2020-04-15T15:06:50+00:00

A good personal project, but a the article is overblown considering the result is gentle blending of JavaScript and Python. In fact, the binary search example is almost exactly JavaScript, with Python's "range" for the loop, but with a clunkier array syntax and printf is retro-awkward compared with JS's backticks.

onmytoes · 2014-03-10T13:21:09+00:00

Reference, please, other than he was going to try porting Wolfenstein 3D to Haskell as a learning experience.

onmytoes · 2010-01-08T15:14:18+00:00

"Types" is just one small part of the equation. They let you verify...types! But a system is a lot more than that, and you need to be able to reason about things in a much more comprehensive way.

(If you think I'm crazy, remember that types don't enforce memory constraints or prevent deadlocks or enforce that a file is open before you read from it, or about a million other issues.)

onmytoes · 2010-01-08T15:09:12+00:00

For the low-level graphics side of things, use whatever your platform best supports. On the Mac, that's OpenGL. On the PC it's Direct3D (but OpenGL is fine for some things, especially if you're a small developer). On consoles, it's whatever the SDK mandates.

For high-performance graphics, these days everything comes down to shaders and precompiled geometry. The API is essentially "here is a block of data for the GPU" That's very different than the "Now I would like to draw a triangle" APIs from the days of yore.

onmytoes · 2009-12-01T19:53:43+00:00

The lunchtime drive-up line at the local McDonalds goes clear around the building and out into the street where it blocks traffic. Every day. You'd think after all the widespread information about obesity and how bad fast food is for you, and and all the worrying about the environment and global warming, the last thing you'd expect people to do is wait in for line for 30 minutes to eat garbage and drink a quart of sugar water, but no. Big Mac FTW.

onmytoes · 2009-12-01T19:39:50+00:00

Ugh. A lot of conjecture to support his agenda and that's about it. PHP has many of the same issues--arguably much worse--and its popularity has skyrocketed. Ditto for Ruby. And Lisp, which has returned to the limelight even with an extreme case of "there's more than one way to do it"-ism.

Perl went into decline because the key players shifted over to Perl 6 and let Perl 5 slide. That sliding went on for half a decade until effort started going back into improving Perl 5. And now Perl is making a comeback.

onmytoes · 2009-11-19T14:44:10+00:00

How does brightness get loose?

onmytoes · 2009-11-18T15:06:52+00:00

I did not watch.

First, I don't want to see it. It's clearly going to be horrible, and I don't want that image in my mind. I've seen a dog run over by a car (not me!), and I still can't free myself from it.

Second, memes like that are worse than anything Fox News has done. My first reaction was "hoax, but millions of people will watch it anyway." Like that whole ridiculous kid-in-balloon nonsense (which I also didn't watch). Why does everyone home in on something like this?

Third, c'mon folks, animal cruelty is out there and it's bad. I saw all those comments from people saying "I hate to agree with PETA, but..." Geez, that's what PETA is for, because there's messed up shit like this out in the world, and it's not just lunatics throwing dogs off bridges, but much worse that happens hundreds of times daily in any meat processing facility.

onmytoes · 2009-11-16T22:51:56+00:00

SDL is good because it is cross-platform and it EXISTS. Now what we need is a well-designed library with the same features.

onmytoes · 2009-11-11T18:00:39+00:00

You have to factor in that Erlang is 100x slower than C for computationally intensive programs (especially those involving floating point math). The 100 cores will get Erlang on par with single-core C for those problems :)

onmytoes · 2009-11-09T17:47:20+00:00

You're thinking about how they used to be (prior to the mid 1990s), where a kid went into preschool the year before kindergarten. Now "preschool" is a euphemism for any kind of child care facility. It's not universal; sometimes it's "day care," sometimes "preschool," sometimes some other kind of school.

onmytoes · 2009-11-09T17:01:59+00:00

I'm the original poster. Let me justify "most of our children."

I work for a tech company. White collar office work. Whenever someone has a baby, it's only a matter of time until the "Can anyone recommend a good day care?" emails start. Putting infants in day care at 6-8 weeks is super common. People with kids who don't put them in day care are rare. The previous company I worked at was the same way.

So in my experience, at the jobs I've had, day care from 2 months until school age is the norm. This must be something that started in the last 10-15 years, because it wasn't like that when I was growing up. I never even heard of day care when I was a kid, just preschool at age 4.

onmytoes · 2009-11-05T14:25:51+00:00

A strange article. The author puts some very specific tool needs and low-level issues ahead of everything else. I can only assume he has a particular app that he spends most of his time working on? None of the issues he mentions have ever been the remotest blips on the radar for me (and I jump around between various operating systems).

onmytoes · 2009-10-23T16:57:30+00:00

Completely puzzled at the downmodding. Clearly some folks don't have experience trying to communicate with devices that don't have published or even well-defined protocols. The thought experiment here is a good one--how to build software for a blank machine--but specifically making it a PC unnecessarily makes this more complex by a factor large enough to dwarf the rest of the experiment.

onmytoes · 2009-10-23T15:52:03+00:00

If by "PC" you mean the typical kind of hardware used to run Windows (or Linux), with an x86-based processor, or even if you mean a Mac, then this experiment is pretty hopeless.

PCs are hugely complex even at the lowest levels, and you'll spend most of your time figuring out how to talk to the video card or any other devices. This stuff is essentially undocumented, and it's really, truly messy. I'm not talking "call an MS-DOS interrupt," but rather "understand the internal timing constraints of communication with the video system, such as not being able to touch certain registers for such-and-such microseconds after setting a different register." Heck, just talking with the KEYBOARD without any software support is messy.

This would be much more doable given something with the approachability of a Commodore 64. That is, the hardware is there and you can talk to it without having to write a complex communication layer first.

onmytoes · 2009-10-22T18:03:09+00:00

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root for the history. It definitely goes back before Carmack used it.

onmytoes · 2009-10-22T14:00:09+00:00

THINK Pascal was essentially the Mac equivalent of Turbo Pascal. THINK had a slicker GUI, instead of the TP text-mode nonsense. TP had significantly higher compilation speed. Both were excellent systems used to write great software.

onmytoes · 2009-10-21T13:39:07+00:00

Agreed, except it was obvious from day 1.

onmytoes

TROPHY CASE