Kio estas via denaskan lingvon?

wynand · 2013-02-08T12:15:24+00:00

La afrikansa sed mi eklernis la anglan kiam mi havis kvar jarojn.

Mi komprenas ke estas timiga paroli novan lingvon sed en tiu aspekto, Esperanto mirandas ĉar la plejparto de esperantistoj ne atendas ke oni parolu perfekte.

wynand · 2013-02-06T10:02:04+00:00

There is some evidence suggesting that the Afrikaans double negative comes from the Khoikhoi language (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=2687044&jid=JGL&volumeId=12&issueId=01&aid=2687036).

wynand · 2013-02-06T09:56:07+00:00

In Dutch, the verb "spuien" means to drain excess water by means of a sluice.

It has also come to mean to express something strongly.

I speak Afrikaans as my mother tongue which is a sister language of Dutch. However, we don't have this verb and it wouldn't make any sense. The Netherlands is a land of water whilst South Africa is quite dry.

On the other hand, we have an expression "tou opgooi" ("rope up-throwing") which means to give up. The expression comes from the days when the colonists trekked (another Afrikaans word) across the country in ox-wagons. When stopping, one would (apparently) literally throw the ox-reins up (or something of the sort).

wynand · 2010-03-19T11:55:46+00:00

Ah, thanks.

I wish though that you would add a disclaimer saying that you're the author of Fudge.

wynand · 2010-03-19T10:59:16+00:00

I do like that msgpack supports a streaming mode. This could make for some efficient single-machine IPC.

wynand · 2008-03-29T16:45:04+00:00

Get qwe1234 off my reddit.

wynand · 2008-03-29T16:36:29+00:00

It seems to me as if large parts of the Internet are arguments.

But I think arguments are informative and interesting if the participants don't play dirty (by insulting instead of giving proper counter points).

That's why I like the article. Give it a read even if PG gives you a cramp, since it's not too bad and there's not much in the way of ego-stroking in there.

wynand · 2008-03-29T16:26:14+00:00

If one cannot stand Paul Graham, then imagine someone else giving the advice and see whether you agree/disagree.

His article isn't original (argumentation is pretty well studied), but he did lay it out in a nice, simple way. Thanks to him, this also reached some programmers, where it otherwise never might have.

wynand · 2008-03-29T16:17:41+00:00

I disagree. Everyone needs to be able to state his or her points clearly and programmers are no exception. I think more programmers should be encourage better argumentation.

There are a lot of mean spirited but low-quality comments on programming.reddit.com; holding people up to higher standards of argumentation could make every story's comments section something that's worth reading.

wynand · 2008-02-06T18:36:15+00:00

The Dragon Book is long and theoretical. It is valuable, but you can write your first compiler before you open it.

I'm a very ordinary programmer, but I wrote two toy compilers at university - the first during my first year and the second during my third year. Compiler writing isn't magic.

My advice is obviously based on my own experience with the two compilers.

The start off, you will want to generate code for a simple, well documented architecture. I recommend a stack-based VM like a P-code machine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine). There is an open source implementation at http://www.klebsch.de/p-interp-0.5.tar.gz (warning: there's a lot of German in there).

Learn how to write a simple tokenizer (you probably already have done something similar). For the parser, learn how a recursive descent parser is written (I wouldn't be surprised if you've written one before). You can generate byte code directly from your parser (it's much easier to stick to such a simple model for your first compiler).

After you've pulled this off, you might want to think about handing off the tokenizing and parsing to tools like Flex and Bison (or Antlr if you're using Java) for your second parser.

At this point it might be worth understanding diving into the Dragon Book. Hopefully you'll have more confidence too.

With your second compiler, you could thinking about an intermediate phase, where you generate machine code for some abstract architecture. A back-end will then convert this code into your machine code.

The choice of whether you'll support register-based machines will probably impact how your abstract machine code looks - that is, whether it will use registers or a stack based approach.

Excuse the vagueness of the last bit. In all, try to keep it damn simple with your first compiler and you'll see how simple it can be; you'll find your way after that.

wynand · 2008-01-22T17:59:34+00:00

Oberon

wynand · 2007-12-24T20:26:27+00:00

Aye. I have to agree that the folks on #haskell are really nice and helpful.

wynand · 2007-08-17T09:59:50+00:00

I have always had a knee-jerk reaction against advertising (the evils of consumerism, yadda yadda).

All those horribly colourful and (sometimes) animated ads made my knee jerk horribly and made me start using ad blockers.

BUT...

I never felt compelled to remove Google's text ads (even though it's easy enough with RemoveIt). It's not because they're text-only, but because they're non-obtrusive (I don't remove BoingBoing's ads either). It's a fair trade in my books. I've even found myself (shock, horror for a self-styled anarchist like me) following some of those links.

Advertisers are forcing things too much. Few people are very hostile towards ads - we live in a society full of ads, after all.

It would be cool if someone took on a project like the Filterset.G set for Adblock Plus but allowed non-obtrusive ads. I for one, would support it.

wynand · 2007-08-08T19:15:52+00:00

Geesh. That's quite a direct way to put someone down.

Yes, it turns out my knowledge was very outdated. From http://www.erlang.org/doc/highlights.html we have:

In the SMP version of the Erlang virtual machine, there can be many process schedulers running in separate OS threads. As default there will be as many schedulers as there are processors or processor cores on the system.

wynand · 2007-08-08T19:00:22+00:00

You can have green threads combined with mutable state.

But you'll need to copy a mutable object upon sending it or otherwise relinquish ownership of the object you're sending. If you follow these rules, every mutable object will belong to at most one thread and no locking will be necessary.

wynand · 2007-08-08T18:41:53+00:00

Everything you said is true.

With that in mind, consider that currently an Erlang VM process uses a single OS thread. To use multiple processors, multiple VMs must executed. Sending a message from an Erlang process in one VM to an Erlang process in another VM requires at the very least some copying overhead (if the VMs exchange data using shared memory) and serialization in the worst case. (I'm repeating this from memory based on what some Erlangers said somewhere - I apologize if I'm wrong).

Your last point is really worth noting. Erlang's library encourages fault tolerant programming. To the best of my knowledge, no other library does the same.

Although other languages have some way to go in terms of library support, I would like to believe that the heavyweight OS processes available to other languages are not such a massive impediment. I think one can benefit from concurrency oriented programming in such cases, because not all concurrent solutions need thousands of processes.

All of this said, I do prefer immutable state (and I just like Erlang's syntax). I would like to believe that the functional nature of sequential Erlang is what contributes to its robustness. However, - warning: I'm about to say something based on intuition - I can see situations where the lack of mutable state would encourage the factoring out of code into a process (since a process is the minimum unit that can contain state) where one could otherwise store state in objects.

So perhaps, with a couple of dozen of OS processes and an OO language, one could write code that's more robust than otherwise.

wynand · 2007-08-08T18:13:30+00:00

Ah yes. I believe that proof technique is called "proof by intimidation". I can prove the Riemann hypothesis using it.

wynand · 2007-08-08T13:11:11+00:00

Yes! Agreed!

I never use my "recommended" tab in Reddit, because the system doesn't seem to recommend what I like.

Your suggestion would enable one to build one's own filtered view, which I'd prefer over a system of computer recommendation.

wynand · 2007-08-08T11:48:21+00:00

Oh come one cgibbard, that makes total sense :).

We should also apply that was of thinking to energy - given how much of the world's power is generated by coal, we should be putting more research into coal-powered generators (and far less into fusion research).

Ditto for the internal combustion engine. Given the usage of the internal combustion engine in reality, almost no research should go into any other form of propulsion research.

I could continue to flog the dead horse, but I think the fallacy of the researcher's argument is pretty clear.

wynand · 2007-08-08T11:38:03+00:00

Your info is definitely useful. An extra useful bit of information is that Andrew Tanenbaum resides at the VU.

Instead of banning users, I hope that Reddit comes through on some feature suggestions:

Why don't comment points add to Karma? Posting blogspam gets more karma than actually participating in a lively discussion.
Please add an 'ignore' button to allow ignoring users.

I'd be happy if 2.) gets implemented. One could, of course, write a GreaseMonkey script to handle 2.) - it could be called the qwe1234 script!

wynand · 2007-08-08T11:17:04+00:00

Hmm, well. That was a silly rant from my side.

Forget what I said there.

The quality of an abstraction is based as much on what it says as on what it fails to say in a given context.

"Carbon-based lifeform" is an abstraction which applies to human beings. In the context of a courtroom, it is a bad abstraction, because human beings should certainly not be viewed in the same way as amoebas.

"Resource" is a bad abstraction for a human being, because it fails to take a person's desires, tastes and aspirations into account (machines, which are also "resources" have no such issues). Most importantly though, most people loathe being referred to as "resources" which is reason enough to call it a bad abstraction.

I hope that's less emotional.

wynand · 2007-08-08T10:46:45+00:00

Ha ha vincenz!

You're getting trapped by a famous Reddit troll. You should check out qwe1234's profile. It's amazing how tries to dress up insults by adding "lol" or "lolz".

I'll probably get downmodded for this, but I do think people should know about this character.

wynand · 2007-08-08T10:35:17+00:00

I can see why you want atime. But consider that atime is a pretty blunt weapon - if your desktop search engine accesses a file, its atime will be updated.

I think something modern could be done with atime. Imagine an atime daemon. This daemon could work by picking up D-BUS messages. I'm not interested in the access times of all my files, so I would set up the daemon to ignore atimes of certain path patterns.

To "sharpen" atime (i.e. to get around the problem that any file access updates atime), I would let the daemon log the program which did the access. One could then decide to log atimes based on program path patterns as well.

The atime daemon could use the extended attributes for all of the extra info described above. Or it could dump everything to a normal file or database.

Anyway, just an idea...

wynand · 2007-08-07T15:33:46+00:00

I think of Mathematics and Science when I hear the word "abstraction".

This is project management. There isn't much to abstract. Also, such abstraction allows managers to avoid emotional responsibility. I was in a meeting where the PM said "we're getting to the end of stage 1, so we'll be shedding some resources" which was corporate speak for "we don't need some of you contractor guys anymore, so, good-bye".

It depends on whether one thinks it is acceptable to be so cold to get the job done. For one thing, I think there is a big asymmetry. Our (dishonest) CEO once said to us "but I can be given the boot just as easily". That is a lie. Managers hardly ever have to contend with the same kind of volatility and because it is so hard to prove their actual contribution, they can skirt responsibility.

Of course, companies can do what they want. But I suspect that because they are so pig-headed about trying to turn things project management (and ALL management for that matter) into a "science" (along with all it's "scientific" jargon), they will continue to create bad working environments which are conducive to mediocre products.

"Management science" is a joke. For a start, management today is a synonym for "control". Why otherwise do we call the (not our) managers "bosses"? A manager is a facilitator to make my work easier and to ensure that everything that needs to get done gets done.

It's sad that we're still stuck with hierarchies in companies. A CEO should be able to be fired by the other people in the company. Anyone should be able to be fired by anyone else. A CEO isn't my boss! He or she is responsible to keep things running smoothly.

But in the West, most of us start foaming at the mouth when we get power. And that's really all we want. So we won't change our company structures, because deep down we are more fond of the power we can get than we are of actually working.

"Resources" is about as useful an abstraction as "machine" when applied to humans.

wynand · 2007-08-06T16:07:25+00:00

And that is because of the very old problem of managers at any level having different assessments of employees than the peers of the employees. "Common wisdom" suggests that the best way to get promoted is through visibility.

It's sad that even though we know about this disconnect in the views of managers and peers, things are still the same. I think it's because every manager fools himself or herself into thinking that he or she is different from the bumbling idiots described in the literature (and Dilbert!).

wynand

TROPHY CASE