codr4

I'm far from wizard on the topic, but from my experience it's not that simple since the relative magnitudes of the operands and the operator affect the size of the error in non obvious ways.

I spent 13 years maintaining a 2mloc reservation and accounting system that used floats for everything. By the time I got there and understood enough it was simply too late to do anything about it.

Just say no, really; that road leads to madness.

If you need precision; and many do; consider fixnums, rationals or bignums, in order of increasing complexity and flexibility.

If I remember correctly at least Alan Kay openly admits being very inspired by Lisp. Unfortunately the limitations/walled gardens they chose to impose in the name of simplification, everything is an object etc, had us running in circles for a long long time. My guess is it was picked up by managements for the same reasons as Cobol, Java, Go etc.

Mostly agree...

The reason it's not all about power/competition is that corruption is very easy to get into your system; be that individual, corporate or otherwise; and tricky as hell to weed out. Once you've been there and done that, the bar is set lower for relapse.

Do you know what the best predictor of future behavior is? They're acting all nice and friendly right now, wasn't always like that and there's no reason to assume it always will be. Even the catholic church is pretty chill these days, but give them enough power and they'll have people burning at stakes in no time.

I've been practicing Ving Tsun for around 25 years. Many aren't aware, but the most of the system is based on blades. The issue I've been having is finding good enough knives to train with. Most of the stuff out there is ornamental crap that will teach you the wrong thing best case and break and hurt someone if you're unlucky. I ended up getting two big, well balanced hunting knives that I've blunted for training.

I'm pretty sure I'll end up making my own sooner or later...

I didn't say that, I said that exceptions are used for exceptional problems. Expected errors like missing values are better handled using optional types. I find the one ring to rule them all attitude less than constructive.

Yep yep, sounds good.

Problem is you're not handling errors, you're wasting precious energy shuffling errors to code that knows how to handle it; which is exactly what exceptions could do for you. The end result is the same, except it takes more effort and the code looks like crap.

They are used for exceptional problems, expecting one doesn't really make any sense.

Of course you do, that's the point; to unwind the stack until you reach code that knows how to handle the error.

Cancer, really; is that you Gordon?

The standard library uses panic/recover to sort of implement exceptions here and there. It's a pretty serious case of do as I say, not as I do.

Do you see any problems with optimizing everything we do for junior developers? I mean, most of us aren't, and it would be really nice if someone gave a crap about wasting our lives as well.

They are not overlooked, they are better handled further up the call stack. And not having the option to forward them implicitly is a step back, not forward. There's no way to make a programming language better by forcing users to do anything, in many cases the user will have more experience than the person implementing the language. A programming language is a tool, predicting and dictating how the tool is to be used is missing the point.

Go's resistance to exceptions looks like Steve Jobs and his one button mouse from here. It's not like renaming them to panic/recover fooled anyone outside of the Pike reality distortion field. Sometimes unwinding the stack is exactly what you want. Optional types are nice too, but that's more for things that are intentionally missing. I have yet to see anything here that's an improvement over just doing the obvious thing.

Exactly like that.

Blindly trusting authority and walking over dead bodies to defend our ignorance hasn't been working for thousands of years, it's about time.

One of my teachers at university kept repeating that you can't really call yourself a programmer before you've implemented at least one language. I don't know about that, everyone is entitled to an opinion.

What I do know is that it's one of precious few things in software that I still find interesting enough to bother [0]. I'm guessing part of the answer is that this is where you end up sooner or later.

And then we have the internet, which is a big part of the equation. It's easy to get numb, but I remember a time when information about implementing interpreters/compilers was VERY hard to come by.

It's all good from my perspective, we're barely scratching the surface of what is possible and there are plenty of good ideas left to rediscover in our history.

But I do wish that more designers would dare to step outside of the box more. Creating a language isn't about cherry picking features from existing languages, it's about finding better ways of solving problems.

[0] https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

As others noted, proving medical benefits has been illegal for a long time. What we do have is the authentic personal experience and testimony to its benefits from hundreds of thousands of users. I know, drug users are not to be trusted; unless it's alcohol or tobacco, then it's ok. But still; you rarely hear users preach the health benefits of crack cocaine, or even alcohol/tobacco.

It does wonders for chronic pain, without the nasty side effects of opiates.

It makes it easier to deal with ADHD/Aspberger traits, without the nasty side effects of amphetamine.

And it seems to have extraordinary cancer curing powers, without long term killing you like chemo.

There's plenty more just a search away...

The same as someone who died from a second round of untreatable cancer after having their system wrecked?

Look, I get it; cancer is no fun. But when the cure is worse than the disease, it doesn't make sense any more.

Except if you profit from disease and suffering, I guess.

Same here, except I prefer C since that makes it more accessible.

That would also allow others to write clients for their favorite languages.

Works short term but wrecks your immune system long term, which means you will get sick from something else and no one can be blamed. Have you actually seen someone on chemo? Scientifically sound is not the first thing that comes into my mind. There's even a decent amount of objective research out there these days showing exactly this so there are really no excuses for clinging to these delusions any more.

I skimmed both books several times back in the days, but didn't really have enough experience to know what to make of it. I once used the bridge pattern to write a multi backend GUI framework, looked it up in the book and all.

32 years into the game my perspective is that patterns is exactly what I don't want in my code...

My boss at my first gig was like that. Would always praise anyone who worked late or rushed in there to put out fires outside of work hours, he wasn't very interested in preventing fires but always first in line to play the hero role.

And on top of that he was severely dyslectic. I don't know, I feel like he would have made a better fire fighter.

Long story short, it took me two years to run into the wall like a freight train. This was 20 years ago, to this day I have serious issues with phone signals and stress in general. First sign of trouble and I simply shut down, can't do it any more.

Second that!

Security apps from the Alphabet agency's cyber unit, nice. At least they're not mandatory here yet...

And that's fine too, it's perfectly ok to disagree with the choices others make. But that's as far as it goes, you wouldn't like someone else telling you how to spend your time without getting anything in return either.

I'd bet most developers would be fine with supporting and incrementally improving if they made enough money from that to do what they really want to do on the side.

I would take a minute or two to reflect on all the time and energy that hundreds of thousands of individuals give away for free. It's easy to forget how far we've come by standing on their shoulders.

Worrying where it will come from is never going to be a good idea, worrying in general is the worst kind of visualization. Dying from starvation is not really realistic in any western country, many will even stop you from doing it by your own choice. Money is not how we survive, you can't eat money or build anything worth building using it. All it takes is a slight disruption and it's paper with funny faces on and digits in a computer that doesn't run anymore.

Hey now, none of this is my fault, most of us are in the same boat. As much as I would want to be completely independent, this society tries it best to make that really difficult. But I'm working on it, I don't consider myself a victim anymore.

You seem to have missed the memo on visualization, yours is pretty much a perfect example of how not to do it. You may safely trust me on this one, you'll never go anywhere if you start by enumerating all the reasons it could never work. First you commit, then all sorts of solutions appear seemingly out of nowhere. It always starts with a leap of faith to make sure you really want it.

Flagged, really?

Didn't rhyme with the HN narrative I guess, probably violated some CoC paragraph.

Ah well, this too shall pass. Just know that from the outside you look very funny when you run in circles chasing your tails.

I mean that in certain areas we've recognized and pay tribute to the importance of visualization. But then we fail to make the connection and realize that the same mechanics apply to everything.

It's mainly the projection of fear, really. Fear of not fitting in, not having a roof over your head or food on the table, of war, disease, terrorists and so on.

It's tricky business to snap out of the collective psychosis, it took me 35 years and I still probably wouldn't have if life hadn't thrown me a banana peel in form of a serious accident.

Somewhere deep inside I'm sure almost everyone knows what they would really want to do. But it's too painful, the contrast hurts and it's emotionally tangled up with all the other things that we're not supposed to think about. So we "forget", to fit in.

Oh, mostly nostalgia at this point :) I was in the startup circle for a while, and I've been writing code for more than 32 years. But the only kind of coding that feels worthwhile to me these days is exploring better ways of writing code [0].

https://github.com/codr4life/snabl

Take a look around you; I'm sure you can find plenty of people living if not outside, at least on the outer perimeter of society. They're still here, some of them in better overall health than more well adjusted citizens.

There are thousands and thousands of collectives, religious and otherwise; that live together in relative harmony and mostly grow their own food and keep the state at arms length. I've lived in two myself, one ashram and one oriented around permaculture gardening.

I would point you to the native tribes, but I can't think of any that we haven't brutally destroyed to remove all traces of their way of living.

Total dependence has always been the goal, and they've fought long and hard using every trick in the book and then some to get there. The fact that we're even having this kind of discussion is a testimony to the strength of the human spirit that just won't give up.

Oh, for heavens sake. That's as far as you can see? You can get that in prison. We were born and raised on a giant slave plantation. There are enough resources to take care of everyone, so much that some of it has to be kept off the market to keep up the illusion and prices.

I'm currently scraping by at a bare minimum, growing my own vegetables and foraging whatever I can find in the area. And I find it infinitely more satisfying than writing software for startups and helping them rape the world in the name of profit.

On a more constructive note:

Consider the effort put into, and importance of, visualization in sports and other areas. If you can't see it; it's just not going to happen, ever. Same goes collectively. What's worse, you tend to get more or less what you expect. Which is why the people running our plantation put so much effort into making us visualize exactly the kind of slave life they have planned for us.

There are plenty of people who are managing that without making any money at all, despite all sorts of prolonged efforts to turn their way of living into hell.

Integrity, being surrounded by loving people, being in good health, having the freedom to be all that you are. Those are all more important from my perspective.

We've been carefully conditioned to believe that this game is the only alternative, it's not.

That being said, this one [0] gives correct results and runs slightly faster :)

[0] https://gist.github.com/codr4life/59f2c02403b27d551e706f673b...