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Understanding means understanding the duality between the concrete and the abstract.
Aram Hăvărneanu
7,926 posts
Aram Hăvărneanu
@aramh
Mathematical engineer bringing type safety to the cloud. Previously worked on CUE @cue_lang.
JSR PC, @(R6)+; I wrote the arm64, sparc64, and Solaris Go ports.
Joined May 2009
- VLC can't do color-managed video, can't play modern codecs, and has one of the most abstruse user interfaces I've ever seen. VLC is not good and has never been good. It was once useful. People lack the capacity of discerning good from bad.Quality of these two free software are unmatched
- I was asked by management to solve the halting problem at least five times in my career. Sometimes it was subtle, it wasn't immediately clear that the problem was equivalent to the HP, but at least a couple of times my boss asked me to solve the literal halting problem.
- I started using Go on November 10, 2009; 15 years ago. I was one of the first people to design production systems in Go (way before Go 1.0). I have built many systems with Go. I have ported Go to many platforms, and I have authored the Go arm64 and sparc64 compilers. If you runI wrote about Go (link in reply). I'm increasingly struggling to see a good use case for the language.
- C is the best programming language C is the best programming languag C is the best programmingC is the best programming language C is the best programming languag C is the best programming langua C is the best programming langu C is the best programming lang C is the best programming lan C is the best programming la C is the best programming l C is the best programming C
- "There's no problem, Markdown is simple", they said. Today I learned about the Markdown Monster (link below), a .md document that renders differently in 24 different Markdown parsers. Enjoy!I cannot explain the popularity of Markdown. It's just an awful, awful format.
- Most programming done in practice is very simple and very easy. And yet it is a reality that most "civilians" just can't do it. I taught programming to people with no serious prior "computer experience", and most of them have no problem learning how to program simple algorithms
- I cannot explain the popularity of Markdown. It's just an awful, awful format.
- Replying to @jconorgroganRegular expressions. When I notified my boss the task is impossible, he "implemented" it with regular expressions. Few things are more damaging to an organization than a manager who thinks he can code, but can't.
- Things I will never understand about LaTeX: 1. Why does it take 5GB? "Because of the fonts" you say, but then KerTeX exists, which is 20MB, not 5GB. 2. What even is a LaTeX distribution? Why are there so many of them? 3. Why does upgrading LaTeX on my mac always break all my
- Every time I explain to non-programmers that software needs maintenance they are perplexed—why would perfectly good software stop working? And it's a totally valid question to ask. We have these (almost) deterministic machines, running these (mostly) deterministic programs, and
- Docker: 1. Images are built by essentially a Bash script (Dockerfile has no intrinsic semantics). 2. No notion of compositionality, neither inside nor outside the image (layers? Docker Compose? Miss me with that.) Even Linux package managers, as bad as they are, have a better
- Rust, for me, sits in this weird spot. Rust is useful if your requirement is for software that is low-level enough such that a higher-level language is impractical, but high-level enough such that you don't need to use `unsafe`. So far I've never been in this space. When I'm
