Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Math Sorcerer" channel.

  1. Rust seems to be the most logical successor to C. The Linux kernel is starting to accept code written in Rust as an alternative to C. I remember this blog post from the Discord folks some months back. They had been using Go for their backend code, and they did some benchmarks with Rust, and found it offered much better performance. So they are switching their Go code to Rust.
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  2. C++ certainly still has some fans. But even those fans admit it has accumulated a load of baggage over the decades that needs to be jettisoned. Google created a new language called “Carbon”, which seems positioned as a more modern successor to C++.
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  3. I wonder, though: some aspects of the tools can’t possibly make sense to someone who doesn’t appreciate the mathematical structures involved. Like the fact that the Git version-control system structures the commit history as a directed acyclic graph.
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  4. That’s one aspect of the books that has not aged well. Basically the entire field of computer architecture has undergone some major winnowing since then. Decimal-centric architectures are gone, and byte addressability is king.
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  5. LISP can be a great language for a mathematician, or at least a mathematically-inclined computer scientist. Go through the Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs book, and tell me if you agree.
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  6. We have Unicode now. Why shouldn’t modern programming languages accept “≠” as an operator?
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  7. 🏆💯👏 What disappoints me about this video is he completely fails to mention them!
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  8. He got distracted by the woeful state of mathematical typesetting. So he put this project aside to create TEX.
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  9. So, more “Kerniğan”, like “Erdoğan”?
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  10. Quote from the preface: “When DEK taught Concrete Mathematics at Stanford for the first time, he explained the somewhat strange title by saying that it was his attempt to teach a math course that was hard instead of soft. He announced that, contrary to the expectations of some of his colleagues, he was not going to teach the Theory of Aggregates, nor Stone’s Embedding Theorem, nor even the Stone-Tech compactification. (Several students from the civil engineering department got up and quietly left the room.)”
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  11. 5:06 So, the common bracketing symbols for “floor” and “ceiling” were invented by the APL guy. Why am I not surprised?
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  12. C23 finally drops compatibility with pre-ANSI function declarations! The writing is on the wall, K&R fanatics ...
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  13. C99 has been a sufficiently major change in so many ways: declarations intermingled with statements, stdint, stdbool, better support for IEEE-754 arithmetic (unheard of back in K&R days), and did you know you also have the option of using C++-style “and/or/not” instead of “&&/||/!” operators? Pity K&R was never updated to mention these. Unfortunately, it has little more than historical value nowadays.
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  14. The fundamental difference, I think, is that in computing we care about the resources our programs use. In maths, the fact that a 1000-decimal-digit integer can be factorized in finite time is something you take for granted, but in computing, the fact that it might take longer than the age of the observable Universe to determine the factors becomes rather important.
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  15.  @mikeh39  All seasoned punched-card users knew how to deal with that.
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  16. These books are not “pirated”, they are cheap editions put out by the publishers on condition that they are only made available in certain “third-world” markets. There is nothing illegal about reselling them elsewhere.
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  17.  @edwarddejong8025  You visited there. How wonderful. I lived in Southeast Asia.
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  18.  @edwarddejong8025  I have seen the kinds of tricks publishers pull, from a viewpoint that maybe you have not. I know what “IP” means to them. It means profit, and more profit.
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  19. You are Jaromil and I claim my £5.
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  20. Donald Knuth is well aware of that, and he did something about it.
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  21. Gesundheit.
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  22. Remember that C barely existed at the time he started work on this series, and nowadays I don’t think it would be considererd a “high-level” language.
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  23.  @johnleclair663  I did say “modern”, did I not ...
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  24. A lot of publishers make cheaper editions available in what they think of as “third-world” markets, on condition these are not sold in places where they make more profit.
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