Comments by "HalfSourLizard" (@halfsourlizard9319) on "Computerphile" channel.

  1. 'I am abusing this monstrously.' == always the sign of well-written code.
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  2. ​ @NutchapolSal Literally false. Editing PDF is trivial.
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  3. Extremely surprised that people were still using ADA that late in an educational context -- would have suspected that 'trendy' and 'new' Java would have been on offer.
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  4. The difference between 'O(1)' and 'doing precisely a single operation' seems to be a subtlety that evades people ... I can't say how many dev candidates I've interviewed who've said that their 2-pass algorithm had 'O(2n)' perf -- that's not a thing, and it suggests that you've completely misunderstood asymptotes / limits.
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  5. It's almost as funny as people using Microsoft crapware in the first place.
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  6. ​ @hernanefrain6085 I suspect this is another case of geek vs nerd conflation/confusion 🤷‍♀️
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  7. It's maths notation; in most implementations a pipe (or an escaped pipe) is used.
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  8.  @helleye311  And, of course, in most implementation, + is used for >0 repetition, rather than disjunction/alternative.
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  9.  @styleisaweapon  Depends very much on the use case -- absolutely that'd matter way more if it were some low-level hard-real-time system or a high-volume trading system or something ... and you're quite right -- even for say a frontend thing (and this is way outside of things I'm familiar with), I know that good devs grab flame graphs and are trying to cut out needlessly expensive ops in their JavaScript -- which is probably 5 levels of abstraction away from bare metal. But, I'd still expect someone with a comp sci background to be conversant in asymptotic complexity -- even if just to discuss why it misses things ... and why writing a quadratic solution to a thing that could be linear is probably (although not always) not a great idea. All abstractions ignore things; some abstractions are useful.
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  10.  @custardtart1312  It's just a file; I assure you that its bytes can be edited.
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  11.  @DavidLindes  Well, that'd be a great teachable moment, eh? Also, I want to acknowledge that you seem to share my love for learning things -- even if we've different preferences regarding approach🙃
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  12. Can your assembly language do that!?
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  13.  @kevvdog  Oh, very probably both 😜
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  14. Let me guess: You're coming from Java ...
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  15. ... it's almost like ANNs aren't the only way to create machine-learnt models! ;P
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  16. Wat? Clearly defining the semantics and proving soundness of the type system are the interesting and challenging bits.
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  17. s/implementation/implementations/
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  18.  @Sora_Halomon  Do you prefer middle seats on flights, as well, then?
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  19. Learning Ed is still very much worthwhile -- both for the historical aspect and because no matter how badly your terminal is derped up or how slow your ssh connection Ed will work.
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  20.  @hanifarroisimukhlis5989  Oh, yeah, that's super important for a lot of things that come up in practice with resizable data structures 👍👍
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  21. (Fav case that I see a lot is: People doing mid-sequence insertion into something that's backed by an array ... and they just assume that it's efficient ... With good people, asking 'so, how would you implement insertion in a contiguous-mem-backed container?' will get them to realise it ... but I've had candidates refuse to believe that it's not const time.)
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  22. Why is anyone using 32-bit ints for anything?! Machines have been 64-bit for ages.
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  23. I'm not a fan of set theory, either ;}
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  24.  @kimuyu  Choose better software 🤷‍♀️
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  25. ​ @DavidLindes  Syntax isn't interesting. It's just arbitrary convention. The fundamental ideas are what matters ... the rest is just implementation details.
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  26.  @DavidLindes  Knowing the theory behind regexps is the interesting bit; there are references (or LLMs) for the derpy idiosyncrasies of the various flavours.
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  27.  @DavidLindes  That depends on the learner; some do better learning theory then applying it, and some do better learning pragmatics and then the theory underlying it.
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  28.  @DavidLindes  How nice that might be for you; I'm pleased to have been taught theory-first ... and proud to have taught that way during my academic career. Mathematics is what's real; the world and 'practical realities' are just emergent properties -- persistent illusions.
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  29. The syntax is what you hate? There are way better reasons to hate Python: Mutability. Lack of a type system. Incorrectly / inconsistently-implemented scoping.
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  30. This is not how to design or implement a programming language. See the work of Ben Pierce, Strachy and Scott, or Winskel if you're actually serious about doing this properly.
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  31. Caution: None of this applies to JavaScript 'arrays' ... which, of course, aren't actually arrays.
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