ramin_hal9001

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@daviwil I would avoid Go simply because it is a language "blessed" by Google, which is a company I would never want to depend on for any reason.

Rust is great for its fantastic type system, and seems to have gained a ton of momentum in the hearts and minds of programmers lately, but the Rust community seems to make no attempt to make Rust binary compatible with other programming languages. The language is too different from C to be able to easily interface other languages (scripting languages) to it without automated foreign function interface generators to generate Rust code to which other external libraries can interface.

Zig is great, but not quite as popular as Rust, and does not have a really nice type system. On the other hand, it does produce very efficient binary code and is fully compatible with C libraries, so you can easily interface languages like Guile or Lua to Zig libraries without having to generate any foreign function interface code on the Zig side. And I am told that it has some pretty nice, modern tooling that helps debugging a lot to make up for the fact that it does not have Rust's type system that can catch such errors before compilation completes. Honestly, Zig just seems to be a much more useful language than Rust. But I would use Zig as a language target for Scheme, sort of like how Gambit or Chicken generates C.

If I were forced to choose between Rust and Zig, I would go with Rust just so that I could get to know its borrow checking type system, but my end game would be try to emulate that borrow checking in a Scheme compiler like PreScheme.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

> "I've been going back and forth on whether I'd try to write a Scheme compiler"

@daviwil yes, this is exactly what I do too when I want to learn a new language, I write a Scheme compiler. I also like writing text editors if I want to test out any GUI libraries for the language. One of my friends always writes a ray tracer when he wants to learn a new language because he likes to test out a language's number crunching and optimizing capabilities, which is something I personally have never done, but sounds like a good idea to try sometime.

Yeah, Rust is one of those languages I really should get to know better, but I just never get around to it. I wonder how well it handles when the code size increases? I guess that is what you want to find out.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@codrusofathens I did narrow my query but without using quotes. My query was something like "apl programming GPU OpenGL shader GLSL" or something like that.

I just tried again with "apl programming compiler target shader GLSL aaron hsu" and I got the APL wiki page for Aaron Hsu which mentions his work on a GPU-hosted APL compiler and links to the Co-dfns GitHub page, as well as his Ph.D thesis. It looks like I almost had the winning query before I posted this question. Of course, you always have perfect vision in hindsight.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@louis if it can be installed onto the latest Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and if it runs Netflix, I might switch to it myself. I have been wanting to move away from Firefox for a while now. If it doesn't run Netflix I suppose I can keep Firefox installed just for that.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@masukomi so Shen is a bit weird because the guy who made, Mark Tarver, it is also just a little unusual. I'll try to explain.

So for a time I was very interested in Shen because I like the idea of a minimalist Lisp with built-in pattern matching and a Prolog-like language that can be used to do meta-programming. I began evaluating Shen to see if it would suit my purposes — wanted to see if I could use it for Emacs Lisp macro programming, to generate Emacs Lisp code with a kind of dependently typed declarative programming system. So I got the Emacs port of the Shen.

However, when I actually tried using it, I found it was completely self-contained, like a toy language, there was no easy way to get it to generate Emacs Lisp code except as a string via the standard output channel, and calling Emacs "eval" was impossible. I knew there must be a way to create new primitives, something like a "foreign function interface" to Emacs Lisp, but I had a hard time figuring out how to do it. So of course the first thing I did was try to read the documentation. But the only way to read the documentation is via the Shen website, it is not available for download as HTML or Infodoc or whatever. This is painful because when doing any programming in Emacs at all, Infodoc is the easiest form of documentation to read.

What I found on the Shen website (at the time) was JPEG images of the manual, like it had been rendered from LaTeX to a series of JPEG files. This was the only way to learn the language without actually buying a copy of the book from Amazon. So I thought, "OK, weird, but maybe I can at least download these images for offline viewing." So I tried Wget, but I found that Mark Tarver's web server had some hack built-in to it that prevented Wget from ripping the images from the site. It seemed he was REALLLLLY against people reading the documentation for Shen, at least unless they went to the trouble of buying a copy of the book.

I just recently checked the website, and things have improved. The documentation is at least available in HTML now, though I am not really willing to try and download it again.

There are other little details about the presentations Mark Tarver posted on YouTube that rub me the wrong way. Everything he says about it has a less-than-subtle air of hubris that just comes off as a bit daffy to me. He often talks about how revolutionary Shen is, how it will "change the world," and he uses expressions like "re-educating the planet." I would ordinarily overlook the personal behavior of the inventor, since it is indeed a fascinating Lisp system, but the fact that Tarver made it so difficult to obtain the documentation just made it all the more insufferable.

Finally, I ran across this diatribe he wrote criticizing free and open source software. He calls it "open source" but makes no distinction between open source and free software, the way Richard Stallman does. He expects his software to be "revolutionary," but also expects to be well paid for it. He ends his diatribe with a quote by David MacIver: "Plans which are predicated on changing the world before anyone will pay you any money are decidedly bad plans."

Well, what can I say, I wish him luck, I genuinely do. I could have made more effort to learn Shen, perhaps emailing Mark Tarver with my questions, but I never have had to go through so much effort to learn any other programming language, even just to evaluate whether it would be suitable for my purposes. And there are dozens of alternatives made by people out there who are more willing to share the least bit of their knowledge as a professional courtesy, why not just use those.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

> "Linux now feels almost like the Windows of the *nixes."

@louis @mms this! This is why I want to switch to OpenBSD! But I don't have any servers, only desktop computers, and OpenBSD does not have the best support for most of the hardware that I use — mostly laptops and desktop PCs, some of which have GPUs, some of which I use for playing games.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@civodul I don't know how to define bloat either, but I think things like fonts, icons, emojis, encryption algorithms, and programming language runtime environments can be excluded from the definition.

But there are many things I do not like. I do not like every application downloading its own copy of slightly different versions of the same library, and/or the same programming language runtime environment. I do not like containers, or things like AppImage or Flatpak trying to facilitate this practice by hiding away the details of library dependencies.

Of course I am sure we both agree that Guix (and Nix) both go a long way to solving the technical details of this problem, but I think there are political issues that remain unresolved, like can we get everyone to agree to release their software at roughly the same time, in a sort of point-release fashion? (Like what Ubuntu does, every 6 months.) I think this solution is analogous to democratic elections in a parliamentary government. "Elections" are held every 6 months, where all laws that have been drafted in the past 6 months go into effect just before the election. So the "laws" are like the software, the "election" is the process of cutting a release of that software and submitting it to the network that delivers it to end users.

But some people will insist on rolling releases. Some people will insist on installing packages using tar archives, some people will insist that flatpaks, appimages, and docker images are all good, practical ways of delivering software. This disagreement is why I call it a "political issue."

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

> "it's rather that GUIs are hardly ever created with user freedom (and user empowerment) in mind."

@civodul @janneke this is very true, and even more true for smartphone operating systems.

I can think of a few GUI applications that do empower users: Emacs, Blender, GIMP, Krita, there are probably a few more that don't occur to me right at this moment.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@daviwil best reason, in my opinion, the language is so minimal it really teaches you how to do more with less. Of course, there are plenty of libraries available to help you get work done. But learning to write working programs with such a limited but orthogonal set of language constructs, you begin really see how you don't need a whole lot to do everything a programming language can do. It is one of those languages, like Haskell, where you have to warp your brain to really understand it, and this makes you see the very idea of software and code in a whole new light.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@garbados Nix is less about the language and more about the package manager that is built out of it. Also, there is an operating system that uses the Nix package manager to manage all software in the system.

What is interesting about Nix is how it builds software: it uses a blockchain-like database of packages to prove the entire chain of dependencies used to build a piece of software, and can guarantee that one piece of software can be built on one computer in an identical way to any other computer, this is called "reproducible builds." Without Nix, it is possible to accidentally build software that have slightly different dependencies on different systems, which can lead to bugs or unexplained changes in behavior between applications running on different systems.

The chain of package dependencies also makes it very easy to undo (or "roll back," as they say) any changes to the set of software your system is using. Every time you install software, a new set of links are added to the chain, sort of like creating a branch in Git. If you install software that breaks a server, or perhaps the GUI on your computer, you can just set your system to use the previous links, and the system goes back to functioning exactly as it did before, no different than checking out an older Git branch of some software. But with Nix, unlike Git, you are "checking out" the set of packages installed on your system, rather than a particular version of source code.

I like to say the the Nix package manager is the most technologically advanced package manager in the world of software right now. (Also Guix, which works in the same way as Nix but uses a different programming language.)

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@pmidden I am not sure what you considere to be "unnecessary dependencies" (I supposed you wouldn't want a web server like Wai), but would log-base get the job done for you?

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

> "When we abhor, we become abhorrent."

@LeftistLawyer isn't it OK to abhor fascism, racism, genocide?

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@sachac I have been quite pleased with https://diode.zone , their stated purpose is "a focus on creativity and electronics." One problem/good thing about them to consider is they are pretty selective with whom they federate.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

@tyil @jrballesteros05 I think if anyone is going to seriously try to write a new web browser from scrarch, it would have to be in phases, gradually working toward standards compliance. I think projects like Qt and Gtk have what it takes to construct a new web engine, it is just a matter of defining widgets that can be constructed from HTML tags and updated with CSS.

Also WebAssembly is gaining momentom now, JavaScript will likely go the way of COBOL in 20 years. At that point, all you will need is the DOM, executable code will all be WebAssembly, compiled from other languages.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

>> "Also WebAssembly is gaining momentom"

> "This is not a good thing."

@tyil @jrballesteros05 why not?

The software industry has made a few attempts at a "write code once, run it anywhere" virtual machine since the early 1990s. Would you rather a fully proprietary VM like Java or .NET, or X86 emulation, be the one VM we must all use? I think WebAssembly is the best we can hope for as far as it comes to finding a common ground solution.

ramin_hal9001, 4 months ago

> " Israel continues to prosecute its war against #Hamas in #Gaza "

@LALegault @raymondpert @Miro_Collas this phrasing of it as a "war against Hamas" is really starting to piss me off now. How can anyone see the weekly, reports from the various UN agencies monitoring the situation in Gaza who all have clearly stated that this is a fucking genocide, not a war. The war on Hamas is just a pretext for the genocide.

And yes, this is a genocide in progress being committed by the United States of America and Israel. Way to go Genocide Joe. How can anyone believe in republican democracy or constitutional rule of law when such exceptions are taken by the US? Even with a Democrat as president, we are living in a full-on fascist authoritarian state.

ramin_hal9001, 5 months ago

@syntaxseed I am almost 100% certain you could write a Minetest mod, with a simple Lua script (or if not that, a mod to the terrain generator), that would do exactly this.

ramin_hal9001, 5 months ago

> "could you explain why mastodon users, who have explicitly come to mastodon for what it offers, will decide to switch to threads?"

@jmaris sorry for the late reply. The users who explicitly come to Mastodon for what it offers, a democratically run decentralized social network, are not a concern, they will not be going to Threads.

But most people, non-technical people, don't care about democracy or decentralization. They still think of Mastodon as just another Twitter, and people who joined just to "try it and see what it is like" will see Threads as an alternative, probably a better alternative because it has a large community of users, and it has more name recognition it has features like search, and it is easier to join since you don't have to choose an instance. They will quickly lose interest in Mastodon which to them will be seen as just "Threads but not as good." But these non-technical people are what make Mastodon interesting, it is a social network with the largest and most diverse group of people with the widest range of interests and expertise that make the social network useful.

ramin_hal9001, 5 months ago

> @but we don't have those people now, what makes you think it will be any different if threads is not federated

@jmaris what do you mean? I am talking about people who are already on Mastodon to see what it is like but don't necessarily care about democracy or decentralization, they just care about whether they can have a good time and meet good people. I expect they would probably abandon Mastodon for Threads if they ever thought both networks are basically the same (since the two networks interoperate) but Threads would seem slightly better to them due to name recognition and expensive features that only a major corporation could afford.