The Whiteboard

user55340

8:00 PM

On the other hand, you've got some novels released nder a CC license: antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/… (attribution, non-commerical, no-derivative) and another similar one though not specifically CC: scalzi.com/agent

user41796

Easier for the compiler to complain and throw an error. :-)

user55340

That said, I bet that @ThomasOwens hasn't read about the lobsters yet.

Thomas Owens

@MichaelT That was that ebook that you linked to? Yeah, I read it.

user55340

Best part of accelerando - each part follows from the previous, but you've got no idea where the next one will go.

user55340

And those lobsters keep showing up in strange places.

user55340

8:02 PM

(btw, there's a sequel of sorts to it.

user55340

Glasshouse (novel)

Glasshouse is a science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, first published in 2006. The novel is set in the twenty seventh century aboard a spacecraft adrift in interstellar space. Robin, the protagonist, has recently had his memory erased. He agrees to take part in an experiment, during which he is placed inside a model of a late twentieth/early twenty-first century Euroamerican society. Robin is given a new identity and body, specifically that of a woman named "Reeve". Major themes of this novel are identity, gender determinism, self-image- and conformity. Contrary to po...

Thomas Owens

There has to be a good polymorphic way to assomplish this.

psr

@MichaelT Though there is actually nothing preventing congress from only allowing software copyrights that are for the purpose of making the software more available to the public. Except, you know, congress.

user55340

Another neat book - the "what if the strossian singularity was averted"

user55340

Implied Spaces

Implied Spaces is a 2008 space opera novel by American author Walter Jon Williams. It explores themes of transhumanism, artificial intelligence and ontology. Setting Implied Spaces takes place approximately 1,500 to 2,000 years in the future. Humanity has entered a period of technological singularity fueled by a series of massive supercomputers orbiting the sun. These computers act as giant solar collectors and computational machine for running human society. While humanity numbers in the hundreds of billions, only perhaps a few million live in the solar system. Some have gone on slowe...

user55340

8:05 PM

(I think that glasshouse is kind of a prerequisite for reading implied spaces in that it explores an aspect of post-singuarltiy war and implied spaces explores another)

user41796

Pro tip: It helps to actually attach the debugger to the process prior to running the test you wanted to walk through.

ratchet freak

and set a break point in the test

user55340

@GlenH7 not if you already have an omniscient debugger: lambdacs.com/debugger/debugger.html

user41796

don't be getting too fancy on me now

Thomas Owens

Anyone want to suggest a new design? Since this was supposed to be my brilliant solution to fix stupid ones?

user55340

8:11 PM

And I owe @ampt another $0.05 - blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/…

user41796

@ThomasOwens You need to call the parent's version of the method or the child's version?

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 The child's version. The parent has all empty methods for each of the message types. Each child chooses the messages that it needs to accept and what to do with them via overloading.

user55340

user41796

Or is it that you have a parent reference to a child object and you need to poke through to the child's method?

user55340

(note the 'history of i' panel)

user15026

8:12 PM

@MichaelT I keep wanting to read and like Stross's books but I just can't ever get into them.

user41796

@MichaelT Can I get that in C#? :-)

Thomas Owens

@GlenH7 That. I have a Parent x = new Child().

user55340

@AshleyNunn accelerando is a fun one. But you've got to read it as a collection of short stories.

Thomas Owens

And then, I have methods for the handful of subclasses of Parent. Based on the specific type of Parent, I need to call the right method.

user41796

@ThomasOwens And I suspect you can't do the proper cast to child class in the code, right?

user55340

8:13 PM

Its the idea that technology (at that point) is moving too fast to try to keep up with - and its speeding up.

Thomas Owens

I could. But it doesn't matter, I don't think. x.getClass() = Child.

user15026

@MichaelT See, as a premise, that sounds awesome, but so do others of his books, and I try to read them, and something about his language or something just florps my brain and I can't do it

Thomas Owens

It's just that instead of calling the method for accept(Child x), it's calling accept(Parent x).

user41796

@ThomasOwens I would think that if you could cast the reference to the actual child then the compiler will know which is the "correct" child method to call

Thomas Owens

So there's no good polymorphic solution? That's going to bloat my code with a handful of casts...

user55340

8:15 PM

He's writing it like its perfectly normal what he's writing about... and its not normal.

Thomas Owens

I wanted to avoid instanceof and casting.

user41796

@ThomasOwens offhand, I can't think of any. But that's a bit outside of the type of things I normally write

user15026

@MichaelT and I think that is where my brain starts to hurt, because I can't quite grasp his concepts and world buidling

user55340

>
Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 1028 MIPS of the solar system's brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation – individually a tenth…

user55340

And then you get to the eigen parents... which makes one's head hurt.

user55340

8:17 PM

Just remember... the cat is a very important character.

Thomas Owens

And if I don't have an accept(Parent x) method, I get a not applicable for the arguments.

user41796

@ThomasOwens I have generally always worked the reverse where I have a child reference and need to get back to the parent method. Sorry I can't think of any other ways to approach the problem.

Thomas Owens

gist.github.com/ThomasOwens/3ecb7ad44109d13e3070 demonstrates my problems. I suppose I could ask on Programmers or Stack Overflow.

I think it's small enough to post somewhere.

Would you all agree that this is a design question? Or should I make a simple class diagram for Programmers?

user55340

Looks designish. Borderline question... gota watch out to make sure that Robert guy doesn't try to close and migrate a good question away though.

ratchet freak

you want to be able to pass random messages and have them handled correctly?

then I'd say only have a handle(Message) in the super and override that and use if(msg instanceof SpecificMessage1) as needed

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