The Whiteboard

user20683

00:00

@JimmyHoffa Payments

user20683

a certain Paypal subsidiary though I didn't really that till after I applied

Jimmy Hoffa

Yeah, tons of financial in Chicago. Mostly stuff you don't want into anyway, those are horrifyingly stifling places often. Not as bad as @MichaelTs last place but the same vein often.

Any other interviews you had?

user20683

@JimmyHoffa not as yet but I've got scads of leads

user20683

I'll find something, stiffling or no, it's experience.

Jimmy Hoffa

Just keep working that till. It's not like the 90s and early thousands where a CS degree had six offers in the mail on grad day, the hiring infrastructure in this industry was broken by all the people who saw hold and came running.

user20683

00:07

@JimmyHoffa still easier than most fields

Jimmy Hoffa

*gold, hiring decisions as well as recruitment in this industry is run by clueless folks who can't find a needle in a pincushion

Matt D

dude, most recuirters cant find the fucking pincushion

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I guess I'll just have to be a sword

user20683

:P

Matt D

recruiters even.

Jimmy Hoffa

00:08

But yeah, take experience when you get the opportunity

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I figure spend that first year learning everything I can, go to conferences as much as possible and generally just network like a madman.

user20683

got my Github setup, gonna try that conversion of Hexpress to Python

user20683

mostly as a way to teach myself unit testing

Jimmy Hoffa

Conferences? They only send a small section of their favorite seniors to those :p that first year is often like the military, learn the chain of command and. Obey orders because green faces hardly ever know why they get the instructions they do

user20683

@JimmyHoffa send? I'd go myself

user20683

00:12

rejoin ACM, get the discount they offer on conferences

Jimmy Hoffa

Wow, you must be better at saving than I by a long shot

Eh, that's cool

user20683

@JimmyHoffa I once survived on 73 cents per day excluding housing costs

Jimmy Hoffa

Never heard of such, the ACM stuff you did was very wise

user20683

I'd have paid the 50 bucks to rejoin already but I'm good at saving :P

Jimmy Hoffa

Me too, it was called being a teenager heh

And ever since my savings skills have failed miserably

Brant

00:50

Ugh, I hate writing cover letters.

user20683

@Brant you and I both

Brant

One place I applied to recently had an online form with a space for a cover letter, and also a 150-character field where I’m supposed to write something that makes me unique, something that will “catch our eye”.

So it’s not enough to have a cover letter, I need to tweet at them too?

Can’t we just acknowledge that cover letters are a waste of time instead?

I mean, for me. I imagine the hiring manager thinks differently, but jeez.

user20683

@Brant in all honesty, I think it's better to have a Github from hell.

Matt D

01:08

github is from hell

Sparticus

04:27

Cover letters are a great way for you to show the intangibles though. Good teamwork, follow through, attention to detail etc

its like a little mini interview where you don't get the chance to defend yourself

or at least get them to say "huh, thats interesting, bring him in for an interview"

I agree that sometimes it gets a little out of hand with tweets and cover letters and videos, but being able to provide some more context on a terse resume can help them to know a little more about you

Jimmy Hoffa

07:46

@Brant I've never seen a hiring manager pay a tinge of attention to them when I was doing the hiring

I have however seen them say "gah I'm not reading this page too" when looking at a hand full of resumes and deciding the cover letters aren't worth wasting their time with

gnat

@RobertHarvey that's still doesn't make it fair, because he doesn't use hands to post at SO...

32

A: Stack Overflow needs direct-to-brain interface for post-human users

It already has. Just not for you.

user55340

14:28

@JimmyHoffa Lets assume you've got 100 candidates that made it past the buzzword filter. The cover letter filter can help you sift it down again so you only need to do a reasonable amount of interviews.

user55340

I look at the cover letter as a 'lets skip the first 5 minutes of the interview where you tell me a bit about yourself and why you want this job.'

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I don't disagree, just saying I've seen hiring managers toss them out in favor of reducing their resume load by just checking for experience/technologies etc

@gnat I said this years top SO user, Jon's apparently been taking a hiatus from his super human powers recently, Martijn Pieters is leading things for a while

Personally I don't find it particularly hard to read resumes, cover letter and all, there's really not a ton of information in one

enderland

14:45

I've always thought that the ideal case is you basically have a job before the hiring manager sees your resume/cover letter, so at that point, both are a formailty

Jimmy Hoffa

15:00

@enderland this was the case when I went back to a job after having left it. It was a most ideal situation.

enderland

indeed. gets harder when you are going external or to places you don't have connections, but this is why networking is so meaningful

my short term career goal is basically to get my current company to create a position which I will define - and let me do that sort of project work that I love doing indefinitely

user55340

3-4 days away from being #2 close vote reviewer...

user55340

@ChrisF Welcome, its not often we see you in here.

ChrisF

Indeed - I'm not here as often I would like.

enderland

it's a trap. get out while you still can!

user55340

15:14

Its always impressive when we see you do the P.SE/SO triple play - migrate a question to another site, merge it to a cross posted question, and then close it.

2

ChrisF

That's actually why I'm here.

-1

Q: Syncing client and server CRUD operations using json and php

I'm working on some code to sync the state of models between client (being a javascript application) and server. Often I end up writing redundant code to track the client and server objects so I can map the client supplied data to the server models. Below is some code I am thinking about implem...

This has been cross posted to SO

stackoverflow.com/questions/19556874/…

Never mind the, OP deleted the SO version.

The lack of one-boxing is a dead giveaway.

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland I did this once, key was convincing everyone up and down the hierarchy that I was a "rockstar" and could basically do no wrong. Which is a complete crock, but if playing on peoples marketting weaknesses is what it takes to be able to get authorization to fix fundamental problems in the software, then that's what I'll do...

user55340

Well, that answers that question... its one of those borderline questions that could go either way...

user55340

I would have leaned more to SO if he didn't act on it himself given:

user55340

> One work around is for each server model after creating or loading, simply do $model->clientId = $clientId; IMO this is a nasty hack and I want to avoid it. Adding a setCientId method to all my model object would be another way to make it less hacky, but this seems like overkill to me.

user55340

15:19

Though it certainly could be P.SE too.

user55340

"Implementation problems lead back to design problem questions"

enderland

@JimmyHoffa That's my goal, tbh. I've been laying some legwork for some time, the only problem is there is no career path doing what I want to do - which means I will get the position, and not get a promotion indefinitely unless I get them to create a career path :)

my company has a "dont do any custom sofwtare projects" type of perspective in the engineering group, which translates to everyone has to use @#%#@y tools and can't get meaningful things done because there aren't necessarily any commercially avilalbe software

but it's a great management/IT position, because they can just pass the problem to the end user and they don't have to deal with the "problem" of maintaining anything - the flipside is then the individual constributors get hosed

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland This is absolutely true, though being a software developer there's an amount of acceptance I think most people should commit to about the dead-endedness of the career. You either become a manager, which is a great path if you want that work, but for those of us who want to code we basically hit our responsibility peak at that ~10-15 year mark when we get that "lead" or senior designation or what have you. You can move into architecture but rarely is that any more than visio jockeys

enderland

@JimmyHoffa it ends a hell of a lot faster in an engineering org rather than a software org, though

user55340

@enderland See if you can (as much as I loath the suggestion) outsource the custom software project?

enderland

15:24

also, funny, but I've got a visio system architecture diagram to put together this mornign (at a really high level)

Jimmy Hoffa

In my book it's an acceptance of available income being capped, which I don't have trouble accepting because the cap is pretty high, sure managers aren't capped because they can grow into other roles, but us who want to code are basically stuck at that cap.

enderland

@MichaelT this is the backup option, but.... see, no one in the engineering org has a CLUE how software dev works (nor how important requirements are) and so it's a trainwreck every time this happens

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland Yeah well, we all still have to do our documentation etc, but the majority of architects only document

enderland

@JimmyHoffa yeah. I'm making pretty decent money now, even as a "newbie" to my company - but I know I'm adding a lot more value relatively speaking than others at the same pay level which is rather frustrating. Especially since I have about 4 years work experience now

I'm not sure how long it'll be before I finally go "F this" and take a job more in IT/dev

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland That's another thing you have to accept. If you're engaged in your work-quality enough to be active in SE, you're out-valueing and out-performing 90% of the industry, which usually means most of your colleagues. You just have to accept that not everyone prioritizes work-quality like you do and that you can't be given extremely jacked income due to egalitarianness; that just doesn't work and wanting it will make you nuts.

enderland

15:30

@JimmyHoffa yup. I've accepted that a while ago :) my current, small, team has a project mananger who is similarly minded though - its such a great arrangment (even though our team is effectively 3 people and a manager)

especially at a big company (50k+ employees at least now for me)

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland Don't undervalue a job you can enjoy just for some flaws. I've found a majority of them are in fact unenjoyable altogether

enderland

@JimmyHoffa oh heck yeah, I'm loving what I'm doing right now (even though VBA makes me CRY a little, ok a lot) - I love develping small scale applications to benefit salary people

it lets me learn a ton (for example, learning basic SQL stuff too) and have immediately visible impacts on people in a way large apps don't

honestly programming in VBA makes me not feel like a real programmer, lol

user55340

@enderland Its... a language that hides a lot, but its not a "not a real programmer"

user55340

joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000006.html

user55340

> Visual Basic is an extremely productive way to write code, especially GUI code. Want bold text on a dialog box? It's one click in VB. Now try doing it in MFC. You have to create a subclassed control, it's a big mess, you have to know all about LOGFONTS and Windows window subclassing and a bunch of other things and you need about three lines of code once you have the magic class.

user55340

15:37

> But many VB programs are spaghetti, either because they're done as quick and dirty one-offs, or because they're written by hack programmers without training in object oriented programming, or even structured programming.

user55340

> What I wondered was, what happens if you take top-notch C++ programmers who dream in pointers, and let them code in VB. What I discovered at Fog Creek was that they become super-efficient coding machines. The code looks pretty good, it's object-oriented and robust, but you don't waste time using tools that are at a level lower than you need. I've spent years writing code for C++/MFC and years writing code in Visual Basic, and let me tell you, VB is just much, much more productive.

enderland

well keep in mind VBA and VB are decently different

user55340

I get lost at TLAs after the first two letters...

enderland

:)

they are decently similar. But yeah, honestly, once you can code in a language really well you can do some magic in it

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland Taking requirements and generating functional software using independently designed control flow and data organization makes you a programmer, if you're using like filemaker pro where you just flip switches and toggles to setup automation that's not programming, but as soon as you're organizing routines and designing data flow to implement behaviour of your own thinking (not asking someone else every 5 minutes what to do next) to make software have features, you're programming.

user55340

15:38

I read "VB", "GU", "MF" "C+"...

enderland

@JimmyHoffa well, I'm also driving the requirements. perks of a team which is small (downside is tons of meetings and overhead non-coding work)

@MichaelT the reference counting thing is so true. I dont' want to imagine how long I've spent trying to track down either memory leaks or null pointer problems in C++

user55340

@enderland They aren't gone in other languages - just often hidden (NPE and memory leaks in Java aren't gone... nor are calling a method on undef and memory leaks in perl... or {other example in other language})... just easier to deal with than C or C++.

enderland

oh for sure, they aren't gone in VBA either because you can't do:
Dim myObject as myObjectType
set myObject = new myObjectType

in one line, as best I can tell

huh. I should have looked into this more, seems you can actually do that. LOL

though... it looks unstable as heck and prone to problems, because of how it works. bummer

also @MichaelT are pointers really that hard for people to wrap their mind around? that article makes it sound like it's impossible for many people to understand them

user55340

16:03

@enderland I don't know... some people just don't seem to be able to get the mental model where pointers work.

user55340

-4

Q: What is the exact reason for introducing pointers in C

Can anyone explain me what is the reason in introducing pointers in C language. Daily we are using pointers in C, but I am always getting struggling to know the reason .

c pointers

enderland

interesting. I mean, I undersatnd how/why they are confusing but... not that confusing? :)

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland If pointers weren't hard, they wouldn't be the source of 99% of the bugs in languages that largely rely on them.

enderland

@JimmyHoffa heheh I spent quite some time trying to track down an error a colleague introduced (who had a Java background), who was using something like

QString str = "world";
return &str;

within a function, which for some reason ran fine on his machine (????)

SoulBeaver

16:33

Hello, I was wondering if somebody could help me with some questions regarding Rest security.

Jimmy Hoffa

@SoulBeaver Make them login and then it's secure. Tada!

SoulBeaver

Funny :D

enderland

well, that was easy. :)

SoulBeaver

I was wondering if I still need to implement OAuth or Hmac if I'm using a secure SSL connection?

I read that, while it's not immune to attacks, for most use-cases it's safe enough

Or rather, while I was reading on Hmac-based authentication, it said that both client and server need to have a private key- which is not sent- and the user's public key. If I understand the premise correctly, how can I securely store a private key for a web-site? I don't think you can, so I'm still lost on how to create a secure authentication scheme for my website - server implementation

Jimmy Hoffa

16:51

@SoulBeaver You just store the private key in a locally encrypted store. Usually people just put them in an encrypted database column or encrypted file or encrypt them and store the encrypted blob in DB etc

alternatively you can use the machines local cert store to store the private key

depending on what kind of OS level facilities you have available for cert storage

but that requires you to generate a cert for each private key (or them to) and dealing with certs adds a whole 'nother layer of complexity

SoulBeaver

@JimmyHoffa I'm not quite sure I understand. Who gives the website the private key needed to hash the information? Do I give the web-developer a specific key that they store and which is loaded every time somebody accesses the page? Or is this supposed to be the user's private key? In which case, how does the website get that key?

Jimmy Hoffa

@SoulBeaver so there's two pieces of information, a shared public and a shared private key. The importance here is that they're "shared" by both you and the consumer. The public key can be sent in plain text from consumer to service and vice versa because it's a public key and totally useless without the private key. The public key acts as an ID which on your side you use to find the private key which you (and they) will use to hash the data

The shared private key is sent once from you to them or them to you, either one of you can generate the private and public keys all that matters is that you both know of them and that neither of you shares the private one after that initial agreement on what the keys are

jozefg

Hi all

Robert Harvey

'sup

jozefg

Trying to clean up my mercurial repo.. God it's a mess in here

Jimmy Hoffa

17:00

after that initial agreement, the consumer has both private and public keys, the server has private and public keys, the consumer uses the private key to hash information in his requests, and sends that hash with the public key, the server uses the public key to find the private key associated with that public key and uses the private key to hash information then compares it to the hashed information sent by the client. If it matches you know they used the private key that you two agreed on

@SoulBeaver Do you follow?

(this is how OAuth works anyway... I had to implement an OAuth client and server a not long ago so it's all still fresh...)

SoulBeaver

@JimmyHoffa The consumer in this case is my website, correct? Could you elaborate on which agreement? I'm very sorry, but I still don't think I understand how the website has access to the private key when it shouldn't be sent from the server.

Are you implying that the private key is sent to the website?

Isn't that insecure?

Jimmy Hoffa

@SoulBeaver I don't know who the consumer is, I'm referring to how the general authentication works. Your site could be the consumer or the server, I don't know your use case

@SoulBeaver The private key is shared between the two parties once and only once. It can be shared out of band (like an SMS text message) so it's much more difficult to intercept, or through e-mail or whatever else. But it has to be shared once. Just make sure it's never shared again and you're fine.

SoulBeaver

Correct, in this case a user using the website and the website makes the requests to the server

Jimmy Hoffa

(that is you're fine as long as you never share it again and it wasn't intercepted that one single time it had to be shared)

SoulBeaver

Aaaah, so it is permissible to send it over https, but only once and then never again, at least for the duration of the session?

Jimmy Hoffa

17:07

@SoulBeaver No, never again for the user's account

psr

@JimmyHoffa Of course once I assume that, I usually just assume that the shared secret is the message I want to send, so the security protocol is not to do anything. Intercept that!

SoulBeaver

So the website should store the information in a cookie so it isn't lost?

Jimmy Hoffa

and like I said, out-of-band sharing is more secure, but if you have to do it over https that once I guess it's not an enormous risk

@SoulBeaver fuck no, cookies are sent back and forth constantly

what you share after that one agreement is the public key and never the private key again.

SoulBeaver

Of course, I'm just asking because I need to store the private key on the user's end somehow

Which will be a website that closes after he's/she's finished

Jimmy Hoffa

account is created->public and private keys agreed upon and shared somehow->forever more communications sent with public key but never private key, private key is only used for hashing

@SoulBeaver You don't store the private key on the user's end, they store it. If they can't store it then that's the user's problem not your servers problem.

SoulBeaver

17:10

Alright, I think I understand

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa The code for my first post on category theory is done! Just not text part

SoulBeaver

But I'm not really targeting any tech-savvy individuals, they're just supposed login and forget about having to store a private key

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg So just write more code around your code until it's like a text part but it's all in code. Embedded Article DSL!

nyuck nyuck

@jozefg cool, what's it about?

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa I fail to see how this carefully laid plan could possibly fail

It's covering what a category is, then a few examples, then functors and initial and terminal objects.

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Functors are done to death... it's almost annoying sometimes how everything everywhere I read regarding Haskell in any way starts with functors

jozefg

17:14

Here's a smattering of poorly documented code to help lpaste.net/94751

@JimmyHoffa They're flipping useful in real category theory, unfortunately they 're broken in Haskell

Jimmy Hoffa

It makes sense why everything starts with functors, they truly are amazing and everyone should start there, but as someone who gets at least functors at this point, eh...

@jozefg O? Broken in Haskell?

jozefg

Well a true functor is from two categories and maps every object in one to the other and every morphism in one to the other

in Haskell the only notion of categories have all the same objects, so we really only have half of a functor

Jimmy Hoffa

MonoidHomorphism <- was that supposed to be homomorphism?

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Yeah, typo

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Ah, but that's just related to the fact that in Haskell everything is in category Hask, no?

user55340

17:17

See... you're making up haskell words again.

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Well you want to be able to encode interesting subcategories

Like the Natural category in my code can't be defined in Control.Category

Also I love the fact that for the "simple" part of my code I have to enable like 10 extensions :$

user55340

(side bit, I'm happy when a user self deletes and reposts on the proper site).

user55340

> This question appears to be off-topic because it is about software setup, not software development. Perhaps SuperUser would be a better fit for this question? – Martijn Pieters 10 mins ago

user55340

> Yes thank you. Sorry I'm new. – vinylguitar 8 mins ago

user55340

Even though he was new, he did the right thing.

Jimmy Hoffa

17:21

@jozefg Yeah, I wish you could just flip an environment setting on your machine to just be all "Look, I really don't care about the haskell report anymore, GHC is Haskell now so give me all of it plzkthx." something like set GHCIsTheOneTrueHask=true

user55340

If you're curious about the reposted question:

user55340

1

Q: Flash drive friendly (portable) XAMPP alternative?

I'm trying to setup a portable mediawiki wiki on a flash drive using XAMPP portable as a server. http://lifehacker.com/354005/run-your-personal-wikipedia-from-a-usb-stick When I try to start apache or mySQL I get this error. 11:19:52 AM [Apache] Error: Apache shutdown unexpectedly. 11:19:52 A...

apache php mysql shutdown

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa It's true, since hugs died GHC has kinda squashed everything else

user55340

@jozefg Free Hugs!

jozefg

@MichaelT Yep, ever since 2006 or so there has been no hugs in the Haskell community. It's a sad world

Jimmy Hoffa

17:23

@jozefg and there's not going to be any catchup, GHC is the haskell report at this point, I know Haskellers are a bunch of non-conformists by definition so the idea of a OneTrueImplementation dictating their standard will never be an acceptable truce, but still...

user55340

I've also gotta say, good job with the reposting - he properly copied the source for the question rather than the rendered output.

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa I'm not as worried about GHC being the one true Haskell as I would have been a few years ago.. We even had a core dev of GHC leave this summer and things kept going just fine. It seems to be pretty community driven. It's a happy state of affairs

Eh, I dislike my encoding of Void as an initial object in Hask..

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg I know, but it's not the risk of losing support that keeps the community from accepting it, it's the community's averseness to a single implementation dictating the standards of Haskell

even though it's already the case because no other implementation is ever going to catch up at this point

I mean seriously, you can't compile a tenth of hackage without complying with GHC's extensions

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa I'm not sure about that.. If some huge company threw money at a new industrial Haskell compiler I think we could get one, Look at clang, it's almost caught up to GCC or has already. Though GHC is just absurd sometimes with it's optimizations

Jimmy Hoffa

living without the bytestrings extensions will make you want to claw your own face off

jozefg

17:28

@JimmyHoffa yeah.. hey have you seen the new overloaded lists extension? I can finally use seqs without being sad

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Yeah but you forget GCC was never a high-level research project, GHC is 20 years of extremely high level research all bundled together. You can't just throw money at a pool of smart people and get the bleeding edge of computing theory coded up at the drop of a few years

complexity wise GCC never held a candle to GHC

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Fair.. though I do expect to see new frontends emerging. As in compiling to core and then handing it off to GHC. Pretty much every optimization happens in the core anywayrs

Jimmy Hoffa

it's comparing apples and nuclear fision driven cryogenics enabled autonomous interplanetary whole-civilization transport

4

jozefg

On a completely different note, yay I'm ordering new books

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg You're going to have a creepy big book shelf as an adult..

jozefg

17:41

@JimmyHoffa It's true, it's already 4 shelves..

Of pure cs books

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg Do yourself a favor, first time you leave home get a storage space to put those in. You're going to move a hand full of times in your life before settling down, you are not going to want to move all of those each times. At. All.

(have you ever moved before?)

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Once, plus I brought about a shelf to boston (they loved me on the plane for that). I should look into storage space..

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg If you don't, somewhere around your 4th move you'll decide it's not worth the trouble and some of those will go in the trash.

jozefg

@JimmyHoffa Personal experience?

Jimmy Hoffa

@jozefg I can't even think of all the stuff that's gone the way side during moves for me; I've had a particularly unstable set of years. I've moved 12 times over the last 9 years, 4 of which were cross country.

Being my neighbor during moving day has been wildly beneficial because I just go knock on peoples doors and offer them things if they're of any quality but I'm tired of moving them

...god it's nice to own a home now...

jozefg

17:53

@JimmyHoffa I could see that

I had a neighbor give me a monitor once when he moved. I'm not actually sure why he did, but hey, free stuff don't argue

user55340

18:08

(hmm... only about 800 more rep until @jozefg gets close votes...)

user55340

Magmas

24 mins ago, 16 minutes total – 11 messages, 2 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked 23 secs ago by Jimmy Hoffa

Because I wrote stuff so there. Trogdor would still take sauron to the limit everybody to the limit I say what's up fwhqghads err I mean uhh...

user55340

21:34

I hereby declare myself a sadist by giving a college student wondering about how to implement monopoly as part of an interview a link to monop from BSD games - bsdgames.sourcearchive.com/documentation/2.17/…

Robert Harvey

What approach or library is most appropriate for robotics programs that can read a file in Klingon and completely assemble a car from scratch in my backyard? I'm not necessarily looking for a full implementation, but a secure one that can respond to verbal commands. — Robert Harvey 43 secs ago

user55340

@RobertHarvey Forth like has some very wide range of possibilities...

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT Perhaps you have a good answer for him. I'm a bit curious myself, but his question seems like a bit of a Hail Mary to me.

user55340

Its one thing to just make PDA (thats not public display of affection - no one does that with forth, they keep their affections quite private - its embarrassing to like forth) and do that...

user55340

He's asking for a C# library or approach...

Jimmy Hoffa

21:41

@MichaelT Alternatively you could just tell him it already has this facility, for the language of arbitrary unicode characters where all characters concatenate with the implementation of print this character, the function is System.Console.WriteLine() to interpret this forth-like language, it's complete and secure.

user55340

Forth when fully enabled (not just forth like) allows for the definition of subroutines and some rather interesting DSL / metaprogramming.

Robert Harvey

What is "Forth Like"? There are other ways to get a DSL. Boo comes to mind.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey I'm kind of confused by him, he has decent rep but then he's had a multitude of under-the-weather questions. He and what's that guys name dukket dukat dukkat or something both have that strange MO, occasionally asking good things or answering good things, having good rep, but often posting crup.

@RobertHarvey I presume he means concatenative

Robert Harvey

I've tried to like Forth. Really, I have. But every time I look at it, I feel like I'm programming the turtle in Logo. Or maybe a simple Lisp without the parentheses.

Clearly I don't get it.

user55340

Forth like is like saying "C like" and referring to all languages that use curly braces.

Jimmy Hoffa

21:44

@Sparticus @jozefg nice little shallow but broad intro for category stuff, could be good for sharing with people, looks pretty easy to penetrate with a minimum of background euclideanspace.com/maths/discrete/category

user55340

The general language area is "all languages that are a push down automata - stack based, RPN calculator type things" - which are trivially easy to implement if you're not going for subroutines, and other such "real programming" concepts.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey I think it's the simplified lisp that is what people like about it. I get it, but I don't think I'd really find it particularly worthwhile when I could just use LISP or Haskell and get the same amount of simplicity/terseness/indirection abilities, and so much more

on the other hand shrug, Jon Purdy speaks very highly of concatenative languages and he's a hardcore haskeller...

user55340

[d1-d1<F*]dsF40lFx20lFx2^/p - thats code for a forth like language (with recursive subroutine too!)

Jimmy Hoffa

Here's his concatenative language github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa A Microcoded Machine Simulator and Microcode Assembler in a FORTH Environment

enderland

21:47

4 hours of meetings..................... ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Jimmy Hoffa

And Purdy's Why Concatenative Programming Matters

user55340

The nice thing about forth, is that its tiny and can fit nicely into a rom. Often used in micro controllers and the like.

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey The thing about forth people like is the key word you used above simple lisp, concatenative languages have an amount of simplicity to them not often found that forces you to not do things that are particularly hard to reason about

but like I said, you can do the same thing in LISP so I don't really get the appeal

user55340

For example - the complete assembly for a 6800 forth implementation - forth.org/fig-forth/fig-forth-6800-unix.txt

Robert Harvey

@JimmyHoffa The article I linked refers to a guy who built a multiprocessing chip with 256 cores, user programmable in a spartan variation of Forth with just sixteen instructions. Sixteen.

Still trying to find the original source. Ah, here it is.

greenarraychips.com

Jimmy Hoffa

21:52

@MichaelT do you read/write that stuff left to right or right to left?

user55340

@RobertHarvey Since forth is purely stack based, you only need a few - things like pop stack into register, push register into stack, and then 14 other operations... and you don't need that many.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Its LtR.

user55340

[d1-d1<F*]dsF40lFx20lFx2^/p --- Define the macro '[d1-d1<F*]' -- thats dup, subtract one, dup, compare to 1, if not less than 1, invoke the macro F and multiply the result. Factorial.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Haskell has made me dislike that... I prefer reading concatenative style stuff RtL because you read it from specific to general as opposed to how you're used to reading imperative coding from general to specific. In imperative you start at the class, then the function, then the line which calls another class which you follow down to a function and down to a line and so forth, whereas concatenative type stuff it's the opposite. You start with a specific statement, then wrap it

...then wrap that, then wrap that etc, so you read it from the inside out

user55340

Then 'dsF' stores the macro into location F. 40 (push 40 onto stack), lFx (load macro F, execute it) gives you 40!.

Jimmy Hoffa

21:54

which just feels right to be read RtL

user55340

Then you've got 20lFx for doing it with 20. Square the result on the top of the stack (20!), Then divide the top and next top of the stack and print it out.

Jimmy Hoffa

It's like XML with implicit ending blocks and no new lines

user55340

> because thats what programming is really about, solving unknown problems and debugging the empty file.

2

Jimmy Hoffa

I should genuinely learn a concatenative language. As The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer points out all of us eventually go through a concatenative phase where we write our Haskell as a concatenative language because it allows concatenative programming, but I never have moved from that to working in a real concatenative-only language

@MichaelT I don't know how you can sling that off the top of your head, but then when you realized to cycle a list of functions you were totally amazed. These two abstractions are part and parcel of eachother in my head...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa part of the evil of the monopoly example - its C. 1979 C.

Jimmy Hoffa

22:05

@MichaelT most of the evil of the monopoly example, the dude will have simply no goddamn clue what he's looking at.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Its just how you think them... for me, thinking in a stack based language isn't a big stretch. I programed in several DSL game languages long ago that were forth/stack based.

Jimmy Hoffa

> s f g x = f x (g x)
>
> k x y = x
>
> b f g x = f (g x)
>
> c f g x = f x g
>
> y f = f (y f)
>
> cond p f g x = if p x then f x else g x
>
> fac = y (b (cond ((==) 0) (k 1)) (b (s (*)) (c b pred)))

The combinatory phase for haskell programmers I mentioned. you'll notice it's all setup so that they can code in what is effectively LISP

user55340

RobotWar

RobotWar was a programming game written by Silas Warner. This game, along with the companion program RobotWrite, was originally developed in the TUTOR programming language language on the PLATO system in the 1970s. Later the game was commercialized and adapted for the Apple II family of computers and published by Muse Software in 1981. The premise was that in the distant future of 2002, war was declared hazardous to human health, and now countries settled their differences in a battle arena full of combat robots. As the manual stated, "The task set before you is: to program a robot, th...

user55340

SCAN
  AIM + 5 TO AIM                    ; MOVE GUN
  AIM TO RADAR                      ; SEND RADAR PULSE
LOOP
  IF RADAR < 0 GOSUB FIRE           ; TEST RADAR
  GOTO SCAN
FIRE
  0 - RADAR TO SHOT                 ; FIRE THE GUN
  ENDSUB

user55340

(ok maybe not that one)

user55340

22:07

Though I did do that one too... lets see....

user55340

Ahh! This was the one...

user55340

RoboWar

RoboWar is an open source video game in which the player programs onscreen icon-like robots to battle each other with animation and sound effects. The syntax of the language in which the robots are programmed is a relatively simple stack-based one, based largely on IF, THEN, and simply-defined variables. 25 RoboWar tournaments were held in the past between 1989 until roughly 2003, when tournaments became intermittent and many of the major coders moved on. All robots from all tournaments are available on the RoboWar website. The RoboWar programming language, RoboTalk, is a stack-oriented...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT I recall you saying this, but the haskLISP above is how I learned to think in terms of combinatory languages, so to me it seems like functional application to build a data pipeline is hand in hand with concatenative languages, which is exactly what that cycle trick was

user55340

(neat! statico.github.io/jsrobowar )

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Not cool. You are seriously going to cause productivity problems pulling shit like that.

user55340

22:10

@JimmyHoffa Heh. The language is a stack based one...

user55340

Main:
    range 0 > shoot if
    aim 5 + aim' store
    Main jump

Shoot:
    20 fire' store
    return

user55340

Note the difference between aim and aim' -- the later pushes the "address" of the variable on the stack instead of the value.

user55340

So, 'aim 5 +' retrieves the value of aim, adds 5 to it. Then aim' gets the variable, and store stores in the top of the stack, the next value on the stack.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT ...bet I could write a tank that'll kill your tanks...

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Give me a weekend... its been a bit.

user55340

22:15

Solo? or team? (there's multi-bot communication options in there)

enderland

@MichaelT this gave me stack overflow error almost immediately. lol

user55340

I remember writing one pair of bots that were wall riders - one top wall, one left wall. When either spotted an enemy, they would send the location to the other one who would then calculate their own trajectory to fire at.

user55340

@enderland Me too... safari?

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Iduno, I'll look at it when I get home. I literally closed the tab to keep it away from myself while I'm trying to finish this jquery up..

user55340

(it still works though)

enderland

22:16

@MichaelT I wish. Chrome for me :)

Jimmy Hoffa

@enderland the irony there is palpable

enderland

@JimmyHoffa I know, right? :)

Jimmy Hoffa

22:26

I would call a team like this untested....get it? did ya get it? :D — Jimmy Hoffa 11 secs ago

Magmas

Transcript for