The Whiteboard - 2013-08-30 (page 2 of 2)

« first day (1092 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3902 days later) »

7:02 PM

Holy crap

> I am building a Virtual Machine and I think I have a perfect program design but I am worried as I don't have too much experience on this field there might be flaws.

this said by the same person who the other day posted:

7

Q: What are CPU registers?

This question has been bothering me for some time now and today I figured I would Google it. I've read some stuff about it and it seemed very similar to what I've always known as processor cache. Is there a difference between the two or am I right when I think they are the same? Is a register ...

memory cpu register

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I laughed.

This guy is in so far above his head

it's truly beautiful. He thinks he's walking on water because he's having no trouble breathing; in reality he's just holding his breath, but that first breath is going to be a doozy lol

user55340

Though sometimes, the only way you can find out you don't know how to swim is to be thrown in the ocean. Otherwise you're like "see, I can take it, my feet touch bottom wherever I go in the kiddie pool"

@MichaelT Yeah, that's about the long and the short of it, and this guy decided to grab a bowling ball and jump into the marianas trench, because water's the same everywhere right

Oh well, seems like a smart guy, he'll get over this stage

user55340

@hyde in relational databases tables are "data schema" or "data structure" they are not "data", your application doesn't create or remove them at runtime, for example your app doesn't create a table for each page that users are going to like or each course that students are taking. — JohnS 12 mins ago

user55340

7:06 PM

There's another fun one. And if you think you're going to have anything performant if you are doing all your creation of structures at runtime...

> Yes it does, my app creates a new table for every page request not just page. This is standard right?

user55340

Make certain you don't hurt your head if you find that image again.

set database...set...set... Nope, I only know of get databases. — Jimmy Hoffa 8 secs ago

@JohnS: You can debate the internal data structures or vocabulary all you want, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. — Robert Harvey 16 hours ago

user55340

The other fun part... he's one edit away from CW.

@RobertHarvey not necessarily, it could be a drunk crocodile playing a trick

@MichaelT I really want to vote close with "This question is off topic because you are misunderstanding the meaning of the term set as it relates to databases." but I guess it's an ok question, with a very obvious answer regardless of whether he wants to believe the answer or not.

user55340

7:14 PM

Note that neither Robert, nor I, nor gnat can close vote that for a second round.

I'm not sure it should be close voted. I think I want to make the edit to just clean up the garbage that says "No, I don't mean a relational database, I mean a <describes relational database>" and then flag it to be locked.

@WorldEngineer is that acceptable? (Did you just change your name back? Good on ya.)

asking about a thing you don't know about by describing functional requirements is fine, but the half of the question just disclaiming the answers is a waste of space.

user55340

> There can be many other ways to do that. My question is if you have previously worked with a similar datasets which solution has best worked for you.

user55340

@WorldEngineer is this any other way for it not to be recommendation or primarily opinion based?

user20683

@MichaelT I don't understand what he's asking after reading the question in detail. People are like "SQL" and he's like "nope" and my question is why the hell not? Because tables are poor representations? WHY?

user20683

Explain it to an idiot (me)

user20683

7:23 PM

:P

user55340

@WorldEngineer Thats why I closed it as 'unclear' the first time.

user55340

Because frankly, I don't know either...

> with a relational database I could use a table for the many-to-many relation between sets and items, for example a table which has a row for each user-liked-page relation. It obviously works, but it requires chaining multiple joins to emulate set functions, which as far as I know is not efficient with large datesets.

His real problem comes out!

that's why he's avoiding a relational database, he's under the impression they're slow...

user55340

So denormalize your relational db, pray forgiveness from Codd and get on with your set operations.

user55340

> [Every] non-key [attribute] must provide a fact about the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key, so help me Codd

user55340

7:28 PM

Third normal form

The third normal form (3NF) is a normal form used in database normalization. 3NF was originally defined by E.F. Codd in 1971. Codd's definition states that a table is in 3NF if and only if both of the following conditions hold: * The relation R (table) is in second normal form (2NF) * Every non-prime attribute of R is non-transitively dependent (i.e. directly dependent) on every superkey of R. A non-prime attribute of R is an attribute that does not belong to any candidate key of R. A transitive dependency is a functional dependency in which X → Z (X determines Z) indirectly, by virtue of...

(this discussion is interesting for me to read... /me returns to lurking)

Finally the truth comes out; you're avoiding relational databases because they're slow! Well let me solve all your problems then: Relational databases are among the fastest technical masterpieces of the modern age. These lumbering hulks crunch through data at a pace that is frankly baffling, I've worked at two jobs where we maintained subsecond query times against billion+ row tables that had to be joined across multiple other tables in high traffic public websites from 5+ terrabyte databases. The modern relational database is miraculous in it's dataset processing performance. — Jimmy Hoffa 9 secs ago

user20683

@JimmyHoffa its

user20683

possessive

My fingers move faster than my thinker

user20683

7:30 PM

@JimmyHoffa my girl doesn't care enough. We may have also been drunk.

user20683

I'm not confirming anything

@WorldEngineer is this edit ok? It feels a little wrong; but the question just doesn't make any sense when he says "I don't want X, I want <description of X>", having that in your question makes it basically unanswerable

"What's that thing, not a bike but it has two wheels, a seat, handlebars, a couple gears with pedals on one of them that you can circulate to get forward propulsion with? No no, not a bike because bikes have a bell and tassles, I want something optimized for pedalling"

programmers.stackexchange.com/posts/209888/revisions

user20683

A trike with a tred on the front

user20683

that has two wheels and all of the rest of it

@WorldEngineer So you're saying he wants a web-scale mongoDB?

user20683

7:35 PM

@JimmyHoffa rofl

Ah he added the "Not an RDBMS!" qualifier back in.

Screw it, I'm close voting it; it's unanswerable like this.

user20683

I'm gonna close it as too broad.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa You need to do the Blues Brother's "dry white toast" routine.

@WorldEngineer You're wasting your time. The OP is engaged in a "prove me wrong" exercise, and is ignoring requests for more detail about exactly what they're trying to accomplish.

@WorldEngineer I voted primarily opinion based because while there's an authoritative answer; if he calls it an opinion I guess the question is opinion based.

user20683

7:39 PM

@RobertHarvey closed it

user20683

I'll be following up...soon.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Blame the evil mods for closing it with a different message than you wanted.

user20683

@yannisrizos JimmyHoffa is blaming you again.

user55340

@MichaelT Instead of manually denormalizing toward optimizing for set functions, I was interested to find out if it has already been done by others. — JohnS 1 min ago

user20683

O_o

user20683

7:40 PM

WAT

@RobertHarvey If he left the "but not an RDBMS!" off the "I want a thing that does <description of RDBMS>" his question would have been fine.

user55340

sigh My head hurts. I made my own 'bang head here'.

@MichaelT He wants an auto-normalizing database? OOOooo... yeah... uhh, I'm going to grab a beer... (it's beer in business day today)

Yeah, it seems pretty obvious that the guy doesn't really understand RDBMS's.

thorsten müller

@JimmyHoffa thanks for that Monad link. Nice read and quite compact.

user55340

7:42 PM

@RobertHarvey There is a not insignificant population that believes that RDBMS are for greybeards and everything going forward should be some flavor of noSQL. Anything suggesting RDBMS must be wrong for some reason.

@thorstenmüller Yeah, Cale is highly respected in the haskell community for his ability to express these concepts succinctly; he's spent a lot of time as a Phd math advisor

user55340

@JimmyHoffa One of our contracts settled... we're thinking whiskey here, but no one brought any.

thorsten müller

Has anybody here some good links how to approch the architecture for a Web API or SOA kind of system?

@RobertHarvey This seems to be a growing trend... proper modeling of data in an RDBMS is really foundational to any good system design (that relies on a database), I'll just be glad I got in early enough to have been forced through all that

@thorstenmüller One second...

@MichaelT Presumably they think that only greybeards can understand set theory.

@JimmyHoffa If Google uses it, it must be good.

7:45 PM

@thorstenmüller apparch.codeplex.com/releases/view/19801

In all fairness, it took me forever to grok SQL. But I was a pretty inexperienced programmer back then.

@RobertHarvey if you've not seen it, you should give it a look too

user55340

@RobertHarvey I think its more that those suffering from goatee universitis haven't learned to appreciate it yet.

user20683

SQL's not terribly hard

user55340

There... went CW finally.

7:46 PM

@WorldEngineer Give me an example of when and how you would model a table that has to join on itself to give sufficient data for it's purpose

@WorldEngineer I think the problem was that I was programming an extension to an MRP system... and I'd never seen SQL before. :)

thorsten müller

@JimmyHoffa looks great, thanks.

Took me about four months before the light finally went on.

user20683

@JimmyHoffa let's say you've got a table of programmers and you want to find out whom has pair programmed with whom.

user20683

I think that's a use case

7:48 PM

Do you need a billion records to find that out?

@WorldEngineer That's a many to many relationship; you need a bridge table for that not a self-joining table because I may have pair programmed in 4 different instances

or you could use excel

user20683

@Ampt would you like to be banned?

3

@Ampt Notepad is the best CSV editor

user20683

:P

thorsten müller

7:49 PM

As for the self join table: I would use those for something like product categories. If the depth of the structure is known you can get the whole tree with some self joins

user55340

Preorder traversal tree uses self joins too.

thorsten müller

Somehow I think I use self joins most often when I scab tables for trashy data

@WorldEngineer how long of a ban are we talking here? It's friday afternoon and I leave in 40 minutes so.....

@Ampt dont remind me

thorsten müller

Can't come up with a good example right now but I used it when looking for duplicates of some kind

user20683

7:51 PM

@Ampt a virtual ban, scope and lifetime are implementation dependent and thus off-topic for this site.

user55340

(that structure I was mentioning - its the modified preorder tree - sitepoint.com/hierarchical-data-database-2 )

thorsten müller

Mentioning Excek as if it's something that could be used for a usefil task? That's a bad one...

I was suggesting CSVs a a few days ago ;)

thorsten müller

CSV is a pain, but at least an accepted data format with some kind of traditional value.

@thorstenmüller duplication checking/management, and directed hierarchical data usually for aggregation analysis on a tree are general purposes for self-join tables

7:53 PM

@thorstenmüller I'm glad you said so! You know what works really well to edit CSV files?

every member has one parent, the parent is a member, you can find out which member has the most children by way of self-join

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993, and it has replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office. Features Basic operation Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets, using a grid of cells arranged in numbered rows and le...

> Version number 13 was skipped due to superstition

thorsten müller

Does it accept Unix line endings by now?

oh you have got to be kidding me

@WorldEngineer that was a very good guess though for being fresh out of college, I only mentioned it to contradict your point that SQL's easy, CRUD can be easy, but good data modeling can get very complex and writing self-joining queries that do aggregate analysis is an example of things that are good to know because you'll occasionally use them, but are not easy.

7:55 PM

@thorstenmüller are you kidding? MSFT support unix? Over Microsofts dead body

user20683

time for me to go

user20683

I'll see ya guys later

thorsten müller

cu

user55340

@Ampt Read the suggestion on what to do in MS post balmer?

later

user55340

7:55 PM

Also look at old SCO...

I'll miss you @WorldEngineer

user55340

> SCO UNIX was the successor to SCO variant of Microsoft Xenix, derived from UNIX System V Release 3.2 with an infusion of Xenix device drivers and utilities

user55340

Xenix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system, licensed by Microsoft from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s. The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) later acquired exclusive rights to the software, and eventually superseded it with SCO UNIX (now known as SCO OpenServer). In the late 1980s, Xenix was, "probably the most widespread version of the UNIX operating system, according to the number of machines on which it runs". History Xenix was Microsoft's version of Unix intended for use on microcomputers; because Microsoft was not able to license the "UNIX" name itself, they gave it an...

Would anybody like to take a stab at what's going to happen to MS post-balmer? If you say flames and death I might just get really drunk tonight. .NET pays the bills, I sure hope that doesn't change.

nah, balmer was holding msft back

user55340

7:57 PM

washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/08/26/…

imho

thorsten müller

Well, we won't have too see his stupid face that much.

That allone will boost MS

@MichaelT I actually really really like that

@thorstenmüller didn't you hear? stocks jumped something like 5% after hearing he was retiring

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Office / Windows will live on for a very long time.

My only fear with a split up is that smaller projects won't have the funding anymore

microsoft can take very large losses without flinching to get themselves in a market

user55340

7:58 PM

its more along the lines of 'spin off xbox from MS and let it sink or swim on its own' and "bing is a money pit... let it do the same"

user55340

The smaller parts that have the funding are the ones that will keep you employed.

I wouldnt mind seeing some serious reworking of the verticle stacks

user55340

Its the other ones that are a drain on the company and not fast enough moving because it can't compete with another part of the comany and needs to be part of the (flawed) plan.

thorsten müller

omg, they may even decide to comply to standards the rest of the IT world uses since several decades

@thorstenmüller Yeah this was my first thought; a touch of glee, followed by an equal touch of uncertainty

8:01 PM

but honestly, a corporation that large won't change with one new leader

@Ampt unless the new one fires everyone, then it'll change!

user55340

@Ampt Often such changes involve a clearing of C*O to director level too.

@MichaelT I just got my new windows phone yesterday, I just hope they keep up with their stupid money losing pit of windows phone, because I genuinely like mine. I almost got an android but just said screw it, the asynchronous API makes my windows phone way more responsive than my wife's android, though with less functionality because the lack of developers.

thorsten müller

@Ampt just the fact that he changes may be more a sign of internal changes already taking place. More the result of this process showing

@Ampt Iduno, the gates->balmer transition does kind of coincide with pretty poor performance in the company...

8:03 PM

@JimmyHoffa my nexus 4 is ridiculous for android (though I agree with non-Nexus android devices)

user55340

MS didn't take the apple approach of strong arming the carriers (which they could do) and making their own hardware (instead getting someone else to do it)... or the google approach of making it free and letting everyone have it. I don't see it lasting too long.

thorsten müller

yes, but this already had started while Billy was still around

@MichaelT It'll last as long as MS wants to lose money on it. With balmer in charge that would have been a while...

user55340

Bill had the start of the slowdown and missed a few things... but Balmer didn't rectify them and made them much worse.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa Like the Kin? or Surface?

8:05 PM

@thorstenmüller and may be why billy left; something brewing may be why balmer left- the question being is it brewing good or bad? I can only guess good because, can they really get worse?

@MichaelT Neither of those ever got any substantiation from MS.

MS dropped them the instant they hit the markets; hell MS knew they were not interested in supporting them before they even released them.

The surface to be fair was just a marketing product made for advanced CAD and movie marketing bullcrap, they knew nobody was going to be paying what they asked for those (hell use one for a few minutes and it's obviously not worth shit)

windows phone is something they've actually spent time trying to support, granted it won't last, but just a couple more years... I don't want to go back to android where java developers are crapping all over my phone heh

user55340

the funny thing with surface... was they had a prototype 3 months from market a year before the iPad hit the market.

user55340

And they canned it.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa it doesn't disqualify rdbms, it disqualify "using tables as sets", a rdb can be used as described in its previous paragraph, by using a many-to-many table. — JohnS 5 mins ago

user55340

o_O

user55340

tables as sets? Tables aren't sets... rows are.

8:13 PM

He's just babbling at this point...

@JimmyHoffa I actually like my surface pro TYVM

@Ampt I was referring to...

Microsoft PixelSense

Microsoft PixelSense (formerly called Microsoft Surface) is an interactive surface computing platform that allows one or more people to use touch and real world objects, and share digital content at the same time. The PixelSense platform consists of software and hardware products that combine vision based multitouch PC hardware, 360-degree multiuser application design, and Windows software to create a natural user interface (NUI). Overview Microsoft Surface 1.0, the first version of PixelSense, was announced on May 29, 2007 at the D5 Conference. It shipped to customers in 2008 as an end-t...

> Price: Starting at $10,000 USD

I'd love to have one of the new surface pros

After having a windows phone for a couple years already, I strongly like the metro interface and asynchronous APIs for touch interfaces

I like the asynchronous APIs in general, but the metro interface without a touch screen is dumb.

user55340

That thing... man... if it had been out back in the day for consumers... I would gotten it.

@MichaelT We had one in the lobby of the MS office I worked at, it was so sincerely useless to all that anyone there could tell

user55340

The board gamers were drooling over its possibilities.

8:24 PM

ok, well there is that...

user55340

Instead, we had to wait for the iPad... and when it came out, the board games erupted into it.

user55340

This was one of the first ipad games - daysofwonder.com/online/en/smallworld/ipad - and it sold quite a bit.

oh man... i should load up some games and play tonight

@Ampt I've been really impressed at the quality of the games on windows phone; have you seen the same on your surface?

I'm presuming much of the same are there

oh yeah. It is a solid little piece of hardware

my only gripe is that the screen is just a little too small for development

the code shows up teeny tiny

and if you use microsofts built in zooming tool for whole apps its... blurryu

but it is Fast

8:30 PM

oh crap, windows phone dev signup says $19 now

user55340

Go read news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/… and cry.

I'm glad I just looked, I was going to say; the thing that frustrated me about it the most before was the $100 for a dev license ! Gah!

now I might actually go create the grocery store app I've wanted on my phone forever since it only costs $19...

@MichaelT I just teared up at the first image of it....

@JimmyHoffa I really love being a part of dreamspark as a student

user55340

user image

user55340

Thats what it was to be.

8:32 PM

@Ampt Do you know C#?

@JimmyHoffa I've been playing a lot with VS2012 apps for windows 8, but haven't turned anything out yet

why?

@Ampt was just curious because I hadn't noticed so much as a whisper about the MS family from you until now

Have you worked with the async/await stuff we were talking about earlier?

I work on that stuff for work a lot so I feel that I have a strong grasp on that part of it

the real problem is that the UI is so tightly coupled into the whole thing that you can't do much more than change text and color

for example, I wanted to put a counting down timer on top of one of the boxes and struggled with it for like 3 days

eventually gave up. I could change the text as a resource when it was a part of the mock database, but to access it while the program was executing was extremely difficult

@Ampt Had you been doing anything with mvvm?

so unless you build from the ground up and make your own UI, you're pretty well stonewalled into Microsofts provided UI elements, static as they are

8:40 PM

@Ampt Wait, are you not talking about WPF?

I'm talking about Windows 8 apps

WPF is a pretty great approach to extensible easily customizable UI

not phone apps. Although they are similair

Windows 8 apps are done in WPF, no?

uhhhh I'd have to look but my gut says no...

no, the stuff I was working on was the windows store apps with the blocks that shift around

8:42 PM

@Ampt Did you have XML to design the UI using like <grid><row><button /></row></grid> type stuff?

@Ampt metro style

yeah its metro style but all of that is done more or less dynamically

at least from what I gathered

uh

heh

am I totally wrong here?

I think so

Now I'm really curious what you were doing :P WPF is pretty great and it's how you do metro and non-metro UI apps

for windows phone or desktop

mine was very dynamic. You added elements to the 'database' and it would make new tiles for them automatically and make a new page

and link the clicking of the tile to the page

automagically

unfortunately It didnt really show you where any of that actually happened

8:44 PM

That doesn't sound like .NET

You must have been using some application-creator framework thingy

definitely was my experience with it

I was using the template for the windows store app

maybe that was my mistake

I figured that was the only way to get a UI that matched the rest of the windows 8 metro experience

@Ampt oh no, you needed to learn WPF for that

maybe I'll try that this weekend then

like I said i tried for 3 days to do that simple little thing and couldn't get it to work

I think I see what you did heh. That's kind of funny and crazy that you were reverse engineering some super complex sample app to use the presentation layer it already had

hahahahahaha

8:47 PM

Yeah, if you have visual studio off hand, just start a plain windows WPF desktop app

well when you put it like that

I don't here no

work computer is...... lacking

I mean when you get home or what not

my desktop at home is where I have all the fun stuff

desktop app? like non-metro?

don't pick phone app or anything fancy, just basic WPF desktop app not metro or anything

just so you can get a feel for WPF

alright

any good tutorials you could point me at?

8:49 PM

It's different, but in a good way. once you understand how WPF works and plays together it becomes easy to see how the metro stuff works, hint: The metro stuff is just phone specific controls in WPF, like there's a panorama control that does the whole multiple-screens-scrolling-to-the-side bit etc

Err... off hand, no, just google heh. I'm a back-end dev, I've not done a ton of WPF work so I've mostly picked it up writing utilities and such.

You'll immediately run into this MVVM meme which is everywhere

yeah our spreader controllers at work are all completely asynch

set up the callbacks at system start and let it rip

it leads for some interesting debugging

you can ignore the MVVM thing though until you get a feel for how to lay stuff out in WPF and how the controls work, followed with how the context binding works which is an exercise in mind numbing brainfuckery, which is why I always keep this on hand whenever I touch WPF.

the confusing thing is almost every tutorial on WPF stuff does it in MVVM form and spends practically no time on the actual WPF, so it's kind of hard to decouple what the WPF mechanics need to actually work from what is just some idiomatic pattern

lol yeah I just figured everyone reverse engineered the templates they provided...

@Ampt Perfect example of the danger of "You don't know what you don't know"; if only you knew to google "WPF", but alas...

That's why people suggest books; I generally get bit by that too though because I get so bored reading books when all I need is some syntax instructions and an API reference

Yeah it crossed my mind too but I have 2 on my plate now and I didn't want to add a third

WPF. I'm going to make that app yet

8:59 PM

@Ampt The only book you should be reading right now, I wish I were kidding when I said it's more important than either of the other two you're reading

"Windows Presentation Framework" -> WPF

Idk, one of those books is for senior design and the other one is for my 9-5 job so.....

both of those are pretty important

> If you say that a is 5, you can't say it's something else later because you just said it was 5. What are you, some kind of liar?

lol

does that mean that all variables are non-modifiable?

@Ampt Completely.

(I know theres a fancy term for that but its friday and I'm packing up for home)

9:02 PM

They're not "variables" as such, they're values.

you're not assigning a the value of 5, you're saying a is 5, like saying "5 is 5" isn't assigning a value to 5, it's just stating a fact.

The sun is orange and a is 5, these are not variables

@Ampt For your senior design project? Yeah, graduating is unfortunately more important than LYAH.

user55340

@JimmyHoffa The sun is yellow.

@MichaelT You totally missed the point about not variables... what can you expect from a perler..

user55340

user image

@MichaelT The sun is peach? Somebody's drunk.

user55340

(vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/starcolor is the site I was looking for)

user55340

9:08 PM

> These colors attempt to show "true" color. That is: without intervening atmosphere or interstellar medium; with the light dim enough to avoid saturating your cones (which would make the light appear white); and yet with the light bright enough that you are seeing color rather than rod grayscale.

user55340

and assuming you have your monitor calibrated correctly.

user55340

casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/Tspectrum.html if you really want to get into the question.

@MichaelT I think it's calibrated correctly, my identicon is pink right?

@MichaelT colorado.edu? I know better than to read the writings of Boulderites.

user55340

"Dude, the sun... its like green..." No, you need to get your head out of that baggie... oh... sorry dude... its like... the sun.

@MichaelT And I'm sure you saw plenty of that in silly valley too.

I still refuse to believe some hoity toity scientist named a planet Betelgeuse, he probably named it Florence and someone changed it on the paper work because they didn't like him

user55340

9:14 PM

At the company I worked for there was one of those HR questionnaires they do as a pseudo-background check. "Have you ever been arrested for a drug related offense?* Y/N .... (*) Do not answer 'Y' if this was only for marijuana offenses."

user55340

Many visible star names are quite ancient.

user55340

The 'Al...' stars are typically from arabic.

user55340

> The star's name is derived from the Arabic يد الجوزاء Yad al-Jauzā', meaning "the Hand of al-Jauzā'", i.e. Orion, with mistransliteration into medieval Latin leading to the first character y being misread as a b.

user55340

Its friday... before a long weekend, at 4:15. I'm the last one in the building.

user55340

Btw, if you go up from that what color are the stars thing... you get to vendian.org/mncharity which is quite fun...

9:45 PM

A Taste of Colorado

A Taste of Colorado is a free, four-day outdoor festival held annually in Downtown Denver's Civic Center Park on Labor Day weekend, as the Festival of Mountain and Plain, a celebration of pioneer days, was around the turn of the 20th century. It is produced by and benefits Downtown Denver Events, Inc., a non-profit organization of the Downtown Denver Partnership that produces community and cultural events. Typically drawing over 500,000 visitors a year, A Taste of Colorado includes over 50 booths operated by local food establishments. The event also features seven music stages, arts and cr...

Other than this, my 3 day weekend is mostly going to involve the sensation of ass-on-couch

...alternatively I really need to clean the gutters on my house...

0

Q: From .Net developer to COTS application developer

I am a developer with 14 years of experience, 7 in .Net. I would like to transition to a position less technical, where there is career advancement with more responsibilities. Would moving from a .Net developer position to a COTS application environment where there are more teams involved, vend...

.net career-transition

10:19 PM

Haskel keeps doing this. "See, it's just a "do" statement. Perfectly imperative, nothing strange here". "See, it's just a record, like a database. Or Pascal. Nothing strange here". Then you get
> newtype Reader r a = Reader { runReader :: r -> a }
> instance Monad (Reader r) where
> return a = Reader $ \_ -> a
> m >>= k = Reader $ \r -> runReader (k (runReader m r)) r
and all of a sudden the cute little imperative bunny's head falls off so it can scratch its back with the tentacle in its spine...

2

@psr Decided to give a read of that reader monad tutorial I linked? it's kinda cool to see a tutorial from someone still struggling with the basics, there's a huge gap in haskell for that kind of content; either people get it and write content like they've already got their triple PhD, or they're groping in the dark and therefore not writing anything at all

@psr the reader bind is the K combinator, that's what helps me think about the reader monad

Right, because K is between J and L, so there it is.

@psr I thought you had already read some of this:

SKI combinator calculus

SKI combinator calculus is a computational system that may be perceived as a reduced version of untyped lambda calculus. It can be thought of as a computer programming language, though it is not useful for writing software. Instead, it is important in the mathematical theory of algorithms because it is an extremely simple Turing complete language. All operations in lambda calculus are expressed in SKI as binary trees whose leaves are one of the three symbols S, K, and I (called combinators). In fact, the symbol I is added only for convenience, and just the other two suffice for all of th...

@jozefg is that a good intuition in your mind to just think of the reader as a partially filled K?

@JimmyHoffa I did. But I can't think of any circumstance in which saying "{Bleh} is just the {SomeOtherMetaSyntacticVariable} combinator" would be helpful to me. Well, possibly the Y combinator.

@psr K combinator is mega simple: Kxy = x, it's a common construct also known as const in haskell

public static T K<T,U>(T x, U y) { return x; } does that help? :)

10:32 PM

Either syntax is fine. Score a fractional point for my haskell knowledge! Yes - simple.

« first day (1092 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3902 days later) »

Transcript for

Aug '1330

The Whiteboard

General Discussion for softwareengineering.stackexchange.com P...

coffee-day horror-stories monads my-code-is-compiling scotch the-other-monitor

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile