The Nineteenth Byte

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Scrooble

1:59 AM

TIL I've been reading Jonathan Fre(n)ch's name wrong for over a year.

Zacharý

It's not just me that sees it as French, thank god.

Quintec

Before I take forever to write it up: thoughts on a challenge about Ghost , except with a given limited dictionary?

PhiNotPi

Is there a term to describe languages where certain commands have weird... imperative/implicit/mutator effect? As in this example in R...

plot(data)

^ this plots data to the terminal or graph window (I'm using RStudio)

pdf("whatever.pdf")
plot(data)
dev.off()

^ instead of plotting data to a window, this plots the data to a PDF file

Quintec

Are you talking about the PDF command or the plot command?

Scrooble

2:14 AM

Ooh, I love Ghost. Sounds like a fun challenge!

PhiNotPi

My point being... in some other languages this would be done with a file handle.

pdf() creates a file handle, which is passed as an extra argument to plot(), and which is closed by passing the handle to dev.off()

but instead that's all hidden

Scrooble

Huh, dunno. non-Haskellian or impure?

Quintec

It's really no different than, for example, import decimal;decimal.getcontext().prec = 6

And then printing decimals or such

PhiNotPi

2:26 AM

Ehh... I'll just stick to imperative. But I was asking because I've seen this sort of functionality in both R and Python's matplotlib... I think it's easy to use at first, but I feel that it can get confusing trying to keep track of what my graphical settings are when I have a ton of plotting commands all together in the same file.

Nathan Merrill

3:15 AM

@PhiNotPi A common pattern for this in scala is implicit parameters

I'm not sure I'm sold on them, but it's an interesting take

in your example, you could do something like:

implicit fileHandle = pdf("whatever.pdf")

and then if the plot function is was defined to take an implicit fileHandle parameter, it'll grab it from the outer scope

it allows you to have context without the verbosity of passing it everwhere

2 hours later…

feersum

4:51 AM

Someone at my work made this horrible Python library

Where the way you use is it have several layers of nested context managers

And all the arguments are automatically forwarded to the inner context managers.

Zacharý

._.

Nathan Merrill

5:27 AM

@feersum I mean...I love 0 argument function calls, don't you?

feersum

5:43 AM

You have to put the arguments in somewhere. They don't magically appear.

There are so many different arguments and it hard to tell which of them apply to which functions and which are ignored.

Nathan Merrill

@feersum environment variables. It's like magic: you never even have to see them in your code

it's becoming the new standard: code by ENV. You never pass parameters into functions, but have them implicitly filled by environment variables

3 hours later…

Stewie Griffin

8:45 AM

I have absolutely no idea how to do this, and therefore don't know where to ask, so I'll just try here, and see if anyone has any ideas.
We have (IMO) too few Autocad licenses at my work, so I have to just randomly try to open it and wait for someone to close their session. This is obviously slightly annoying. Is there a way to send a request to the license server every 5 minutes or so, to check if there's an available license, without actually opening Autocad?

I only use Autocad a few hours every other week, so they won't buy a new license just because I'm a tad impatient now and then. I have enough of other stuff to do, so it's not like I won't get any work done while I wait.

3 hours later…

New Sandboxed Posts

11:50 AM

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Optimal Alphabet Stepping Given an input string consisting of only letters, return the step count with the minimum step sum when stepping over a wrapping alphabet that results in all those letters in order. (ugh, fix this phrasing) For example, take the word, age. If we use a step count of one,...

Nathan Merrill

12:03 PM

@StewieGriffin you can try capturing the network call via wireshark or something.

5 hours later…

Quintec

4:39 PM

@Scrooble Posted a preliminary draft, will work on it more soon :) codegolf.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2140/…

New Sandboxed Posts

4:51 PM

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Limited Dictionary Ghost Game! king-of-the-hill Let's play a game of Ghost! Now, I know Ghost is a solved game, so to make it non-trivial, we'll use a limited dictionary. Here's a summary of the(slightly modified) rules: Ghost is a two player game. A player is chosen at random to start. Each ...

New Main Posts

5:45 PM

-1

Q: Get this Bitshift Variations in C Minor code golf to work on Mac

After watching this Youtube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqZgoNRERY8 I decided to try this code golf play on my mac: echo "g(i,x,t,o){return((3&x&(i*((3&i>>16?\"BY}6YB6%\":\"Qj}6jQ6%\")[t%8]+51)>>o))<<4);};main(i,n,s){for(i=0;;i++)putchar(g(i,1,n=i>>14,12)+g(i,s=i>>17,n^i>>13,10)+g(i...

tips c

New Main Posts

6:33 PM

Q: Graphical languages!

Challenge I love graphical languages, they give you a new way to think about programming. So your challenge is to make one that meets the following criteria: Is a graphical language, in that you can feed the compiler/interpreter/runner an image to run a program OR The text form of the image ca...

2 hours later…

Luis felipe De jesus Munoz

8:22 PM

This just made my day hahahahahahahaha

That's not objective. We need an objective way to say "This submission is invalid". As it stands, my submission could be 1, in Python 2. Because it takes an image, ignores it, and prints "Hello World" in the shape of 1. – Nathan Merrill 9 mins ago

1 hour later…

Poke

9:35 PM

popcon arguments irk me

You're really just arguing back and forth about whether "popularity" is objective

The real argument is that some people in the community want it to be cut and dry who wins regardless of fake internet points

essentially voting doesn't matter

One single person cannot answer the question "What will literally everyone ever like best out of these answers"

but it's very easy to answer the question "Which of these answers is represented in the shortest number of bytes"

based on this i'm pretty sure no popcon should be a valid challenge on this website

I've mentioned Helka's Mona Lisa challenge (codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/33172/…) in the past since it has managed to stay open. The original image gives answerers something to shoot for but there is not, as far as I'm aware, some algorithm you can run your result through to compute a score

if there was it wouldn't be a popcon

2 hours later…