The Nineteenth Byte

Christopher

00:11

damn taco is still here sheesh

also, I can't remember, but if I solved a challenge in minecraft, A is that allowed, and B how would you count bytes?

lyxal

Depends on how you solve it

If it's command blocks, yes

Byte count is (iirc) total commands

Christopher

not using command blocks though

lyxal

In that case

28

A: Programming in Minecraft (Redstone) - how to measure program size?

There is now an MC Standard for bytecount. With the 1.10 update, they introduced a block called the "structure block", which creates a .nbt file representing a structure in its entirety that can be measured in bytes. As this is a Minecraft standard for converting builds into bytes, this should b...

Christopher

ty

thejonymyster

01:02

thats funny i was just reading that meta earlier

just 'cause

caird coinheringaahing

01:35

@ATaco If you ever have to use PHP, instead, consider doing it manually, without computers, and all on paper. It's likely to be slightly easier

6

Radvylf Programs

02:37

@WheatWizard I just love to hate on any language. You could write a language with C's speed, Rust's memory safety, Java's portability, Python's learnability, prettier and more expressive syntax than any language I've ever seen, and I'd still try to find its worst, darkest secret and remoreselessly and unrelentingly mock it :p

I personally find JS to be...not that bad, a mid-tier language, but from they way I'd talking about it you'd think it was humanity's worst sin. PHP is what allowed me to do some interesting projects early on, and taught me a lot, but I'll mock it all day. Python has a partiuclar set of goals and accomplishes them pretty well, but I'll gladly make fun of everything it doesn't do (and often doesn't want to do in the first place). No language is safe :p

caird coinheringaahing

@RadvylfPrograms well yeah, it won't be very golfy

Radvylf Programs

Idea: A language whose printable ASCII is an ordinary praclang with clean syntax, but it actually uses an SBCS and the other 160 characters are golfing language operators

emanresu A

@RadvylfPrograms Especially not Vyxal lol

Speaking of which:

The History Of Vyxal

8

Unrelated String

nice

emanresu A

02:55

gotta do an exam now, o/

Radvylf Programs

Good luck!

Nobody

03:49

Superior Simple

Superior Simple: A 2D programming language. See github.com/Sup...

thejonymyster

04:33

@RadvylfPrograms thats so dope actually i love it

Unrelated String

same

thejonymyster

"hey that code looks pretty clean. say whats that thingamado?"
"oh that filters the inverse of the lists' products"
"i see"

btw do people know about lua

i feel like i only hear of it in my tiny circles

i have no gauge of how popular it is or isnt

Unrelated String

i feel like everyone knows about lua some way or another

it's pretty popular for what it's designed for
i.e. embedded scripting in what-the-fuck-ever feels like using it

i know there are at least a few card game simulators that run most of their logic on it

thejonymyster

love2d is in lua, but then i also dont know how popular love2d is xd

Unrelated String

i have never heard of love2d

thejonymyster

04:39

mari0 the mario portal game was made in it

Unrelated String

ooh nice

i think i have heard of that

thejonymyster

and basically everything else those devs made lol

not tetris 2, aka tetris with physics

but yea idk what else beyond that

its for makin games so its probably less popular than a regular general purpose lang

just by like, being more specific

Unrelated String

i think the first i heard of lua was when i was playing tech modpacks in minecraft a bunch and some of them happened to include a mod that adds a computer block that just lets you manipulate a terminal and some robot entities with lua scripts

lyxal

@emanresuA you missed a part on Reg, which is what got me to like Unicode in golfing languages

Because before that I was very much against confusing symbols

emanresu A

Idk how I could've found that

lyxal

04:41

Esolangs page

Unrelated String

the name barely rings a bell

emanresu A

@lyxal In the history?

lyxal

It's above the Keg+ section

@emanresuA on the Keg page

esolangs.org/wiki/…

emanresu A

Oh I see now

I didn't scroll down that far :P

The website's gonna be kinda painful to change because of my shitty code - at this point I may as well rewrite it with some JS

Unrelated String

lol

des54321

04:53

@RadvylfPrograms thats evil, i love it

thejonymyster

bad/silly challenge idea: output a quine in any language that is longer than your program

des54321

that could be interesting or really boring

thejonymyster

perhaps gsdfg

PyGamer0

CMQ: Is generating random floats useful in golf?

% flax
      ?4
>>>
[0.31225204398554076335,0.054500212800235322235,0.34648386394179323299,0.39370017268274356899]

Unrelated String

probably best as a digraph nilad

definitely useful, not that useful

PyGamer0

05:08

ok then ? will now be ternary if

des54321

ternary if/else is definitely more useful than RNG

PyGamer0

(context: i am changing flax quick glyphs)

lyxal

All I can say is ouch

My feet are pain and tiredness is real

PyGamer0

CMP: Which looks better for n-compose: ←↤⇤ ?

Unrelated String

n being how many things you compose i assume?

PyGamer0

05:15

yeah

Unrelated String

probably ↤

PyGamer0

ok

usage: FGH+3↤ → F(G(H(w)))+x

3 is the number of monads to compose

if that monad is not given, it is FGH+↤ → F(G(H(w))+x)

so 2 monads

i am not smart enough to handle dyad-nilad pairs as monads

@UnrelatedString ^^^^^ how is that?

thejonymyster

CMC: print the link to your solution

Unrelated String

05:30

so the idea is to have something that can be used to group large chunks inline but also has a sensible default? hmm

PyGamer0

@UnrelatedString are you taking about the compose builtin?

the defualt is to compose 2 monads

Unrelated String

yeah

@PyGamer0 in that case you might want to be careful with an optional nilad argument to your compose(s), since they might eat something you wanted to use with a dyad

PyGamer0

05:45

in flax, 50 secs ago, by PyGamer0

v0.1.17

pxeger

07:57

→ 1 message moved to The Nineteenth Bakery

mathcat

08:13

@lyxal "Samsung health"

doesn't look like it's very healthy though

lyxal

@mathcat what? Is using the step counting app natively used by my watch so bad?

mathcat

that too but, 13,000 steps sounds like a lot

lyxal

It's 18266 now

mathcat

woah

lyxal

I went walking with my cousins today, that's why it's so high

mathcat

08:28

Did you manage to cross Australia?

ATaco

Do not underestimate just how much Australia there is

mathcat

*opens google maps*

lyxal

There is a lot of Australia

It's a big country

The walk was on a 3.5ishkm walking track, making it a 7km round trip

mathcat

nice

Nobody

09:01

5 hours ago, by Nobody

Simpy

A 2D programming language that when decompressed has only 5 co...

3

ais523

10:24

@pxeger here's the rule that bans "brainfuck" in page titles: meta.stackexchange.com/a/238581

pxeger

I saw that, but I thought an 8-year-old post about a 6-year-old "uneasy consensus" wasn't very conclusive, and given I don't think post #84 on the whole site is likely to hit HNQ any time soon, I didn't bother to revert the edit

ais523

I'm more surprised that you could revert the edit

maybe the ban on page titles doesn't affect edits to them?

fwiw, I'm never quite sure what to call the language in contexts where it might be seen by people who would be offended by the name

there's an interesting debate in the answers of the linked question

pxeger

I think there is no such automated check any more

ais523

it's never clear in the process where the check would be

pxeger

I don't want to actually publish a question entitled "Go fuck yourself" to test it though

ais523

10:30

this has lead to occasional reoccuring damage at Wikipedia where someone convinces an admin that something destructive has been made impossible, the admin tests, and it turns out that they were lying

when deleting the Main Page actually was made impossible, the developers were very clear to say that the prevention was at the start of the process, before you filled out the reason, to try to discourage the same thing happening in the future

pxeger

Well looking at codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/brainfuck, it seems like people are easily able to post questions with "brainfuck" in the title, at least

ais523

I think the word got banned from HNQ at some point

that probably reduces the importance of banning it from titles altogether

there were a few HNQ bans due to similar incidents (i.e. a question is obviously ontopic and harmless in context, but out of context can offend people or look unsuitable)

pxeger

@lyxal I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. But I have a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. I will look for you, I will find you, and I will outgolf you.

ais523

I think the whole of Interpersonal SE was banned from HNQ for this reason

pxeger

yeah, that was something of a debacle IIRC

ais523

10:35

the same sort of thing happens on Reddit too occasionally – the post normally takes off, with everyone upvoting it to try to get it to the top of /r/all

for me the problem comes when writing programs which need to name the language – do we put uncensored profanity into the program itself? when talking to people I typically know who I'm talking and can abbreviate or not as appropriate, but a program (especially if it's meant seriously) can end up being read and used in other contexts in the future, and I have no real control over that

pxeger

Arguably the best solution would be for everyone to grow up and deal with swear words, but that's never going to happen

especially because once a certain swear word loses its impact, new ones will appear to replace it when that impact is needed

ais523

"grow up" seems like the wrong verb here – it's more adults who get offended than children, who mostly just find it funny

using swear words is childish, getting offended by them is adultish

hmm, apparently the ban on "brainfuck" in titles was broken even as early as 2015: meta.stackexchange.com/q/238577

err, wrong page, I meant to link to a comment near the bottom of that page

but apparently I can't link to comments without JavaScript

pxeger

Huh, that's a random thing for SE to do on the frontend rather than the backend

ais523

SE normally works fairly well with JavaScript off, but does have the occasional glaring issue

the most notable is that changing which page of answers you're looking at resets the sort order

so if you're looking at page 3 of "oldest" and move to the next page, you get page 4 of "votes"

maybe I should report that

pxeger

That could probably be fixed with a userscript, if you accept running your own written JS

ais523

10:50

it's weird that it needs fixing at all, though

pxeger

I can somewhat more see how that would happen though

it's a slightly more complicated task to implement on the backend than on the frontend, since you'd need to keep track of the current user's sort order, possible separately across multiple tabs

ais523

the thing is, the sort order is in the URL

and it's still in the URL even after clicking onto the next page, it's included in the link

but, it isn't respected and the page sorts by votes anyway

m90

11:09

@ais523 It looks like what is happening is that the parameter answertab works to set the order, but the links to other pages change the parameter name to tab, which doesn't work.

ais523

good diagnosis, may I add that to my bug report?

m90

Sure.

ais523

thanks

bug posted

Wheat Wizard

11:33

2

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Determine Uilta Pitch Accent Uilta is a minority tungusic language spoken in the far east of Russia. A neat thing about Uilta is that it has pitch accent which can be predicted by a computer program. In this challenge we are going to take Uilta a word and determine where the accent peak is. Let ...

Going to post this shortly.

PyGamer0

11:46

@ais523 why do you disable js?

ais523

@PyGamer0 JavaScript generally makes sites worse, all sorts of things popping up and fading in and out and the like – most functionality that's actually useful can be implemented without it

and usually is

PyGamer0

oh ok

github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-JavaScript

New Posts

12:01

0

Q: Determine Uilta Pitch Accent

Uilta is a minority tungusic language spoken in the far east of Russia. A neat thing about Uilta is that it has pitch accent which can be predicted by a computer program. In this challenge we are going to take Uilta a word and determine where the accent peak is. Let me explain how this can be do...

emanresu A

12:24

@ais523 Partially agreed - also, there are many things that can/should be done with builtin HTML instead of JS. For example, everyone tries to homebrew their own version of <details>.

ATaco

Huh, add that to the list of tags I wish I knew about earlier

<marquee> is basically the only tag that matters anyway.

emanresu A

OTOH, one of JS's main advantages is its ability to dynamically generate content. A server can do that too, but JS is often simpler to use. For example, the History Of Vyxal website linked in the starboard is a huge kludge of inline CSS and absolute positioning. I could rewrite it with JS and make the code a lot smaller, more readable, and more extendable. I haven't yet because I'm lazy

ATaco

Soon we'll have out-of-the-box support for WASM workers

And then, we'll be able to write our web-code in something less aweful

ais523

@emanresuA isn't that the sort of thing that would ideally use a static site generator (i.e. a program that generates an HTML file as output, but that you only run once)?

ATaco

@ais523 I think they mean more like... a Blog post is "Dynamic Content".

Nobody

12:29

Superior Simple

Superior Simple: A 2D programming language. See github.com/Sup...

emanresu A

@ais523 True, good point

ATaco

Turn data into a webpage and serve

Shouldn't always want to save it as an entire webpage.

Nobody

@ais523 it seems like all JavaScript does is make ads

ais523

I never really understood why most blogs are dynamic – mine (which hasn't been recently updated) is static-site-generated

Nobody

frustrating

o/ gotta go

Someone check this out help me thanks

ATaco

12:30

The idea is for an easier workflow.

Nobody

Superior Simple

Superior Simple: A 2D programming language. See github.com/Sup...

emanresu A

@Nobody Please stop

Nobody

Ok

emanresu A

@ATaco ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ At this point, many languages are multitargeted and can be used for websites. I don't think JS is that bad unless you go looking for the weird bits, and you're going to have to use it anyway as a wrapper for whatever you've compiled.

ATaco

I don't like using Javascript for various reasons. It's not really a bad language, as much as I like to make fun of it.

emanresu A

12:33

Understandable, but I think it's here to stay.

ais523

the first version of JavaScript was, IIRC, the result of giving a skilled and talented language designer an impossibly short deadline and forcing them to make a language

this explains things like function scope for variables (proper lexical scope is obviously better, but would have taken longer to implement)

emanresu A

Hm, I hadn't heard that story before

Nobody

Me neither

ATaco

I still can't wrap my head around the difference between let and var.

emanresu A

let is better.

Although that's maybe just my programming style, which completely avoids var and function

ATaco

12:35

Now that I think about it, it's not Javascript I don't like, but Web Development

ais523

@ATaco what do you think var a = 4; { var a = 5; document.write(a); } document.write(a) prints?

ATaco

I can tell you what it should print.

Nobody

Let me guess 4 4

ATaco

But I believe it does print 5 5

ais523

correct; let prints 5 4

Nobody

12:36

I mean5 5

ais523

that's the difference

emanresu A

@ais523 I honestly don't get why blocks on their own are a thing - they just add ambiguity for object syntax.

@ais523 Doesn't document.write override all page content?

ais523

@emanresuA most likely because the if statement is copied from C

ATaco

I like blocks on their own. Lets me seperate chunks of code with locals.

ais523

@emanresuA it appends at the point of the <script> tag

ATaco

12:37

Probably better to seperate them into functions

Nobody

Bye for now

o/

emanresu A

@ais523 Never mind :P

I should sleep, o/

ais523

it isn't common nowadays to use <script> as an element in the document body, but it used to be very common in the early days of JavaScript

and I was doing the tests by literally writing data:text/html,<html><body><script> into a web browser URL bar

(followed by the desired script)

this has some weird side-effects, like "the browser can't parse the rest of the page beyond the <script> tag until the script has finished running, in case it writes unbalanced tags to the page"

(this was once used in a code-golf answer to intentionally hang the browser's parser)

ATaco

HTML+JS+CSS is a fantastical Bodge

And our idea was to use that to make Desktop apps for some reason

ais523

I think I understand the reason: all GUI toolkits are terrible, and attempting to use HTML+JS+CSS as a GUI toolkit is actually less terrible than the alternatives (whilst still being terrible)

ATaco

12:41

Definitely true. HTML+CSS(+-JS) is probably the easiest toolkit for making UI's I've used.

ais523

and one major part of the terribleness is often "things break a few years later and you have to learn an entire new toolkit", and most people don't trust anything cross-platform other than HTML+CSS+JS to be here to stay

ATaco

The worst is definitely Garry's Mod Lua's Derma.

mathcat

13:01

@ais523 I think the android developer toolkit is a bit less terrible than H+C±JS, but it might be just because I'm not good at CSS.

pxeger

@ATaco it's a nice idea for a feature, but I don't think I've every actually used it

ais523

@mathcat working only on a small subset of OSes is an inherent problem for libraries – it limits where you'll be able to port your application in future, and means that you're stuck if the OS ever becomes inappropriate (which can happen for reasons outside your control sometimes)

mathcat

yeah true

Looks like I'm gonna learn CSS now

ais523

when I was younger I frequently used nonportable programming languages, but my code ended up breaking a few years later far too often

at one point I even used Excel to create GUIs (I didn't have many programming languages available at the time and was familiar with Excel…); you'd expect me to regret that when I moved to a compute without it, but instead I discovered that my programs broke in a later version of Excel – versions of Excel that could run them are very rare nowadays

maybe this is why I ended up getting into esolangs – I learned programming with an absolutely terrible set of languages to learn it on

mathcat

@ais523 Microsoft be like:

pxeger

13:13

Nov 4, 2021 at 17:52, by pxeger

@hyper-neutrino I started programming using Visual Basic in Excel, and wow, those scars certainly still haunt my dreams

mathcat

but /srs that's really dumb if you upgrade and all your programs don't work

ais523

to some extent, this depends on whether the thing you're programming in was intended as a programming language or not

pxeger

@cairdcoinheringaahing Go also has this (optionally)

ais523

13:50

@graffe I'm not sure whether that problem (choosing prefixes with a given total length from a given set of lists, maximising the sum) has a name, but it's NP-complete, because you can encode the subset sum problem in it (encode a number n as n-1 zeroes followed by n), so there isn't an efficient algorithm unless P=NP

m90

@ais523 I don't think that's right, because that construction creates a number of values exponential in the number of bits in n.

ais523

oh, I see

I frequently get confused with NP-complete problems that use numbers

because it's unclear what function of the input we're measuring the complexity with respect to

or, hmm, I guess I'll just look it up

OK, best known subset sum is algorithm is exponential in the total number of bits of the numbers in the set, meaning that subset sum is polynomial in terms of the size of the actual numbers

this makes it very likely that the problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming

and some further research implies that there's a distinction between "weakly NP-complete" (can be solved polynomially in the value, rather than size, of the inputs), and "strongly NP-complete" (unless P=NP, can't be solved polynomially even in the value of the inputs)

New Posts

15:10

0

Q: Minimum Alteration String

Given a set of N words, starting word and ending word, the words can be changed to obtain any one of the words in the given list of words by altering exactly one character and the target is to obtain the ending word with the minimum number of alterations starting with the starting word. Print the...

string permutations

graffe

@m90 do you think it can be solved in poly time?

@ais523 I hope so! But how?

ais523

dynamic programming is basically a recursive brute-force algorithm combined with very heavy memoization

you could probably do something like working out, for each n from 1 to 100, the optimal score using n coins in the first half, and separately in the second half

and recursing

actually, isn't that just a linear-time algorithm? for each aligned power-of-2-sized subset, work out the optimal score for each n, starting from the smallest and working towards the largest

or no, it's n log n, but still pretty fast

graffe

15:38

I am not sure that works does it?

Could you write it out with a little more detail?

Or even better, code it :)

Radvylf Programs

15:57

@thejonymyster Since it's used in Roblox, some other games, some tools for programmers, etc., probably a lot of people. I wouldn't expect it to overlap very well with the people who know JS/Python though, since it's not really used as a general-purpose language as far as I know.

pxeger

Lua is explicitly designed for use embedded in larger applications

ais523

there are several languages like that, though, and only Lua really caught on

pxeger

It doesn't really have a proper standard library, so it's not very usable outside that

ais523

you hardly ever see Tcl or Guile used nowadays, for example

pxeger

@ais523 Lua has the ~~advantage of being first-to-market~~ (I wrote this before you mentioned Tcl and Guile, so I'm not sure if it's actually true) and thus benefits from the network effect

It's also very fast (thanks to LuaJIT)

Superior Simple

Simpy

Superior Simple

Superior Simple

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