"Parameters are constant in the procedure body. By default, their value cannot be changed because this allows the compiler to implement parameter passing in the most efficient way. If a mutable variable is needed inside the procedure, it has to be declared with var in the procedure body. Shadowing the parameter name is possible, and actually an idiom:"
Re-using parameters as variables is very useful for writing concise code. I see no reason to limit things in this way. If the compiler thinks it can do something clever to optimize parameters when they are not modified, then it can detect when parameters are not modified and just do it, without limiting the programmer.
And forcing programmers to shadow variable names to get around this limitation is just awful. Shadowing of variable names is dubious to begin with as it can lead to confusion when reading the code (you can easily lose track of the fact that there are two 'x' variables in scope, one shadowing the other), and a language "feature" that actually encourages this bad practice is awful.
Yeah I think I'm done reading about nim. My conclusion: it's designed by programmers without a whole lot of programming experience, who do not realize the more subtle design points that should be adhered to in language design. I don't need another language designed by novices.
Here's a big one: overloaded operators are terribad.
"The Nim library makes heavy use of overloading - one reason for this is that each operator like + is a just an overloaded proc. The parser lets you use operators in infix notation (a + b) or prefix notation (+ a). An infix operator always receives two arguments, a prefix operator always one. Postfix operators are not possible, because this would be ambiguous: does a @ @ b mean (a) @ (@b) or (a@) @ (b)? It always means (a) @ (@b), because there are no postfix operators in Nim."
One of the worst "features" of C++ is operator overloading. I don't care how concisely I can write a Matrix class with operators that "look like" real math operators applied to the types; if I can't read a program and know what operators might do because they could be overloaded, then the programming language is inherently very difficult to read, at least with confidence. In my opinion it's much better to have to provide functions to perform actions on types, with those functions naturally having names that describe what the action is. When "a + b" *could mean* "a and b are numbers which are being added together" or *could mean* "a and b are complex types and some completely arbitrary operation is being applied", the language has lost readability.
Another critique: the 'discard' keyword is unnecessary. "Forgetting to use a return value" is not a bug vector in my experience. No reason to force the programmer to tell the compiler "yeah I really didn't mean to use the return value of the function I called".
Just reading the docs, the first thing that pops out at me is that there is no need for a separate 'const' and 'let' keyword. They describe the difference as:
"The difference between let and const is: let introduces a variable that can not be re-assigned, const means "enforce compile time evaluation and put it into a data section":"
But the compiler can detect whether the expression on the right hand side of the let assignment is compile time constant, and "put it in the data section" if it is; no need for the programmer to have to make that decision.
I just thought your post was kind of a rant, hard to read, and pretty much in the line of "I want to tell people my story" kind of post. I thought it was funny to post my response. But whatever, it's the internet, people post dumb shit all the time, you and me included.
What you say is not universally true. Good U.S. universities do fail students out. And why not? There are plenty of qualified applicants to replace them, it's not like the university is going to miss any income.
I've also never head that European universities were "more strict and rigorous". All that I've ever heard about that system is that students tend to stay in it for a long time since it's so easy to sort of float through with a minimal courseload year after year. It doesn't cost anything so why not just keep going as long as you're young and it's still fun to hang around with other college kids?
I don't think you have any idea what the people you are talking about are actually like. I don't either; I didn't go to Harvard. But you're making some serious assumptions about how students would treat each other and I suspect you actually have no clue.
Not at the moment, although luddites like you will come along eventually "dorky goggles" or not so no one is paying you or your asinine concerns any attention.
You got his point totally backwards. He wasn't saying that private industry should be the ones to do this type of project, he's saying that BECAUSE private industry has shown no interest, it must not be possible to do it profitably, meaning it is likely to be a money sink.
I am pretty sure that lots of private companies would love to be in the road building and maintenance business, I'll bet it's easy to make a buck there given the steady use those get, the proven tech, the low capital outlay.
I am sure the tech is very useful, and being able to transmit understandable voice (even if it takes some concentration to understand it) in a very low number of bits is cool. I just thought the slashdot summary exaggerated a little bit.
They're skirting the bottom edge of comprehensibility, the voice in the samples is by no means "clear". You have to focus very closely to understand that is being said much of the time, and even then, repeated listenings are sometimes necessary.
Why, yes I do. Simply put, all the low hanging fruit x86 processor development has been picked already. The only remaining advancements are incredibly expensive to make, both in time and money, and as a result even Intel can't appreciably speed up x86 processors anymore.
Now that Intel is mostly standing still, AMD has a chance to catch up. It can benefit from all of the research work, process developments, etc, that have occurred, and implement its own version of the same advancements that Intel made over the past 7 years or so, much more cheaply than Intel did. AMD's limited budget may just be enough.
I actually don'tt think that Ryzen will be as fast as Intel's best. But I expect it to come within 25%, and for a reduced cost. My prediction is that x86 won't get much faster as AMD becomes more competitive with Intel, but it will become a lot cheaper. Intel's high end consumer chips that cost $350 now will be available for $100 in a couple of years, whereas without AMD's Ryzen providing the competition, they probably would only have come down by $50 or so.
More power to you. I made the mistake of visiting rotten.com once in the late 90's, and somehow morbid curiosity caused me to spend about 2 hours looking at the worst stuff that I could see on there, I couldn't tear myself away because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And afterwards I went into a sort of depression for several days. I have never gone back and have actively avoided any situation in which I might see something similar. If I had to watch that stuff on a regular basis I would either, like you, somehow disassociate myself from the feelings that I have about such things, or go crazy. I don't think either is a good outcome personally.
However, if such people have to exist, then I am thankful that they do and that they can protect myself and those I care about from these things. So to everyone who has to do it - I owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude, and I hope you are paid very well.
Despite your obvious pessimism about the market's ability to solve these problems, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that if a home battery system like you describe were cheap enough and safe enough to do the job, it would absolutely be chosen in preference to a complex and costly substation based solution.
In fact it sounds like a great idea, and I'm sure you're not the only person to have thought of it. Maybe that's part of why Tesla is pushing those home battery systems its selling?
It is true that there would be a rife of problems were CA to try to secede; but you didn't actually state any of them. Instead you went on a rant full of your own biases and judgements. And who cares what you think? I don't, not enough to even finish reading your crap.
But it would cost enough in R&D and tooling that Intel would not find enough buyers for the faster chips to make that back and still turn a profit. It's just that hard to increase speeds now that absolutely all of the low hanging fruit have already been picked, and most of the medium-hanging fruit too.
The number of customers who will pay handsomly for faster chips is an ever shrinking pool, and there is not enough money left in that pool to fund the R&D necessary for large increases in processor speed.
I disagree. We're pretty far along the asymptotic curve at this point. And Intel can only increase processor performance at the rate that people are willing to pay. Maybe they could double processor speeds but the R&D and tooling costs would require that they charge 4x the price of current processors for it. The thing is, so few people are willing to pay significantly for more CPU power (because the number of users for whom CPU speed is a significant issue has declined precipitously as CPU speeds have increased), that Intel would never make back its investment. So it doesn't try.
The thing is that the longer that this is true, the more that gradual investment by AMD will allow them to catch up to the state of the art that Intel has. Which will then drive the prices down considerably. AMD will never make much money, but then when AMD finally regains performance parity with Intel, Intel won't be making much money any more either.
So you can expect top end consumer oriented CPU performance to remain stagnant but prices to drop considerably. I'd still call that a win.
Professional software development typically has compilation steps that can use all processors at 100% for minutes at a time. I can easily use 100% of all CPUs for 20 minutes straight when compiling 5 million lines of source code scattered across 25,000 files. Which I do several times per day typically.
Of course, not all of compilation is embarassingly parallel; there is usually a link step at the end which cannot be multithreaded (at least not by current tools) and which just sits there adding another 5 minutes using only a single core the whole time.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another unnecessary weakness:
"Parameters are constant in the procedure body. By default, their value cannot be changed because this allows the compiler to implement parameter passing in the most efficient way. If a mutable variable is needed inside the procedure, it has to be declared with var in the procedure body. Shadowing the parameter name is possible, and actually an idiom:"
Re-using parameters as variables is very useful for writing concise code. I see no reason to limit things in this way. If the compiler thinks it can do something clever to optimize parameters when they are not modified, then it can detect when parameters are not modified and just do it, without limiting the programmer.
And forcing programmers to shadow variable names to get around this limitation is just awful. Shadowing of variable names is dubious to begin with as it can lead to confusion when reading the code (you can easily lose track of the fact that there are two 'x' variables in scope, one shadowing the other), and a language "feature" that actually encourages this bad practice is awful.
Yeah I think I'm done reading about nim. My conclusion: it's designed by programmers without a whole lot of programming experience, who do not realize the more subtle design points that should be adhered to in language design. I don't need another language designed by novices.
Here's a big one: overloaded operators are terribad.
"The Nim library makes heavy use of overloading - one reason for this is that each operator like + is a just an overloaded proc. The parser lets you use operators in infix notation (a + b) or prefix notation (+ a). An infix operator always receives two arguments, a prefix operator always one. Postfix operators are not possible, because this would be ambiguous: does a @ @ b mean (a) @ (@b) or (a@) @ (b)? It always means (a) @ (@b), because there are no postfix operators in Nim."
One of the worst "features" of C++ is operator overloading. I don't care how concisely I can write a Matrix class with operators that "look like" real math operators applied to the types; if I can't read a program and know what operators might do because they could be overloaded, then the programming language is inherently very difficult to read, at least with confidence. In my opinion it's much better to have to provide functions to perform actions on types, with those functions naturally having names that describe what the action is. When "a + b" *could mean* "a and b are numbers which are being added together" or *could mean* "a and b are complex types and some completely arbitrary operation is being applied", the language has lost readability.
Just say NO to operator overloading!
Another critique: the 'discard' keyword is unnecessary. "Forgetting to use a return value" is not a bug vector in my experience. No reason to force the programmer to tell the compiler "yeah I really didn't mean to use the return value of the function I called".
Just reading the docs, the first thing that pops out at me is that there is no need for a separate 'const' and 'let' keyword. They describe the difference as:
"The difference between let and const is: let introduces a variable that can not be re-assigned, const means "enforce compile time evaluation and put it into a data section":"
But the compiler can detect whether the expression on the right hand side of the let assignment is compile time constant, and "put it in the data section" if it is; no need for the programmer to have to make that decision.
I just thought your post was kind of a rant, hard to read, and pretty much in the line of "I want to tell people my story" kind of post. I thought it was funny to post my response. But whatever, it's the internet, people post dumb shit all the time, you and me included.
You have no clue. But don't feel bad just because you can't afford expensive toys, you probably wouldn't enjoy them anyway. Right?
I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing that people who can't get into these schools say to make themselves feel better.
Cool story bro.
What you say is not universally true. Good U.S. universities do fail students out. And why not? There are plenty of qualified applicants to replace them, it's not like the university is going to miss any income.
I've also never head that European universities were "more strict and rigorous". All that I've ever heard about that system is that students tend to stay in it for a long time since it's so easy to sort of float through with a minimal courseload year after year. It doesn't cost anything so why not just keep going as long as you're young and it's still fun to hang around with other college kids?
I don't think you have any idea what the people you are talking about are actually like. I don't either; I didn't go to Harvard. But you're making some serious assumptions about how students would treat each other and I suspect you actually have no clue.
Not at the moment, although luddites like you will come along eventually "dorky goggles" or not so no one is paying you or your asinine concerns any attention.
You got his point totally backwards. He wasn't saying that private industry should be the ones to do this type of project, he's saying that BECAUSE private industry has shown no interest, it must not be possible to do it profitably, meaning it is likely to be a money sink.
I am pretty sure that lots of private companies would love to be in the road building and maintenance business, I'll bet it's easy to make a buck there given the steady use those get, the proven tech, the low capital outlay.
I am sure the tech is very useful, and being able to transmit understandable voice (even if it takes some concentration to understand it) in a very low number of bits is cool. I just thought the slashdot summary exaggerated a little bit.
They're skirting the bottom edge of comprehensibility, the voice in the samples is by no means "clear". You have to focus very closely to understand that is being said much of the time, and even then, repeated listenings are sometimes necessary.
Nobody is assuming a 15 year life span.
The question is, why do you assume that people talk nonstop 24 hours per day?
Why, yes I do. Simply put, all the low hanging fruit x86 processor development has been picked already. The only remaining advancements are incredibly expensive to make, both in time and money, and as a result even Intel can't appreciably speed up x86 processors anymore.
Now that Intel is mostly standing still, AMD has a chance to catch up. It can benefit from all of the research work, process developments, etc, that have occurred, and implement its own version of the same advancements that Intel made over the past 7 years or so, much more cheaply than Intel did. AMD's limited budget may just be enough.
I actually don'tt think that Ryzen will be as fast as Intel's best. But I expect it to come within 25%, and for a reduced cost. My prediction is that x86 won't get much faster as AMD becomes more competitive with Intel, but it will become a lot cheaper. Intel's high end consumer chips that cost $350 now will be available for $100 in a couple of years, whereas without AMD's Ryzen providing the competition, they probably would only have come down by $50 or so.
More power to you. I made the mistake of visiting rotten.com once in the late 90's, and somehow morbid curiosity caused me to spend about 2 hours looking at the worst stuff that I could see on there, I couldn't tear myself away because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And afterwards I went into a sort of depression for several days. I have never gone back and have actively avoided any situation in which I might see something similar. If I had to watch that stuff on a regular basis I would either, like you, somehow disassociate myself from the feelings that I have about such things, or go crazy. I don't think either is a good outcome personally.
However, if such people have to exist, then I am thankful that they do and that they can protect myself and those I care about from these things. So to everyone who has to do it - I owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude, and I hope you are paid very well.
Despite your obvious pessimism about the market's ability to solve these problems, I'd be willing to bet quite a lot that if a home battery system like you describe were cheap enough and safe enough to do the job, it would absolutely be chosen in preference to a complex and costly substation based solution.
In fact it sounds like a great idea, and I'm sure you're not the only person to have thought of it. Maybe that's part of why Tesla is pushing those home battery systems its selling?
You and your wife watch too much TV.
Pretty sure that if people could affordably have fast charging at home, they would, even if they rarely used it.
The OP is correct; the actual reason this doesn't happen is partially because of the safety aspect. Cost being, of course, the much bigger issue.
It is true that there would be a rife of problems were CA to try to secede; but you didn't actually state any of them. Instead you went on a rant full of your own biases and judgements. And who cares what you think? I don't, not enough to even finish reading your crap.
Pretty sure that Cook makes his real money on stock grants. His overall compensation is way, way, WAY more than 8 million per year.
But it would cost enough in R&D and tooling that Intel would not find enough buyers for the faster chips to make that back and still turn a profit. It's just that hard to increase speeds now that absolutely all of the low hanging fruit have already been picked, and most of the medium-hanging fruit too.
The number of customers who will pay handsomly for faster chips is an ever shrinking pool, and there is not enough money left in that pool to fund the R&D necessary for large increases in processor speed.
I disagree. We're pretty far along the asymptotic curve at this point. And Intel can only increase processor performance at the rate that people are willing to pay. Maybe they could double processor speeds but the R&D and tooling costs would require that they charge 4x the price of current processors for it. The thing is, so few people are willing to pay significantly for more CPU power (because the number of users for whom CPU speed is a significant issue has declined precipitously as CPU speeds have increased), that Intel would never make back its investment. So it doesn't try.
The thing is that the longer that this is true, the more that gradual investment by AMD will allow them to catch up to the state of the art that Intel has. Which will then drive the prices down considerably. AMD will never make much money, but then when AMD finally regains performance parity with Intel, Intel won't be making much money any more either.
So you can expect top end consumer oriented CPU performance to remain stagnant but prices to drop considerably. I'd still call that a win.
Professional software development typically has compilation steps that can use all processors at 100% for minutes at a time. I can easily use 100% of all CPUs for 20 minutes straight when compiling 5 million lines of source code scattered across 25,000 files. Which I do several times per day typically.
Of course, not all of compilation is embarassingly parallel; there is usually a link step at the end which cannot be multithreaded (at least not by current tools) and which just sits there adding another 5 minutes using only a single core the whole time.