In case this is relevant to your reasons for posting … every time I see one of the fact free posts the slam Python to promote Julia it pushes me further from considering Julia for anything.
The biggest thing that keeps me from using Julia rather than Python for math prototypes is that it uses one-based indexing. I go back and forth between these prototypes and my C++ codebase, and the mental gymnastics to switch from 0-based to 1-based makes Julia a non-starter for me. I prefer Julia over Python other than that one issue, and the lower availability of tutorials, etc. for Julia.
Obviously the comment above is far from helpful in tone or content, but this spurred me to look it up. As a python guy, my takeaways are:
1. It’s designed by mathematicians specifically for math.
2. It has much better support for generic/runtime types, something the academics apparently describe using the terms “parametric polymorphism” and “multi-dispatch”.
None of that sounds even close to convincing me to switch from Python, but I can see the appeal for people who value those typing features and want something faster.
I don’t necessarily see the connection between either of those things and the implementation above, tho… presumably it’s basically instant, anyway?
It was a sly dig at APL for using non-ASCII characters as regular operators. Actually I have no idea how those were implemented in the language. Presumably not as Unicode since APL predates Unicode by quite a considerable number of years. Does anyone know?
In modern APLs a character scalar is just a Unicode code point, which you might consider UTF-32. It's no trouble to work with. Although interfacing with things like filenames that can be invalid UTF-8 is a bit of a mess; Dyalog encodes these using the character range that is reserved for UTF-16 surrogates and therefore unused. If you know you want to work with a byte sequence instead, you can use Unicode characters 0-255, and an array of these will be optimized to use one byte per character in dialects that care about performance.
I feel vaguely annoyed, I think it's because it took a lot of time to read through that, and it amounts to "bad to put child in solitary confinement to keep whole society happy."
What does a simplistic moral set piece about the abhorrence of sacrificing the good of one for the good of many have to do with (check notes) Facebook? Even as vague hand-wavey criticism, wouldn't Facebook would be the inverse?
You have every right to take what you like from it, but I'd suggest that perhaps you're not seeing what others are if all you get is a morality play. As one example, maybe spend some time thinking about why you apparently missed that it's intentionally left ambiguous as to whether the child is even real in the story's world.
A condescending lecture starting with "you just don't get it" ending with "I read your mind and know you missed the 'but was it even real?'" part isnt imparting anything useful.
Re: "actually you should just ponder why you are a simpleton who doesn't get it, given other people derived value from how it relates to Facebook": There arent people here running around praising it. The comment 4 up was, and still is downvoted well below 0, there's barely anyone reading all the way down here. Only one other person even bothered replying.
I don't think me mentioning this is useful or fair, but I don't know how to drive home how little contribution there is from a condescending "think harder, didn't you notice the crowd loves it and understands how it's just like Facebook"
You misread my comment, I wasn't trying to be condescending; a primary theme of the story (in my and many others' readings) is the limits of our ability to imagine different, better worlds than the one we exist in. We struggle to read the story as purely utopian, even when we are explicitly told to do so. It has more impact when you find this on your own, and I was trying to avoid spoilers.
In the 90s I worked across the aisle from our AS/400 dev - after an office power outage we’d spend hours running fsck on our unixen and he’d take a long lunch. Every time.
Sat through a showing of Herzog’s Fata Morgana - partway through they stopped, apologized for the film being backwards or flipped or something. They changed … something … and started up again. It didn’t greatly improve the experience.
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