Posts by zwol@masto.hackers.town
 (DIR) Post #B4nCW2PqETQuYj5YfY by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       more high level languages should adopt R's Algolesque call-by-unevaluated-expression semantics send toot
       
 (DIR) Post #B4xHVAOhVvtQNLYfzs by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       thinking about "post"-covid mask advocacy and IMHO we (people generally in favor of continued public masking) are not gonna get anywhere with it until we really grapple with just how important "mealtime as a social activity" and "being able to see people's lips when they're talking to me" are to most peoplelike I seriously think these things are, in an revealed unconscious preference kind of way, *more important* than continued good health to a solid majority of the world population
       
 (DIR) Post #B4xHVAcWgWx54E1iXw by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       I am never forget the conversation I had, while I was still teaching at CMU, with some other faculty members -- this was after we went back to in-person instruction but before admin dropped the campuswide mask mandate -- where I was the _only person_ who was comfortable continuing to mask in public for the rest of my life if necessary.I tried to get them to explain why they didn't like the idea and got nothing helpful. At the time I thought it was probably mostly about the meals...
       
 (DIR) Post #B67feHkJwqLe3RfNo0 by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       This is the ideal pickup truck. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2o3Bzyick1gOTQ by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       A Take Related To L'Affaire Rsync:It is a disgrace upon the entire free software community *and* the entire software development profession that nobody has ever written a tool that can ingest a pile of shell scripts and excrete a pile of functionally equivalent Python scriptsor the same for any other pair of languages of roughly the same "height"
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2oH1AZmHQu9R1U by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       Look: my attitude to LLMs starts with "I already spend all day every day arguing with computers, having the argument in English would not improve the experience" and passes through "my masters' degree in cognitive science says you aren't checking that chatbot's output anywhere near as thoroughly as you think you are" on the way to "these companies are cartoonishly evil, engaging in _any way_ with them strikes me as a bad business decision"but that doesn't mean I don't grok the temptation
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2oYO7zfkImHJ68 by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       in particular, there have been many times in my career when the task at hand could *nearly* but not *entirely* be reduced to a sequence of sed commands, and so I had to gird up my loins and embark on a week of unmitigated tediumand you know what, it *should* be possible to automate such taskssource-to-source transformers are not a new idea, they don't need stochastic models of any size, they work very reliably when they existbut very few people have been inspired to write them. why?
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2onzC09J59ZlPU by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       I've been Online long enough to remember that Guile was supposed to be this. It was supposed to have front ends for every "scripting" language that was popular at the time, so you would need only the one interpreter, and it wouldn't have been much more of a stretch to make it spit back out code in your notation of choice.But only the Scheme freaks got excited about Guile, therefore none of the alternative front ends got off the drawing board, and I think that points at a chunk of why.
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2rvtZ3G4mYIcee by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       Another chunk of why is probably just that smoothing over the semantic mismatches between each pair of languages would be an endless tedium mine in itself. Just imagine how much work you'd have to do to recreate Python's stdlib, or the "core" shell utilities, on top of Lua's wretched excuse for a runtime.Still, the utility would be so high that it's surprising, in a "there's a research paper here" kind of way, that no one has ever latched onto the project and made it theirs.
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2suruM1zpepJh2 by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       Coccinelle is a step in the right direction, but it's not nearly powerful or flexible enough. tree-sitter is a step in the right direction, but it's infrastructure. LSP completion and refactoring engines are playing in the same ballpark but they solve a different problem.Coccinelle also never got nearly as much interest, or follow-up, as it ought to have ... maybe because it was marketed as mostly of interest to kernel freaks? idk.
       
 (DIR) Post #B6tT2twg574Z1YgH9U by zwol@masto.hackers.town
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       Are there things in this space that I don't know about? Probably. Please tell me about them.