jang

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• So I have a question about this. I'd assumed that "deploy" came from the French word meaning to unfold or to spread out, and that if anything the direction of semantic travel would have been from a general notion of laying out or spreading out, t…

  in Code Critique: Boundaries of Ethical Code and Coding Comment by jang February 2020
• or "deployments" (as corporate teams say, using a military term with a casualness I find horrifying) That's a startling observation! I've been exposed to this term for most of my working life. If you'd asked me, I probably would've guessed t…

  in Code Critique: Boundaries of Ethical Code and Coding Comment by jang February 2020
• or "deployments" (as corporate teams say, using a military term with a casualness I find horrifying) That's a startling observation! I've been exposed to this term for most of my working life. If you'd asked me, I probably would've guessed t…

  in Code Critique: Boundaries of Ethical Code and Coding Comment by jang February 2020
• On cleverness versus "cleverness", the baroque and the downright rococo: topically, there has recently been (another) call to "write boring Haskell" (a quick search here will provide arguments both for and against) - as a reaction against some of th…

  in FatFinger.JS Comment by jang February 2020
• The quote, "cat came back from Berkeley waving flags" was attributed to Rob Pike (around the inception of Plan 9, I believe, but I can't find an original source for this at the moment). There was a similar piece of folk wisdom that every piece of…

  in Code Critique: Plan 9 cat Comment by jang February 2020
• (It doesn't;see the first para of the man page.)

  in Code Critique: Plan 9 cat Comment by jang February 2020
• I wonder what the types / genres of software are where this would be possible -- where there exists such a detailed description of the intended output that someone can carefully audit the output just to see if it matches that description. A …

  in Code Critique: Line 255 of Sea and Spar Between Comment by jang February 2020
• The article itself was fantastic - a very nice write-up of various attempts to improve the algorithm given the constraints of the machines of the day. This may be of interest, by way of contrast. I've thrown a gist together that uses two approach…

  in A Travesty Generator for Micros Comment by jang February 2020
• @joeyjones and @jang Can you speak to this point? I'm assuming you meant the point following, about keeping source closed. Schneier has a short entry here that addresses this counter-intuitive position. It also links to three longer essay…

  in "Coding Issue" in 2020 Election app Comment by jang February 2020
• Keeping the code closed doesn't prevent hacking; it does, however, put those wanting to legitimately verify it on a potentially sticky legal wicket. A potentially worse problem is the host of conspiracy theories that a closed app will engender - …

  in "Coding Issue" in 2020 Election app Comment by jang February 2020
• Just as a note - one subtle distinction between the p9 version and the GNU one is this: if(write(1, buf, n)!=n) sysfatal("write error copying %s: %r", s); ... which jumps out as being pleasantly surprising. Under POSIXy…

  in Code Critique: Plan 9 cat Comment by jang February 2020
• If I can add one personal comment about my own reaction to this: Occasionally, one comes across a particularly striking piece of code. It's especially stark when this happens with something like C. As such a low-level language, it's typical to ex…

  in Code Critique: Plan 9 cat Comment by jang February 2020
• I'd like to start with this: Finally, what does the (terse, short variable names, uncommented) code style of Plan 9's cat tell you about the values of its creators? Every line here seems to be written with the assumption that its meaning will …

  in Code Critique: Plan 9 cat Comment by jang February 2020
• @KalilaShapiro: Why should that decide someone's alignment so heavily? That's an interesting question, and in truth probably reflects the reality of this situation. The alternative question might be, "why should someone's alignment cau…

  in Code Critique: "Who Are You In 1917 Russia?" and arbitrariness in political compass tests Comment by jang February 2020
• There is also the category "gross hack," where one feature is misused because it'll have a desired side-effect. These kinds of things have quite the attraction for bright, inquisitive and inventive minds: plus, solving a puzzle by lateral thinking g…

  in Code Critique: Mel, FIRESTARTER and Misreading Code Comment by jang February 2020
• I think the English names for common objects stem from later ISO standardisation efforts to unify glyph names. As a kid (I got hold of Iverson's APL report through an inter-library loan) the only names I knew for these were the original ones that…

  in Week 2: Indigenous Programming (Main thread) Comment by jang February 2020
• There's a similar issue with var dickinsonFlatLessLess = dickinsonLessLess[0]; dickinsonFlatLessLess.concat(dickinsonLessLess[1], dickinsonLessLess[2]); which explains the misbehaviour of riseAndGoLine. However, the following comments: // …

  in Code Critique: Line 255 of Sea and Spar Between Comment by jang February 2020
• @ebuswell - in terms of this: Is it an advantage to know the English "if" or is it maybe an advantage to have "if" presented without the nontechnical baggage of everyday English? you might want to look at the for/else here or while/els…

  in Week 2: Indigenous Programming (Main thread) Comment by jang January 2020
• Could you speak a little about the implementation? For starters, the implementation language; and whether its own glyphic limitations have an impact on your code? Are you writing your Cree# implementation in a language derived from European traditio…

  in Week 2: Cree# Comment by jang January 2020
• (On the question of Python's random.shuffle:) You'll find it here There's a quick mention of its rationale here. Something like this ought to suffice also: // Approach 1, modified slightly function anagram(text) { var a = t…

  in From the introductory chapter: "a job interview" Comment by jang January 2020
• HACK-HACK looks like a common routine (although implementations vary across games). There's a description in one of the infocom memoires (which I can't currently find, alas) of the way that a new game would be started: the source for something re…

  in Code Critique: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Comment by jang January 2020
• One of the ideas we try to introduce to programmers is that all code should be written with human readers in mind - it's seldom the case that anything is written once and never looked at again. It's a vital skill to communicate effectively; the desi…

  in Code Critiques: Jupyter Notebooks/Taroko Gorge/Flight of the CodeMonkeys Comment by jang January 2020
• No apology needed! I'm interested in this from a pedagogical stance. One of the things students do is mimic various behaviours as they try to approximate "elegance" - the development of an aesthetic response is part of learning the craft. At the sam…

  in Code Critiques: Jupyter Notebooks/Taroko Gorge/Flight of the CodeMonkeys Comment by jang January 2020
• I'm really rather taken with "Flight of the Code Monkeys". However, the reason I'm posting is to ask a specific question about the (at time of writing, current) annotation on "Taroko Gorge". Specifically, "elegance" is mentioned twice. Clearly…

  in Code Critiques: Jupyter Notebooks/Taroko Gorge/Flight of the CodeMonkeys Comment by jang January 2020
• C. How should CCS handle implied, misleading or ironic code? How does other criticism handle it? (This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.) A. What examples of implied, misleading or ironic code have you come across in your ow…

  in Code Critique: What Python does when it's doing nothing. Comment by jang January 2020
• It's a cheeky way to take the integer part of a number. Prefix ~ is the bitwise complement, which coerces it's argument to an int. Applied twice, it undoes the complement.

  in Week 1: amazon.html by Euguenio Tisselli Comment by jang January 2020
• Jan Grant here. I'm not an academic. I read and write a lot of code. First encountered CCS when Ari Schlesinger asked, "what does a feminist programming language look like?" - her criteria were quite interesting, I think. I like diverse opinions …

  in Introduce yourself Comment by jang January 2020