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Comment Without sleep? (Score 1) 40

Debiak coded for 10 hours on minimal sleep

Is that guy a cat who needs to nap every 2 hours?

FWIW, I once participated in a coding contest at my university in the early 90's that lasted 72 hours (the first prize was a full scholarship, which I didn't get :)) I ran on coffee and speed for the full 72 hours, then collapsed on a couch and slept until someone woke me up to come get my third prize (a Solaris license).

10 hours non-stop coding sounds like a normal day at the office trying to wrap up a project.

Comment Re: Dystopia this isn't (Score 1) 72

"destroyed by their reaction of hiding"

My point was exactly that while we think we have all the context we need, we sometimes don't, to potentially devastating effect. The fact that the internet brigade has a high chance of being "right" in this case doesn't invalidate the point. People can have perfectly legitimate reasons to not want the details of who they're in a relationship with broadcast at large.

All you post tells me is that people are very hungry to see people "get what they deserve" and extrapolate all sorts of things to make them feel justified about doing so.

Comment Re:Dystopia this isn't (Score 1) 72

I think in broad strokes, infidelity is bad, but when it comes to a specific case, I'd say nobody is in a position to judge without much more context.

And that's what makes this kind of stuff rather shitty. People feel confident filling in all sorts of details from their own imagination and prejudices, and even if you get it mostly right 9 times out of 10 (to be very charitable, in my opinion) does that excuse the 10% of the time where the internet mob is wrong?

Comment Ada is fine, as is Fortran, for different things (Score 1) 111

First, the Tiobe index is rubbish, mainly counting how many times people ask about a language on social media. It doesn't measure usage popularity.

I've been a developer on both Ada and Fortran compilers, though my Ada experience ended around 1985, while I continue to be involved with Fortran today. I love Ada as a language - I used to say that if you could get an Ada program to compile, it would probably work. Ada also strongly influenced important features in modern Fortran, including modules and submodules. I also spent a week with Ada creator Jean Ichbiah's company Alsys in France, beta testing our compiler.

"Systems programming language" would not be my term for Ada, but as I was responsible for a real-time and embedded system Ada product, I suppose it qualifies. When the DoD dropped its requirement to use Ada, interest in the language fell off a cliff, despite its benefits. Fortran is NOT a systems programming language - it excels at scientific and engineering applications, though in my career I have seen it used for many things outside that scope, including the file system for PRIMOS in the late 70s. Fortran continues to evolve and, in many ways, leads other languages in standardizing parallelism. Fortran 2023 is the current standard, and work on the next revision is in progress.

I'm happy to see a resurgence of Ada but note that it doesn't seem to have much in the way of vendor support, unlike Fortran.

Comment Re:It's always about what you want to pay for.... (Score 1) 273

"those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain"

Is it impossible to obtain - the national ethos sees absolutely no problem with the unbounded consolidation of wealth and power, so long as it is in the private sector.

The joke is the private sector is so powerful at this point, your public sector is just a sock with the private sector's hand up its ass.

That'll never change as long as the concept of even moderate, reasonable redistribution of wealth is a national non-starter. It's impressive watching the way the US twists itself this way and that, where everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire voting for less taxes, less spending to make their supposed future rich selves happy for when they finally join the billionaire class.

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