cpressey

But at least one thing I can see is that in PR, you need to fix the upper bounds of the loops (/recursion depth) ahead of time, not "on the fly". If you're doing some kind of iterative approximation, you probably don't know what those bounds "should" be, because you're going to terminate on some other condition, like, the change in the value has become negligible. Your upper bound will be a worst-case estimate -- which you have to do extra work to compute -- and I don't see how it differs much, in practice, from a timeout, which has the advantage (again from a systems perspective) of being measured in clock time rather than cycles.

Not sure about parallelization. PR doesn't suggest any advantages to me for that offhand, but then, I haven't thought about it.

* from a systems point of view, an infinite loop is no worse than a routine that doesn't return after a reasonable amount of time. PR is a huge complexity class (it contains NEXP); just because a function always terminates doesn't mean it's efficient (or as efficient as you would like/need it to be.)

* PR functions are somewhat easier to reason about than general recursive functions (no need to mess around with bottom and domain theory) but I haven't seen a lot of evidence that that translates to making them easier to aggressively optimize.

* In fact, I have heard many PR functions have a more efficient GR equivalent, and I don't know of any way to automatically derive the GR version from the PR; and I expect (just on hunch) that no perfectly general PR->GR conversion could exist.

* Granted, a function can be shown to be total without necessarily being PR, but then you have the burden of proving that it is total, and it seems inelegant to move that burden to hardware. Maybe it's not, maybe that's just "normal science" talking.

* In practice, if I want to run an interpreter for an existing TC programming language on this architecture, it has to treat the architecture as TC (i.e. conceptually break its separation between executor and evaluator) anyway.

"Hodgson Gestation Services, LLC"

(Yes, this is sarcasm.)

Ouch!

btw, I think "fill the screen with @'s" must be the "Hello, world!" of Commodore machine-language programming. (Back when you could call it "ML" and not get it confused with a functional programming language, too.)

Descriptivistically, the "Mount Gox" backronym seems to have more currency. (pun intended, but immediately regretted!)

I tend to think it's a more general effect where humans actually want a certain amount of irregularity in their languages/notations, to act as markers or error-detecting codes of some sort. e.g. "he", but "him" in accusative case. But who knows; English gets by with "you" being both singular and plural...

This is kind of a confusing statement to me. Most instruments called "trumpets" where I come from are valved instruments which are fully capable of producing chromatics. (Maybe this is technically incorrect and we should be properly calling them "cornets" or something, I don't know.)

My point is, you certainly don't have to go to a museum to find one, and I expect, in a museum (of history anyway), any trumpet you'd find would be more likely to to be valveless and non-chromatic.

Whether it helps one when reading music is another matter. I remember learning to play an electric organ as a youngster with a book of sheet music that came with the organ; being aimed at beginners, each note head had the note letter written inside it. Hummingbird is basically using the same idea, just replacing the letter with a symbol. It probably does make it easier to learn. Whether it would be of any use for an experienced musician, I kind of doubt. (I certainly outgrew expecting the note head to contain the note letter, myself.)

Some would call it "narcissism", which (with an appropriately nuanced meaning) I think is more accurate than "bragging".

I strongly agree with the article. Sharing your experiences with social networking isn't necessarily about needing to get validation from others on your experience in order for the experience to feel complete for you... but for some people, it is. And I have to wonder, the more prevalent social networking becomes, are more and more people going to use it as their image-of-self crutch? And I have to wonder, what does such a society look like after a few decades? It's a bit like Warhol's "15 minutes of fame", except minutes are the wrong unit of measure. Everybody's a 15 milligram celebrity...