gciruelos

Yes, in general it is obviously undecidable.

I should have been clearer, but I'm mostly interested in structure (traversal) algorithms, most of which could be coded in a language with bounded loops.

An easier question is the one of determining the complexity of an algorithm. I think there's a ton of work in this area, for example in techniques that use typing systems (types may for example specify how many times a parameter is used, thus allowing the program to infer the complexity).

(easier because the equivalence relation of "implementing the same algorithm" is strictly finer than "having the same complexity")

Related to your last question, I was always puzzled by the following: when is a program an implementation of an (abstract) algorithm?

For example, can a program decide, given a sorting function implemented in language X, and an algorithm Y, whether or not the sorting function is an implementation of algorithm Y? Part of the question is how to represent algorithms (is "formal" pseudo-code the best way?)

Also, can you decide whether or not two functions written in different programming languages are implementations of the same algorithm?

This is awesome, great write-up, thank you very much.

You briefly mention that crypto-currencies are used for money laundering. Do you think that's what's driving btc price to insane levels? Or is it just good old euphoria?

john baez is a brilliant guy.

and also he's the cousin of joan baez, which makes me appreciate both of them even more.

yes, but if you add up how much everyone paid for the lost eth it won't be $300MM but it will still be an insane amount of money.

i wish the main tool wasn't inside an <iframe>. completely unnecessary

some have a lot of false positives (even some in -Wextra have had false positives due to bugs), so if you compile with -Werror (as you should do) it can be troublesome.

every browser needs to have some counter like that if it wants to suggest pages when you open a new tab or something like that.

i think it's cool that you can see the actual ranking.

maybe it is a consequence of increased technological knowledge in the general populace? i don't feel that it has increased, but maybe Apple's marketing team arrived to that conclusion.

i agree completely on the large document problem that LaTeX has, especially when you have big formulas, statements or diagrams that are hard to parse after you have written them and, say, you want to find where you committed a syntax error or made a typo.

i think semantic macros really help with that, but they are not a silver bullet. i'd really like to see editor plugins that convert LaTeX commands to actual symbols (for example, as soon as you write the space after the q in "\neq ", it gets converted to a "=/=", and when you type backspace to erase the "=/=" you get "\ne"). that has been already implemented for languages like agda, and in a simple form is present in text editors that support fonts with ligatures.

i know that what i'm proposing more on the "wysiwyg" side (which some LaTeX fundamentalists might dislike), but i think it would be a very nice thing to have when editing complicated formulas or diagrams.