tectonicfury

Modern C++ is something nebulous. What is Modern C++ now would be obsolete few years down the line. So clearly maintenance of such a project wouldn’t be much fun, I suppose.

C doesn’t suffer from this for one. You have more time to focus on the task than on managing the myriad ways of doing the same thing.

Oh thanks

What happens if your parents are first cousins? You don’t have as many ancestors as the article assumes. And it’s only now that people are so connected that such a situation can arise, but earlier people used to marry mostly within their local communities, so each spouse would share many of the same ancestors as the other.

My father told me the reason some years ago. As a rough sketch, it was because decades ago many highways used to be 'single lane', so if you had a truck in front of you, you needed to overtake it as you wouldn't want to be stuck tailing it the entire length of the road.

He said that above the "OK" there used to be a bulb. So if someone wanted to overtake the truck, they were required to sound their vehicle's horn to signal their intent/desire to do so, that's what the "Horn Please" was for. If all was clear, the truck driver used to turn on the bulb to tell that it was "OK" to do so.

Apparently, with time, the bulb went into oblivion (perhaps due to becoming redundant because of the widening of the roads) but the words remain.

Read the first couple of pages and it’s talking about things like operator precedence and left associativity and couldn’t continue. Hopelessly uninspiring IMO.

good question

I felt that it was a good article, very straightforward, and he made an interesting point about numerical packages being often written by graduate students.

Personally, I would like to learn the math, but I would want to first learn from the 'established' books (i.e. the books the author read on his way to this point), only then will I be in a position to judge the real worth of the author's books.

Nice points. Going through SICP and solving problems using scheme, I did experience the “brain amplification” sensation.

Once you flesh out the idea in lisp, it’s just a matter of implementing it in the language of your platform. It’s like doing ‘architecture’.. Lisp is about aesthetics and beauty

I did seam carving as part of Coursera's Algorithms course by Bob Sedgewick. It was gratifying.

If you like it hard enough, it would soon stop being hard

When you have websites like hackingwithswift and you see Chris lattner (who is some genius because he made a new language) endorsing it with lavish praises, you tend to believe that it’s easy. But then every time I tried to make a 10% decent app, I had to look up the documentation and used to be confronted with (gatekeeping?) jargon like concurrency and background thread. I even paid for raywenderlich’s annual subscription but now I realise why these websites are so flashy and captivating.

There are also a lot of resources which sound as if they would be great as they have big name authors but they actually make you more depressed. I had many such experiences most notably with Stroustrup’s books. The one called Programming - principles and practice is a hopeless soup of complicated syntax and lousy pedagogy. It’s aimed at beginners but really anyone who’s read chapter 6 of the book where he seeks to teach ‘what programming is actually about” using a calculator program as an illustrative example, he really makes it appear as if recursion is some exotic and esoteric thing, whereas it is a recurrent theme in the domain of programming. I say this because before this chapter he never used recursion and it becomes very unintuitive, unlike SICP, where from the beginning this is identified as one of the central ideas in all programming.

I was fortunate I used to read e-books and didn’t spend too much on purchasing flimsy books, turns out, as far as CS is concerned, the best stuff is actually free (and accessible as pointed above in the link)