TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Brief history reminder

Remember the man named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilien_Robespierre

This is basically my response to http://blog.dilbert.com/post/145456082991/my-endorsement-for-president-of-the-united-states which I can't help but interpret as hilarious for its framing and sad if there is a shred of sincerity to it. If there is to be another glorious revolution (and we all know what side of the spectrum it will come from) there will be a lot of heads for the block, backs to the wall, and general in-group vs. other in-group killing. And as the bloodlust consumes all not even the ringleaders have a good chance of surviving.

All I'm saying is that if all you have is a paper saying "See?! I endorsed your side!" you in fact have nothing. Make better contingency plans than paper if you're legitimately worried about being a target.

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Nim is a cool language

If you haven't heard of Nim, you're missing out. Just google it -- there are some great blogs about why it's amazing. I found another one the other day, and thought it was an interesting topic to continue for myself. That blog is "Nim is the best programming language!" which I don't agree with, but that post is more about what the author looks for in a new language, and what is totally irrelevant. My views differ and yet we both came to love Nim.

I wrote a comment a while back summarizing what I thought are the "hooks" of Nim. The tldr quoting myself a bit is that Nim is fast (at or faster than hand C), supports all three of optional, tunable, implementation-swappable garbage collecting with access to malloc/free, easily embeds C or asm directly, has easy C interfacing, has static typing (mostly downside or me) but usefully inferred so it's often out of the way but also has useful builtin types like sized ints, plus it has distinct types, there are lots of compiler pragmas (common one being inline), user-defined compiler demands to make optimizations via term-rewriting macros, flexible name and calling semantics so that people can use their style preferences even when using third party libs, and finally Nim has an awareness of and support for many higher level language features enjoyed by other languages plus uses its not-exactly-Haskell-level static typing smartly unlike some languages that begin with g and end with o.

OK, so that's really the things that drew me into Nim, but the blog I linked earlier lays it out in a different manner of explicit non-criteria and criteria for whether he looks into a language or not. Let's do the same.

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