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

Intangible costs matter in compensation packages

If you commute to work by car, what would you rather have: free parking or a $4k increase in annual salary?

Note that if you pay $15/day for parking, and take no days off, that comes out to $3900. So the raise is strictly more than the cost, even.

I would pick parking. That's because even though raise > parking_cost, the actual comparison is raise vs. parking_cost + intangible_costs.

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The mythical C and C++ replacements

I watched this recent talk by Bryan Cantrill, and thinking about it got me to write up some older periodic thoughts. It's probably worth reanalyzing this topic every few years (especially if I look deeper into any of the languages listed below) but consider this the first one.



Unlike Bryan I'm more interested in the theoretical replacement language for game programming rather than systems programming. The big "enemy" here is C++, but C is still very common especially at the library and middleware layers, so I think we're in alignment in generally aiming at C and C++ together.

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Ramblings on data structure literals

I've been stewing a bit about Clojure's pretty data structure literals, and finding myself wanting them in other languages. In Common Lisp, maybe enough to use one of the various reader macros for maps. But what is it I really want?

In PHP, you used to have to do array() to make a new array or list. You could have data literals though: array(1, 2) for lists/arrays, array('foo' => 3, 'bar' => 4) for maps. It worked for me. I didn't need literal syntax for sets or anything else.

Later on I learned Python, I prefer the syntax a bit more. (1,2) for a "tuple" (list), [1,2] for an array/list/stack/queue/... very versatile, {'a': 3, 'b': 4} for a map. In JavaScript it (can) be about the same for arrays and maps, though you can leave off the key quotes for maps, but leaving them there (and using double quotes) has the nice side-benefit of being more likely to be valid JSON. It depends on whether your value is something serializable or not of course.

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