Even though I hadn't thought about xv in decades, as soon as I read the headline, the image of those 3d buttons with the crisp outlines resurfaced from my memory.
Those are functional languages that generally don't use statements, so it makes sense to leave them out of a discussion about statement separators. If you think more people should use functional languages and so avoid the semicolon problem altogether, you could argue that.
Functional hardly matters Haskell has plenty of indentation which is by the way interchangeable with `{ ... }`, one can use both at one's own pleasure and it's needed for many things.
Also, famously `do { x ; y ; z }` is just syntactic sugar for `x >> y >> z` in Haskell where `>>` is a normal pure operator.
Indeed it does, by showing how many different and confusing types of parsing rules are used in languages that don't have statement terminators. Needing a parser clever enough to interpret essentially a 2-d code format seems like unnecessary complexity to me, because at its core a programming language is supposed to be a formal, unambiguous notation. Not that I'm against readability; I think having an unambiguous terminating mark makes it easier for humans to read as well. If you want to make a compiler smart enough to help by reading the indentation, that's fine, but don't require it as part of the notation.
Non-statement-based (functional) languages can be excepted, but I still think those are harder to read than statement-based languages.
The syntax of languages like Lisp and Forth are so fundamentally different that they don't need an explicit statement separator. You don't have to think about many other things either, or I should say you don't have to think about them in the same way. Consider how much simpler the order of operations is in those languages.
I've looked into TextAdept a few times. It appeals to me because it's got a standard Qt UI, is fast and lightweight and highly customizable with Lua. But I could never commit the time to fully customize it for daily use. Anyway, I'm committed to emacs. Other Scintilla-based editors with a similar feel (but missing the Lua angle) are Geany and Kate.
I was satisfied with Tuareg + Merlin for OCaml development in Emacs, it just worked for me and didn't break when I upgraded packages, but yes, this being from bbatsov is a strong incentive to try it out. My only concern is that it uses tree-sitter, which I try to avoid because of the messiness of the JavaScript ecosystem.
I think tree-sitter's relationship with JavaScript is entirely syntactic. You don't need any JS runtime installed to write grammars, because technically tree-sitter CLI already has a JS runtime included and using that it converts your grammar first to an intermediate JSON format, then it generates parser code in C. And then this C code gets compiled into a shared library, which is what editors like Emacs use, so to use tree-sitter modules you definitely don't need a JS runtime either.
You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a primary driver in the background.
My dad said he stopped being a professor because of that.
He liked the research, and he even liked teaching, but he absolutely hated having to constantly try and find grant money. He said he ended up seeing everyone as "potential funders" and less like "people" because his job kind of depended on it, and it ended up burning him out. He lasted four years and went into engineering.
I don't know that "motivation" is the right word for it, because I don't think professors like having to find grant money all the time. I think most people who get PhDs and try to go to academia do it for a genuine love for the subject, and they find the grant-searching to be a necessary evil part of the job; it's more "survival" than regular motivation, though I am admittedly splitting hairs here.
If you rotate it so the board looks like the traditional solitaire layout, the direction of free tiles is horizontal as it's supposed to be. But then the images on the tiles are rotated 90 degrees. Either way you look at it, something is non-standard.
The other thing is that this implementation doesn't seem to support overlapping tiles, which is kind of important. For instance, the topmost tile should overlap and block all four tiles under it.
Thank you for the insight! I think rotating the tile images is key. Since I’m using CSS Grid for positioning, there are some limitations around overlap like the one you mentioned, but it should be solvable. I’ll keep working on it to bring it closer to the standard behavior.
Two games in a row now I have gotten to a point where the last two pieces are ontop of eachother. I think this is perfectly fine, but seems to happen a little too often. Or I was just very unlucky.
The author is definitely claiming that it's not just about naming conventions: "These different perspectives ultimately amount, I argue, to mathematically inequivalent structural conceptions of the complex numbers". So you would need to argue against the substance of the article to have a basis for asserting that it is just about naming conventions.
Article: "They form the complex field, of course, with the corresponding algebraic structure, but do we think of the complex numbers necessarily also with their smooth topological structure? Is the real field necessarily distinguished as a fixed particular subfield of the complex numbers? Do we understand the complex numbers necessarily to come with their rigid coordinate structure of real and imaginary parts?"
So yes these are choices. If I care how the complex plane maps onto some real number somewhere, then I have to pick a mapping. "Real part" is only one conventional mapping. Ditto the other stuff: If I'm going to do contour integrals then I've implied some things about metric and handedness.
I still don't see how this really puts mathematicians in "disagreement." Let's pedestrian example:
I usually make an x,y plot with the x-axis pointing to the right and the y-axis pointing away from me. If I put a z-axis, personally I'll make it upwards out of the paper (sometimes this matters). Usually, but not always, my co-ordinates are meant to be smooth. But if somebody does some of this another way, are they really disagreeing with me? I think "no." If we're talking about the same problem, we'll eventually get the same answer (after we each fix 3 or 4 mistakes). If we're talking about different problems, then we need our answers to potentially "disagree."
Exactly. So I feel like all the article really says is that "Complex numbers" doesn't necessarily tell you everything you need to know. It depends on what you're doing with them.
It honestly sounds like how a diaper-wearing baby would mispronounce kilobyte.
"I will not sacrifice my dignity. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds with awkward pronunciations. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done to the kilobyte!"
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