delnan

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Mar 19	comment	upgrading to newer version of compiler Testing, testing, testing.
Mar 17	comment	Method for detecting deadlocks @castironpi I saw a source link, but ignored it because throwing the source code at people is no substitute for a well-written explanation of the core idea. Only now I took a look, and yes there's a long-ish docstring. (I am rather well acquainted with graph traversal, having written numerous programs whose core data is essentially a graph. Correct reasoning about concurrency is where I fail.) Apart from that, what about my main complaint?
Mar 17	comment	Why Java does not support private/protected inheritance like C++? One doesn't need a reason to omit a feature, one needs a reason (ideally, several good ones) to add it.
Mar 17	comment	Method for detecting deadlocks You didn't actually tell us anything about how you detect whether a deadlock would occur. And of course any runtime check (as opposed to proof by static analysis) it doesn't tell you about the problem until it is actually triggered, which may not reproducible/testable/deterministic. What's the advantage over just letting it deadlock? I only see one downside: You get an exception instead of a deadlock, which adds ways to ignore the problem (swallow the exception; silently re-launch threads that error out).
Mar 16	comment	C# The Complete Reference by Schildt: does it matter about using an older edition? Side note: Herbert Schildt's C and C++ texts are notoriously error-ridden and misguided. I have no idea if the C# books suffer from the same issues, but in any case, there are probably more really great books about C# than this one.
Mar 13	comment	Python potential for science applications? Python is used a lot for Science. See SciPy, Sage, and countless people using those and other solutions. As a specific example, CERN has a fair bit of Python IIRC, though mostly for "prototyping". And regarding compilation: See programmers.stackexchange.com/q/181944/7043 and note that your approach to this issue is way too simplistic.
Mar 13	comment	Python potential for science applications? Translating to C or C++ by hand doesn't get you nearly as much speed increase as one would hope either if done badly. And it's really easy to do badly.
Mar 13	comment	Would Python be too slow for client-side use in Browsers? @TMN What Daniel B said, and also gzip should reduce the difference. Oh, and Python doesn't need most of those new lines and spaces. Many (though not all) lines can be joined together just fine in Python, e.g. `a = something(); frobincate(a); return quux` and `if condition: react()` are single line each. And n indentation levels needs only n spaces, not n * 4 spaces.
Mar 12	comment	How do I handle having so many SQL queries? Even with an ORM, you still need the moral equivalent to queries (e.g. a bunch of LINQ operations), and they're not necessarily simpler. Better than embedding SQL in strings in the source code, but as the logic doesn't magically become non-trivial, it's still important where you put them. In that sense, you don't really answer the question.
Mar 12	comment	Would Python be too slow for client-side use in Browsers? @Profpatsch From the state of it last time I looked at, it doesn't even implement very large parts of the Python language. Conveniently, among the unimplemented features are those that are hard implement well atop of JavaScript. To paraphrase one of the PyPy authors: It's easy to make a nontrivial subset of Python fast, full Python is where it becomes hard.
Mar 12	comment	What's the next level of abstraction? @Giorgio (Arguably) True, yes, but neither really relevant here nor contrary to anything that has been said, so I don't get why you stress the point so much.
Mar 12	comment	Would Python be too slow for client-side use in Browsers? Well, CoffeeScript is essentially a different syntax for the same core concepts as JavaScript, and C is essentially a portable assembly language. Python and Javascript, on the other hand, differ quite a lot. To implement Python correctly, you need to support (among billions of other things) the class model, operator overloading, metaclasses, etc. and most of that doesn't map to JavaScript easily and efficiently. Same problem with compiling either of them to C or machine code. A specializing JIT may be your only hope, but JIT compilers targeting JS are yet to be proven practical.
Mar 12	comment	Would Python be too slow for client-side use in Browsers? Your first point doesn't follow. Everything can be compiled to almost everything (including machine code), but that doesn't mean a program written in some language L and compiled to some language C is as fast as an equivalent program written in language C.
Mar 12	comment	What's the next level of abstraction? @Giorgio Absolutely, and that's not what I objected to. To adopt your example, it's equally possible (and perhaps even better) to switch to a different sorting algorithm altogether, which is not necessarily more or less abstract. In your wording, I was only pointing out that it's not a total order. Not even with the examples in the question.
Mar 9	comment	How Immutable Sets are Manipulated I wouldn't look at immutable collection for performance, they have other benefits. AFAIK it is rather rare for immutable collections to be actually faster than mutable ones, all other things (sophistication of implementation, cleverness of algorithms, performance of relevant primitives such as memory allocation and looping) being equal. That is not to say they are slower, either.
Mar 8	answered	Are there any programming languages understood by all operating systems, if so what?
Mar 8	comment	Should developers be worried about automation that make them redundant eventually? If I automate something, I don't make myself redundant, I make a part of my job easier and free up time for other tasks ;-)
Mar 7	comment	Thread safety IDE warnings In fact, there are numerous research languages geared towards making concurrency easier to do correctly. They often take more radical approaches than just allowing detection of potential issues, many take new approaches to concurrency entirely (i.e. not using threads/locks/shared memory explicitly). That's not even getting into attempts of automatic parallelization.
Mar 7	comment	Thread safety IDE warnings Thread safety is much more complicated than that. So my hunch is: No, it's about as useful as asking the compiler to find violations of GUI design guidelines ;-)
Mar 6	comment	Using a public username as a login username @Gaz_Edge The URL includes an ID instead, but still, from the URL of your profile and from a link on my profile, I can guess that the link to edit your profile -- yet I get a 404 there, as SE (like any remotely decent site) applies proper authorization checks.