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7:14:24
flip214
White_Flame: that's a very good argument for starting IT education with assembler or BASIC, so that people constantly look around
7:14:52
splittist
I suspect the problems people are interested in solving change over time. Back in the day it was symbolic differentiation, Eliza and block worlds. Now it's First Person Shooters and SaaS.
7:24:20
splittist
Actually, thinking back on my own experience, the first thing I wanted to do with a programming language was making rude words scroll endlessly up the screen. Then text adventures, tabletop RPG character generators, and Space Invaders. For splittist Jr it was an iPad cow clicker with in-game currency...
8:01:29
White_Flame
flip214: maybe not even starting with asm, but introducing it after the fact. People would have a mind to rederive the higher level stuff and might have an inkling to have broader ideas
8:02:56
moon-child
‘It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.’
8:12:05
White_Flame
one thing that comes up in conversation a lot here, regarding people who basically code via stack exchange and trying libraries, is who writes the libraries? how do they do so?
8:12:16
White_Flame
only when you want more than what's offered are you required to think of how to create something new
8:13:02
White_Flame
I haven't gone through the "From NAND to Tetris" course, but I would hope it gets into some of these ideas
8:33:42
beach
Quite well thank you. I think I almost finished register allocation. Some methods might still be missing but that should be easy to fix. You?
8:42:17
Josh_2
Yes its going quite well thanks, the last couple of days I have been getting a lesson in how to write instructions for normal non tech folks to follow
9:11:39
splittist
I assume technical writing and history of computing are compulsory courses for a CS degree...
9:44:00
contrapunctus
Josh_2: if you like, I could try and help you with that. Documentation is something I'm interested in working on.
10:42:36
contrapunctus
Josh_2: "running the program, observing potential improvements to UX to avoid hitting the documentation, and improving the documentation where necessary" comes to mind. Would that help?
10:56:42
Josh_2
Ah I see. I really appreciate the offer but due to the nature of the program at the current time, and the way the user interacts with it I don't think that is possible.
11:36:29
flip214
White_Flame: My son is currently learning c# in school; but starting at that point he has no idea of all the (more or less hidden) lower complexities.
11:37:10
flip214
I think that starting from a low level and going up people can really appreciate all the layers inbetween - and end up with a rough idea where to look when something goes wrong.
11:39:06
Odin-
You may have a point about appreciation, but I think the real problem is when the lower levels are just completely ignored.
11:41:37
Odin-
Resulting in severe cases of "any sufficiently advanced technology" towards programming languages and (particularly) VMs.
11:44:36
Odin-
Well, I for one don't often bother with thinking about the operation of computers in terms of the quantum physics of semiconductors.
11:52:48
no-defun-allowed
Or whatever the counter thing is, I forgot. And it's nice that looking up "ABA problem" comes up with child torture methods.
11:57:50
no-defun-allowed
In my personal experience, going from Lisp back to Java at university made me want to transfer. So I did, and then I wanted to transfer again, but decided it was too hard to transfer once already.
12:16:44
contrapunctus
no-defun-allowed: I've been advised by at least three Lispers to write something in a non-Lisp for sake of employment...but the C family icks me out and doesn't really seem to offer anything very unique. Which leaves me with...ML family, Smalltalk, Erlang, Prolog, or Forth, so far ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
12:19:14
contrapunctus
Yeah, I'm thinking I have more fun as an amateur programmer anyway. Can pick whatever language or problem which tickles my fancy. Have better qualifications and experience in my other field, too.
18:13:57
stylewarning
Xach: I'm having difficulty repro'ing this QL report: http://report.quicklisp.org/2021-03-31/failure-report/magicl.html#magicl_ext-blas
18:14:47
phoe
stylewarning: how are you trying to reproduce it? it seems that this is not a compilation error but a FASL-loading error
18:15:19
phoe
so I guess that the way to reproduce it would be to compile everything, then try loading magicl/ext-blas in a clean image
18:17:42
phoe
hmmm, magicl/ext-blas depends on magicl/core which defines the magicl.backends package
18:20:03
phoe
my train of thoughts is, this is because it is mentioned in DEFTYPE and this type might be expanded in DEFMACRO WITH-BACKENDS... hmmmm, I'm thinking out loud
18:21:13
phoe
that's because DEFTYPE is like DEFMACRO, functions called by/vars accessed in the type expansion must be available in the compilation environment, hence EVAL-ALWAYS
18:24:06
stylewarning
phoe: I'm just going to commit that because it makes sense. I admit I haven't been testing on other platforms that are a bit more picky about *-time evaluation
18:25:32
phoe
I have no idea what is it about Xach-platform that makes it picky in this particular case
18:34:46
stylewarning
phoe: well based on your hunch I did https://github.com/rigetti/magicl/pull/133