I can generate a lot of tests amounting to assert(true). Yeah, LLM generated tests aren't quite that simplistic, but are you checking that all the tests actually make sense and test anything useful? If no, those tests are useless. If yes, I don't actually believe you.
It's the typical 10 line diff getting scrutinized to death, 1000 line diff: Instant LGTM.
> However, the best engineers I know are usually among the quickest to open an editor or debugger and use it fluently to try something out.
That's not my experience... mostly it's about first interrogating the actual problem with the customer and conditions under which it occurs. Maybe we even have appropriate logging in our production application? We usually do, because you know, we usually need to debug things that have already happened.
(If it's new/unreleased code, sure fine, let's find a debugger.)
Intel 8080 was launched in April 1974 and the development system for it, "Intellec 8 Mod 80", was available soon after that.
CP/M could be developed only after the launch of the 8080 and the delivery of the development system.
In UNIX, the environment variables were added in the Seventh Edition (1979-01), together with the Bourne shell.
I do not remember whether any other command interpreters used something equivalent with environment variables before the UNIX shell (excluding the interpreters for general-purpose programming languages, like LISP and APL, where you can run a function in REPL and that function can access global variables).
Therefore the quoted year may be a typo for 1979, when environment variables appeared in the UNIX shell, but were not available in the CP/M Console Command Processor (CCP, the predecessor of COMMAND.COM).
CP/M 1.0 was demoed to Intel in 1974, but they didn't buy it.
iCOM FDOS was the first operating system that was available to people, and it sure didn't have environment variables.
Anyway, these operating systems didn't have multiple directories. But you could use CP/M 2.x's ASSIGN command to bind a logical name to a physical name. Minicomputer operating systems had this, also IBM mainframe had JCL DD commands.
Been saying this for a while now. I work in aerospace, and I can tell you from first hand experience software engineers don't know what designing a spec is.
Aero, mechanical, and electrical engineers spend years designing a system. Design, requirements, reviews, redesign, more reviews, more requirements. Every single corner of the system is well understood before anything gets made. It's a detailed, time consuming, arduous process.
Software engineers think they can duplicate that process with a few skills and a weekend planning session with Claude Code. Because implementation is cheaper we don't have to go as hard as the mechanical and electrical folks, but to properly spec a system is still a massive amount of up front effort.
I think wmf's comment in this thread was absolutely correct and succinct, so I won't repeat, but I think it's worth noting that many (all?) of the Wayland devs were actually Xorg devs. Make of that what you will.
You’re thinking of this with the benefit of dedekind in your schooling - whether or not your calculus class told you about him.
Density - a gapless number line - was neither obvious nor easy to prove; the construction is usually elided even in most undergraduate calculus unless you take actual calculus “real analysis” courses.
The issue is this: for any given number you choose, I claim: you cannot tell me a number “touching” it. I can always find a number between your candidate and the first number. Ergo - the onus is on you to show that the number line is in fact continuous. What it looks like with the naive construction is something with an infinite number of holes.
I think you are getting away from my point, which pertains to what the article said, which is that mathematicians thought there were "gaps". What mathematician? Can I see the original quote?
The linguistic sleight-of-hand is what I challenge. What is this "gap" in which there are no numbers?
- A reader would naturally assume the word refers to a range. But if that is the meaning, then mathematicians never believed there were gaps between numbers.
- Or could "gap" refer to a single number, like sqrt(2)? If so, it obviously is not a gap without a number.
- Or does it refer to gaps between rational numbers? In other words, not all numbers are rational? Mathematicians did in fact believe this, from antiquity even ... but that remains true!
Regarding this naive construction you are referring to: did it precede set theory? What definition of "gap" would explain the article's treatment of it?
I don’t know the answers to all of your questions - but I believe you’d benefit from some mathematical history books around the formalization of the real analysis; I’m not the best person to give you that history.
A couple comments, though - first, all mathematics is linguistics and arguably it is all sleight of hand - that said the word “gaps” that you’ve rightly pointed out is vague is a journalists word standing in for a variety of concepts at different times.
The existence of the irrationals themselves were a secret in ancient greece - and hence known for thousands of years, but the structure of the irrationals has not been well understood until quite recently.
To talk precisely about these gaps, if you’re not a mathematical historian, you have to borrow terminology from the tools that were used to describe and formalize the irrationals -> if former concepts about the lines sound hand-wavy to you, it is because they WERE handwavy. And this handwaviness is about infinity as well, the two are intimately connected. In modern terms, the measure of the rationals across any subset of the (real) number line is zero - that is the meaning of the “gaps”. There is, between any two rationals, a great unending sea where if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero.
EDIT: for a light but engaging read about topics like this, David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More is excellent.
I think you will agree that the bulk of your comment employs a post-set-theory nomenclature.
Regarding "if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero", I ponder the question of how one might casually "choose" a value with infinite entropy.
I can generate a lot of tests amounting to assert(true). Yeah, LLM generated tests aren't quite that simplistic, but are you checking that all the tests actually make sense and test anything useful? If no, those tests are useless. If yes, I don't actually believe you.
It's the typical 10 line diff getting scrutinized to death, 1000 line diff: Instant LGTM.
Pay attention to YOUR OWN incentives.
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