nicbarker.com
Open source developer & programming educator.
github.com/nicbarker for my projects.
https://www.youtube.com/@nicbarkeragain for programming videos.
ex engineering @canva & game dev @cerebralfix
459 posts
566 followers
203 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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Congrats on your temporary retirement Sean 😁
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Thank you 😁 and yes, that last shot of the mirror took a bit of work to get right haha
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Yes you're right, under certain circumstances the compiler can transform a recursive call into a loop, which means you don't need a stack frame for each layer of depth 🙂
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Compared to iteration where inside your while loop, any local variables there will just be mutated / overridden rather than allocated again
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The main difference there will be that with recursion, you’ll need to pay the full cost (memory wise) of all the local variables in every stack frame, which can very quickly add up to a significant % of your 64k of L1 🙂
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Exactly, picking the level of difficulty is one of the hardest things about making educational videos - I try to start easy then have a reasonably smooth increase up to the more complex parts 🙂
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Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate it 🙂
My older videos are a bit rough (especially back when I was still recording the entire thing in one take), but I hope there's still some useful bits in there!
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I 100% agree with this, especially for the larger AI auto complete. It's like having an over eager junior constantly talking in your ear while you're trying to program.
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I'm sure that overall I'm faster and more effective with the modern tools, but observing this phenomenon is making me wonder if I should be essentially "working out" by writing code in plain old notepad a few times a week.
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Yeah my programming exams in university were "write the code on paper" style. I personally don't think it's a good method of assessment but at least it avoids the AI problems.
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The things in my life that in hindsight I am very proud of are almost exclusively things that I was convinced I spent 10 times too long on at the time.
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As a programmer I've lost track of the number of times I've oscillated between "society is unable to comprehend my brilliance" and "I'm probably the dumbest person to ever sit in front of a computer"
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I also think now that Microsoft owns Github there is a perverse incentive in place - as with every massive tech company, MS has made enormous profits off the back of open source work without proper compensation, and it's in their interest for things to stay that way.
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I also wonder whether github is missing an opportunity to offer paid software licenses (basically, an app store) alongside $0 open source, given that ends up being the pathway to sustainability for many long term FOSS maintainers.
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Steam, for all its faults, does have systems in place to incentivise quality - public facing aggregated reviews & scores from users, easily accessible tags and genre charts, an "early access" model specifically for partially complete software.
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I think it's reasonable to look to a section of our industry that manages to reasonably consistently release feature complete and documented software (i.e. video games), and recently I've been thinking that the steam model might work better than the github one for open source.
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I absolutely support and believe in the idea that maintainers of critical infrastructure should be paid for their time, but I also think that to move forward productively as a discipline, we need to hold what we release for "free" to a higher standard.
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I really like this x*y*z framing, I think it helps illustrate the combinatorial explosion of problems we have in the real world!
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I've heard this from several people about clojure! Will definitely have to try it out 😁
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The problem is unfortunately self fulfilling, as new software is built on more and more layers, modifications in the lower layers cause ripples of forced updates and deprecation downstream. You can only build stability on top of stability.
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Surely we can just do a little bit and not go full haskell 😁
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Same here!
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Oh boy, I can’t wait to visit these two distinct locations!
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The process of learning a technical topic in the modern world feels like following a "Top 10 things to see in New Zealand" guide for your holiday, only to find that all 10 locations are actually the same place, with the photos taken from a different angle.
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Can’t argue with that!
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Pretty much 🙂 I don't even have a particular "correct" answer in mind, my soft red flag answer would be "they're bad but I can't explain why", and I suspect with more experienced people it would lead to some interesting discussions. Would be a plus if threading gets mentioned!
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Apple instruments is actually fantastic if you’re on osx, superluminal on the windows - I have tried to like the visual studio profiler over the years but just struggle to get useful in depth results out of it
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I honestly had no idea there were black squirrels, what a cool little dude!