Thank you. Clear, easily understood explanations of questions I always wondered. 👍🏼

Whenever I see this image I always wonder 2 things:

1. What makes hemoglobin more efficient?
2. Why do we even need these fancy molecules to transport oxygen? Can’t we produce some kind of biological ampule that holds some pure O2 for consumption by the various processes that need it? We have dedicated organelle structures for similar tasks (i.e. mitochondria)

Apparently it’s not even really all that stable, so that whole container would rapidly decompose into probably carbon dioxide (CO2) and a bunch of pure carbon (think charcoal). At least that’s my hunch. There is a Wikipedia article on the stuff, but it’s pretty short, since it’s a pretty unusual chemical (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicarbon_monoxide ).

CO2 is of course extremely common. I’d love to see what a chemist can describe about a bottle of C2O though!

Ada, hands down. Every time I go to learn Rust I’m disappointed by the lack of safety. I get that it’s miles ahead of C++, but that’s not much. I get that it strikes a much better balance than Ada (it’s not too hard to get it to compile) but it still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of safe interfacing. Plus it’s memory model is more complicated than it needs to be (though Ada’s secondary stack takes some getting used to).

I wonder if any other Ada devs have experience with rust and can make a better comparison?

Sadly front end, like “High Level” is a very relative term. For example, in compiler design, the bit that parses code is called the “front end” since the “back end” is what emits machine code. I think that’s what they mean here, the “front end” that understands D3D8 code has been added, presumably there is also a “back end” that converts the parsed/analyzed D3D8 code into valid opcodes for consumption by GPU/CPUs.

In the other direction, a UI/UX is sometimes called a “back end” when it is part of a more complex embedded project where physical controls are the “front end”.

I still use Ada daily for my personal projects after having used it at work. I find it compliments my thinking patterns well. My only gripe with it is that they ate too much of their own dog food at AdaCore and now it can be hard to install Ada and gprbuild (due to a circular dependency). Plus gprc stole libgpr and broke some stuff too.

If you read the readme, this looks like it’s specifically for when you don’t know the correct tld or spelling of the site you’re looking for. Google searches often censor sites of borderline legality, but they’ll usually still have Wikipedia articles with accurate links.

This specifically only redirects .idk domains as a search helper. Could it possibly work better as a browser extension? Maybe. :)

That would be an excellent idea. But I feel like an even broader community should be created. Like a generic book club, but for code bases! Could even have a small handful of different code bases on the go at a time. I’d love to get to know lemmy’s, but also e.g. neovim, or even unciv :)

Maybe one day it could even start tackling Moby Dick!

I’m also wondering what’s in the top-left. Is it a bowl of stones?

Wait! I figured it out.

You were close with C-section, but got the direction wrong. Clearly this is getting ready for urgent replacement of gizzard stones! :)

In case anyone wants the real meanings: I am not a lawyer, read the f***ing manual, bank of america.

Except for one issue: it’s an even width, so now we have the inevitable attempt to make it off-centered but pointy leading to a leafageddon. Oh well, can’t have everything.

What are factions, and where do you search them? I don’t see anything in the UI?

EDIT: found them under a link under info. Thanks for setting the faction up!

Yeah, when I was picking a scale I intentionally looked for one with minimal AA cause I was worried about that. The 180-wide version was full of it, as was the 99.

FYI: I’m starting with the outline of the left half of the leaf. I have to go to work soon, but hopefully there’ll be enough outline for the rest to be filled in (just mirror it one pixel over).

After years, and many languages, I still have to say Ada. Kotlin, Rust, Julia, and Nim are my current contenders to overtake, but here’s what Ada does well enough to still be my preferred tool when appropriate:

• strictness: typically my code works the first time it successfully compiles with few or no bugs. Rust is almost on par in this respect.
• structure: a corollary of the above is that it forces me to “plan ahead” more than just “start coding” which I find fits my programming style better, and leads to better “Unix Philosophy” product designs. I haven’t found any other language that has the same effect other than maybe Haskell.
• speed: I honestly find that Ada code outperforms C/C++ code most of the time. The only times C/C++ outperform Ada is after optimizations that come at the cost of readability.
• multitasking: Ada’s first-class tasks and protected objects are the only way I’ve ever been able to write bug-free concurrent programs that are more complex than async/await and/or producer/consumer structures (and I took a dedicated elective on concurrency at university!). Kotlin is almost on par in this respect with its coroutines.
• hardware: The fact that Ada basically ships with a hard real-time OS built-in and can compile to e.g. AVR means that all my fancy libraries I’ve written or saved work just as well for a desktop game, a website backend, or an embedded microprocessor. Just look into representation clauses and interrupt pragmas to see its unique powers.
• design: The whole design of the language has lead it to be the only language where I can consistently return to a multiple year old passion project with no attempt to write maintainable code, and fully understand what its doing and modify it with little effort.
• tooling: While this is the biggest downside of Ada (see below) gprbuild is still my favourite build tool. I have no idea why strongly-typed build systems aren’t more common. Its always a joy to work in gprbuild, once you get gprbuild working of course.
• static polymorphism: Ada’s generics are some of the best I’ve found. But they have some limitations that leads us into…

There are some situation where Ada shows its age:

• static calculation: I love Nim (and Zig, etc) for the ability to run arbitrary code at compile time. It allows me to describe what would normally be an opaquely initialized data structure or code path in a clear and descriptive manner.
• terseness: Ada is verbose, that’s not such a big deal, but I find its just a tad too verbose which can lead to some slight difficulty when parsing code. func/proc (Nim) vs fun (Kotlin) vs fn (Rust) doesn’t make much difference to me, but function X returns Y/procedure X starts to add a lot of visual noise to a file.
• web compilation: The ability for both Kotlin and Nim to compile to either ASM or JS is AWESOME. If I have to write a “full stack” application, Kotlin multiplatform with ktor every day.
• operator overloading: Only the built-in operators can be overloaded in Ada. It always makes me wish I could overload arbitrary operators. A small thing, but a symptom of…
• TOOLING: Ada’s tooling is BY FAR the hardest I have ever seen to get working. It takes the “eat your own dog food” too far. The fact that even in Arch Linux you have to install a bootstrap package, then the real package shows how hard it is to get a consistent build environment. ALR is helping in this respect, but is still not quite mature in my opinion.

Here’s when I use the alternatives, and their biggest weaknesses:

• Kotlin: anything where I want both one or more JS artifacts and one or more JVM/native artifacts. Weaknesses: performance, static analysis, on the fence about tooling (gradle is cool, but sometimes seems too over-engineered), Biggest weakness: IDE dependency, writing Kotlin outside of IntelliJ is a pain, which is somewhat fair given who maintains it!
• Rust: so close to beating Ada, if not for two things: ugly code - so many operators and glyphs that pollute the reading experience, maybe I’ll get used to it eventually, but for now I can’t scan Rust code, nor pick up and revisit it nearly as easily as Ada; language scale - I find Rust suffers from the C++ design attitude of “we can add this as a language feature” it takes too much mental effort to hold the entire design of the language in your head, which you sort-of have to do to develop software. Java and C are IMHO the undisputed kings in this respect. After reading through the specifications of both languages, neither will ever have any surprises in store for you. There’s no magic under the hood or special case. All the cool features are done by libraries and rely on the same simple syntax. Every time I learn a new cool thing Rust can do, its at the expense of another edge case in the compiler that modifies my conceptual model of the code.
• Julia: multiple dispatch and mathematics plus clean module design and easy unicode incorporation leads to clean code for math-y/science-y code.
• Nim: templates and macros are excellent, concept system gives access to Rust-style traits without all of the additional “ugliness” of Rust, excellent performance, tiny executables. I just find that the syntax can get clunky. The UFCS easily cleans up a lot of the mess that Rust creates with its added features, since it keeps the parsing the same even when using some fancy language feature.

Thank you for attending my TED talk :P. Any questions?

Wait until you learn about the shell specific /dev “files” like /dev/udp and /dev/tcp (which can send/recv IP traffic as if from a file)!