Brian Beckman

I noticed that a k-form a has an implicit parameter p, a point in manifold M where the cotangent space T*pM of the k explicit parameters of a are rooted. This reminded me of the implicit "this" of OOP and the implicit continuation param in CPS. Could OOP and CPS just be k-forms?

Finding that Python 3 f-strings work great with hypothesis events: e.g., event(f"""isnan(t1) {math.isnan(t1)}"""). https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_modules/hypothesis/control.html#event …

Doing new big project with "non-fundamentalist" TDD (it's OK if tests pass early :) Key things: change one thing at a time (if possible); never more than a few minutes away from working again; refactor as distinctions become clear; cutover from old only when new is working, etc.

I was just treated to an honest "thermometer progress bar." It took 1s to get halfway from left to right, another 1s to get half of half the remaining way, then another 1s to get half of half of half of the remaining way. It's been inside the last pixel on the right for an hour.

TIL that 4 is the smallest dimension that has non-simple elements in its Grassmann algebra, i.e., elements that are not exterior products of 1-elements. That fact is one way to understand why 2-space and 3-space are special not only in physics, but in mathematics too.

overheard in the coffee bar: grey-haired woman to teenaged male: “you don’t have to be good; you don’t have to be smart; you don’t have to be decent; you just have to be strong.”

In 2005, I ghostwrote a coffee-table book of predictions for 2020. I knew at the time it was nonsense, but my customer was delighted. It did NOT predict the iPhone, the cloud, TensorFlow (my moniker for novo-AI) ... ... ... . It did predict that SQL would be everywhere.

Today I Learned that Wolfram's "Block" does parallel, confluent, topological assignment, like a supercharged "let*" in scheme, as opposed to "With" and "Module," which do only serial (nested) assignment. "Block[{c = b^2, a = 42, b = a}, c] ~~> 1764".

I need to learn the classic Java Design Patterns (JDP) because I am working with a large legacy code base. The quick way for me is this secret decoder ring from Clojure to JDP, ironic because I am pretty sure it was meant to teach Clojure to Javaists :) http://mishadoff.com/blog/clojure-design-patterns/ …

In continuation-passing style (CPS), every function takes a mandatory argument, `k`, the continuation function. In object-oriented programming (OOP), every function takes a mandatory argument, `this`, effectively a dispatch function. Duality between CPS and OOP?

There are 2^128 distinct UUIDs. That's about 565 trillion moles. If every UUID were a water molecule, that would be about 10 cubic kilometers of water, enough to slightly overflow Lake Cayuga in New York.

I had spare time and read Wikipedia on Smalltalk. I've been curious about it for decades because it's revered by people I respect. I see discussion of "reflection" as if it were profound. Isn't it just a hack of homoiconicity? so mundane it doesn't even merit a name in a Lisp?

Overheard in the coffee lounge: "Reader and Writer are just inversion of control. Instead of threading configs and loggers around in every parameter list, you just let Reader and Writer call your business logic."