On 11 December 2013 23:32, Francesco Cattoglio <francesco.cattoglio@gmail.com> wrote:
> Damn you guys speaking about food, now I'm hungry again!
>
>
> On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at 21:12:20 UTC, Brian Schott wrote:
>>
>> I lost -15 pounds or so this year. Does that count?
>
>
> Lost -15 pounds = gained 15 pounds, right?
>
> 2014 is the year I (finally) get my master degree. That one is a given.
> My _dream_ for 2014 is having a chance to prove that D + ZeroMQ can earn a
> place in the scientific computing world (I got so much tired of C/C++ and
> MPI), but I will have to fight people that still think that there's nothing
> a good FORTRAN77 code can't compute.
> Also, I would like to contribute more to the D language.
> Will I succeed? Only time will tell!
>
> Oh, also, I hope to run away from Italy, and spend a good year somewhere in Europe! :D

Come to Brighton (UK).  :-)

On 11 December 2013 21:30, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:
> On 11/12/13 22:00, bearophile wrote:
>>
>> I am glad to read all this. And yes, good vegetables are very good food. I
>> also
>> suggest raw fennel, raw carrots, raw celery stalks, raw cucumber, steamed
>> broccoli (and related: brassica oleracea var capitata rubyball, purple
>> cauliflower, romanesco broccoli, curled cabbage, lacinato kale, both
>> steamed and
>> in soups with some breads and carrot pieces, zucchine (cucurbita pepo)),
>> eggplants, plus several fruits as pomegranate, etc. :-)
>
>
> Take sliced fennel, sliced celery, partially-crushed walnuts, mix together, grate flakes of parmesan over the top, and finally drizzle over with a really good olive oil.  (Optionally also drizzle over with lemon juice, freshly squeezed.)
>
> One delicious salad is yours. :-)
>

With one butternut squash diced and oven roasted till tender, and a pasta of your choice (linguine or farfalle are my preferred). Make an onion, garlic and sage saute in a deep pan, mix in butternut squash (mash it) and pasta, sprinkle in pine nuts and serve with parmesan and optionally drizzle of olive oil.  ->  One pasta dish that melts in your mouth hot or cold. :o)

On 12/12/13, Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
> With one butternut squash diced and oven roasted till tender, and a pasta of your choice (linguine or farfalle are my preferred). Make an onion, garlic and sage saute in a deep pan, mix in butternut squash (mash it) and pasta, sprinkle in pine nuts and serve with parmesan and optionally drizzle of olive oil.  ->  One pasta dish that melts in your mouth hot or cold. :o)

This thread seems to have taken a delicious turn!

On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at 19:45:25 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> As for my future plans, I'm hoping to land myself a nice
> programming-related job next year. I've never had a programming job,
> most of the paid work I ever did was physical work, such as drilling
> through bricks, rock, concrete, installing and repairing air
> conditioners, installing central heating systems, lighting and
> electrical work, and stuff like that.

I'm actually baffled to hear that someone of your caliber has is not a professional programmer. Passion and theory alone will only get you so far... (IMO).

So, I hope you land yourself that job.

> I also want to and plan to study algorithms this year. Whenever some
> algorithm-related discussion popped up in the newsgroups I would
> typically avoid giving any input as most of the conversation would go
> over my head. But I'm gonna bite down and study hard, I really want to
> "grok" it.

Algorithms are a major branch of programming, and, IMO, one of the funnest ones to study. Having solid knowledge of all the major algorithms (as well as data structures in general, they are also "forms" of algorithms) will *always* help you tremendously, no matter what you are doing.

I (personally) really enjoy thinking in terms of "complexity" (in operations or memory), "worst case complexity" or "amortized cost".

Having a background in math helps, but if you don't have it, it means ever more stuff to learn! Learning is fun.

> > My first mini-geek is due in June :D

> Awesome! So it's a he?

Who said girls can't be geeks? Seriously though, I don't know yet.

On 12/12/2013 12:09 AM, Mike Parker wrote:

> And on a personal note, I "won" NaNoWriMo.

Wow! If winning means completing 50K words, my daughter did the same! :)

Ali

On 12/12/13, monarch_dodra <monarchdodra@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm actually baffled to hear that someone of your caliber has is not a professional programmer. Passion and theory alone will only get you so far... (IMO).
>
> So, I hope you land yourself that job.

Thanks. I'm currently somewhere in a pre-interview stage with Sociomantic, we'll see how it goes!

On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at 19:45:25 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:

2013
Wrote a D code base for a screen reader plugin (NVDA) and a rudimentary server for mobile phones (vibe.d). Learned more about D.

2014
Bring old bits of my D code up to modern D-standards. Dig deeper and use the full power of D (where necessary). A general spring cleaning for code.
Make the plugin and the web service available (for free).
Try to re-write in D or at least interface to some of the algorithms developed by colleagues and other people in other languages (e.g. try MatD), and create a solid code base.
Keep on learning and promoting D and write the odd blog about how D can help solve _practical_ problems.
Think about how D's features and the freedom it provides can help develop new approaches to structuring programs (something that's been on my mind for a few months now).

On 12/12/13 01:56, bearophile wrote:
> Look better, Julia aims also at partially replacing Python as golden glue in
> scientific computing, and it seems to have some of the numbers for it. It's
> statically typed, it has type inferencing, a refined type system with
> multi-methods and more, and a good LLVM-based JIT (that's in my benchmarks
> produces a performance no more than 2-4 times slower than D compiled with ldc2.
> If you compile D with dmd Julia is often faster for FP-heavy code. This means
> it's much faster than any Python code).

Is that taking into account stuff like NumPy/SciPy which is C underneath and (according to colleagues who use it; I don't) super-fast?

> It's better than Matlab about as much as  D is better than C, and it's already
> better than Python for some things :-) And Julia is currently much more
> flexible than D (there's a REPL, lot of scientific routines in the std lib, and
> the JIT). In two years its easy to write code has allowed lot of people to
> write more standard library than D community has done in 7 years.

Interesting.  I did take a look at Julia after discovering that a colleague used it; it certainly has many friendly features, but I found myself worrying that some of the "easy" mathematical notation might very readily lend itself to unfortunate typos that in turn would generate bugs and wrong results.

That said, when it comes to stuff like MATLAB/Octave you are often not writing extended code bases but short and easy stuff for data analysis, so there is much less need for concern over this kind of thing.  I imagine the same might apply to Julia, which at the same time looks like it should make it easier to develop larger-scale stuff if it's wanted, despite the things I'm worried about.

On 12/12/13 00:32, Francesco Cattoglio wrote:
> Oh, also, I hope to run away from Italy, and spend a good year somewhere in
> Europe! :D

La situazione corrente chiaramente non è buono ... :-(

Where in Italy are you based, out of curiosity?

On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 10:34:40 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 12/12/13 01:56, bearophile wrote:
>> Look better, Julia aims also at partially replacing Python as golden glue in
>> scientific computing, and it seems to have some of the numbers for it. It's
>> statically typed, it has type inferencing, a refined type system with
>> multi-methods and more, and a good LLVM-based JIT (that's in my benchmarks
>> produces a performance no more than 2-4 times slower than D compiled with ldc2.
>> If you compile D with dmd Julia is often faster for FP-heavy code. This means
>> it's much faster than any Python code).
>
> Is that taking into account stuff like NumPy/SciPy which is C underneath and (according to colleagues who use it; I don't) super-fast?
>
>> It's better than Matlab about as much as  D is better than C, and it's already
>> better than Python for some things :-) And Julia is currently much more
>> flexible than D (there's a REPL, lot of scientific routines in the std lib, and
>> the JIT). In two years its easy to write code has allowed lot of people to
>> write more standard library than D community has done in 7 years.
>
> Interesting.  I did take a look at Julia after discovering that a colleague used it; it certainly has many friendly features, but I found myself worrying that some of the "easy" mathematical notation might very readily lend itself to unfortunate typos that in turn would generate bugs and wrong results.
>
> That said, when it comes to stuff like MATLAB/Octave you are often not writing extended code bases but short and easy stuff for data analysis, so there is much less need for concern over this kind of thing.  I imagine the same might apply to Julia, which at the same time looks like it should make it easier to develop larger-scale stuff if it's wanted, despite the things I'm worried about.

My colleagues use Matlab for prototyping, but you cannot use it for serious programs. The thing is that all languages like R/Matlab/Python etc. are good for testing scientific algorithms, but if you want to use them in real world programs (say speech recognition), you'll have to re-write it in a language like D/C/C++.