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Toot

Written by tef on 2025-02-05 at 18:56

https://explaining.software/archive/the-sudoku-affair/

incredible writeup of one of the best running jokes in programming

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Descendants

Written by Jonathan on 2025-02-05 at 19:01

@tef this is incredible

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Written by tef on 2025-02-05 at 20:21

@jonbro it's very well written without being too mean about it, despite having several opportunities to kick while they're down, so to speak

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Written by Rev. Poppy Haze on 2025-02-05 at 19:05

@tef the part about how your career affects how you think hit me like a ton of bricks

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Written by Smoljaguar on 2025-02-05 at 19:33

@tef Part of the contrast might also be the style of programming; norvig is used to FP whereas Jeffries is used to OOP. FP generally has concise elegant solutions which makes it easier to keep everything in your head, so I'd expect somebody used to FP to be better at that sort of code (I noticed this a lot going from dabbling in Haskell and seeing how it changed my mindset writing Python)

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Written by tef on 2025-02-05 at 19:34

@Smoljaguar it sounds like you're a functional programmer, huh

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Written by tef on 2025-02-05 at 19:36

@Smoljaguar i kid but "concise elegant solutions" is also how rubyists describe their one-liners, and also how APL programmers talk about their code too :-)

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Written by tef on 2025-02-05 at 19:38

@Smoljaguar and, well, if we're talking about constraint and search based programming, logic programming should get a look in well before it's non-goal directed cousin in modern FP

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Written by Smoljaguar on 2025-02-05 at 19:46

@tef definitely!

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Written by Smoljaguar on 2025-02-05 at 19:39

@tef Yeah, I mean I do find uiua (an array language) interesting and how it can be maximally concise but reflecting on it you do have a tradeoff between conciseness and what sort of problems you can solve, even if you do hear stories of some people claiming to write serious large projects in k

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Written by Smoljaguar on 2025-02-05 at 19:53

@tef just naive and unjaded and therefore easily taken in by enthusiastic evangelism lol

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Written by Chris Vest on 2025-02-05 at 20:43

@tef “He prevents himself from seeing the forest by pressing his face against the trees. And sometimes, as he moves from one tree to the next” 😂 wonderful use of this metaphor

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Written by Mark Dominus on 2025-02-05 at 20:58

@tef “This is belied, however, by the fact that he returned to Sudoku two years later, writing forty-five new posts on the topic.”

Wow, just brutal.

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Written by tef on 2025-02-06 at 08:41

@mjd it's still a kinder writeup than i could manage, heh

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Written by obw on 2025-02-05 at 21:04

@tef got to the end of this and realized the writing style reminded me of zach tellman's blog posts... turns out that's because he wrote it

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Written by mb21 on 2025-02-06 at 07:54

@tef haha, great writeup indeed.

to be fair, I can see that in the crud-app/business/database world, his intuition is often right: changing the database representation is a pain, and complete rewrites are a no-go. But yeah, just pretending there is no big picture is equally dooming.

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Written by tef on 2025-02-06 at 08:41

@mb21 sure, but i'm a database janitor by trade, and understand search + constraint search, because that's how you use a database

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