This is possibly one of the more cursed single sentences I've ever seen in a job posting

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @aud @SnoopJ @glyph POLYENBY (am I doing this right?)

Anyway, of all things, Visual fucking Basic let you redefine array bases on a compilation-unit level, which created no small amount of bugs.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I wish literally anyone except for Oracle had purchased Sun.

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @SnoopJ @aud @glyph IKR? I keep thinking that really just needs to be in any new language. generalize it so that you can just list parameterized invariants. But that just gets back to hypothesis and similar libraries... the ring and field axioms were even cooler than that for what information they gave the compiler.

Kevin Riggle

@SnoopJ @xgranade @aud What I really want is the LLM to translate idiomatic COBOL to idiomatic Java and then the transpiler and some formal methods to prove that the idiomatic Java is identical to the idiomatic COBOL, but that sounds like hard work and real computer science and software engineering so it’s probably not what they’re doing

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] oh Jesus. Chapel just basically exposed the range map to the user, should you wish it, for any individual array. I think you could still compile assuming the default index started at 1 as an option but that was just during the change; I don’t think you could arbitrarily change them all at the compile level. Oooof.

Irenes (many)

@xgranade @SnoopJ @aud @glyph yeah absolutely

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, that actually sounds like it would be useful and work! So definitely not what they’re doing.

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ireneista @SnoopJ @aud @glyph Slide 116 or so of https://web.archive.org/web/20060819201513/http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutorialSlides9Jun2006.pdf has a good summary.

_NetNomad

@SnoopJ @aud @glyph @xgranade most of our codebase where i work is COBOL and every few years we start talking to a new company that claims they can translate it into Java, but none have actually been able to deliver. my conspiracy theory is that any companies still left with mainframes and COBOL are far past the point of being able to transition from that, and these COBOL-away companies make all their money doing long expensive consultations before saying it won't work and finding another sucker. it's Lucy-pulling-the-football-out-from-under-Charlie-Brown-as-a-Service, or LptfofuCBaaS

Xandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@aud @SnoopJ @glyph @ireneista Oh no, it was slightly worse than that even still. Any file in your project could have a compiler directive that changed the array base globally for the project. It wasn't even an option in your project, that might make some sense!

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] okay! Having not just focused on the LaTeX part this time but the ring and field one… that is… I want that.

Am I correct in thinking that would mean, like, compiler created operator overloads/implementations for arbitrary types for which you could define what the result must be??

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] holy fuck

SpookJ 👻

@xgranade @ireneista @aud @glyph [record scratch] yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] … alright, well, when phrased that way, it is much less appealing.