(no subject)

[dr_tectonic]

My work computer churned out 16,000 runs of the game this weekend, so I had enough data to figure out how to balance the hazard scores properly today. Got a bunch of stuff tweaked, left it running more for tomorrow so I can compare the changes.

I did lots of probability calculations today. Probability is such a useful thing to understand, and important to so many disciplines, that I'm surprised it's not taught more widely in highschool. I'm really glad I took Prof. Rota's probability course my senior year at MIT. (Although, most of the other students seemed to have had at least a little bit of exposure to it, so maybe it's just my secondary education that was totally lacking.)

Today's I-hate-java rant: whoever thought that we still needed to have both floats and doubles as a core part of the language needs to be beaten with a stick. There should be integers and non-integer numbers, and if anybody needs something more complicated, they should use a special package that lets them decide how many bytes of memory to use to represent each number. Compiler errors that claim no matching signature could be found because "0.2" is a double and not a float fill me with homicidal rage.

Comments

[navrins]

whoever thought that we still needed to have both floats and doubles as a core part of the language needs to be beaten with a stick

Now *that* Java rant I'll agree with completely.

I'll go further and complain about the fact that *some* AWT/Swing methods take floats, and some take doubles, and woe upon the programmer who forgets which are which. (There is, as I recall, some consistency, but it's never explained and easy to miss.)

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I think the core mistake was deciding to still have primitives at all, instead of making EVERYTHING an object. But that probably would have been too big a leap for the C++ programmers java wanted to convert.

[dpolicar]

My introduction to Smalltalk made my head hurt for precisely this reason. But once I reached a state where it made perfect sense that loop-iteration was just a method defined on the number class, I was spoiled for all these other languages that claim to be OO.