• 6 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 25th, 2024

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  • Thank you.

    I did consider Julia in the beginning, but I’m using rust so I can make a python library available for people. And also because I can easily transfer other programs I have, and some other libraries in C into rust easily. My project is mostly about connecting the existing tools the grant agency has plus tools scientific communities use.

    What do you mean by official language communities? I don’t know what is rust official community. I am in rust discord but I have never gotten any response on any questions I ask about non trivial things there. I need people knowledgeable about macro, stable abi, and other features.



  • There is a python library as well. But the core algorithm and the plugins are in rust. The GIS component also is computationally intensive or memory intensive, that makes Rust have advantages over python. And the Whitehouse is also talking about more memory safe languages so it seems like a good choice to do it in rust over c/c++ for computational parts and the plugin architecture.

    Edit: As for professors. I need external professor for my committee, and this is a good option as I’m not familiar with any CS professors in my university that do grad research.










  • You know how people say “Devil you know is better than God you don’t”?

    Excel is that Devil people know. It’s not the best tool for a lot of stuffs but it let’s people do things.

    I saw a co-worker generate sequence for formula in excel for another cell in excel. They wanted to do average of all January data, instead of averageif/sumif/countif etc, they generated a sequence a1+a13+a25… And used excels’ drag down thing to make the formula. I’m like who could even verify it.




  • Some software is always going to have problems. Specially if the developer never had to work with linux.

    In my case I think of it like my choice of Linux like how people may choose other lifestyle. It’s not about having superior experience in everything, but about general good experience and self satisfaction.

    Just think of it this way, people in the 90s were happy with the softwares they had, so if some subset of software is not available to me it’s not end of the world. On the flip side many softwares are only available to me because of linux, my favorite is poppler-tools that allow me to merge PDFs and other pdf related tasks that in windows you’d need to pay Adobe for. If you compare and want things that you can’t have it’ll always make you unhappy. Everytime you search for a tool, search in linux websites or search source codes and you’ll be happy to ignore any tools that have a lot of licensing complications and windows only support. Not saying that’s the way to do it, but that’s how I do it.







  • Most open source tool have the same thing that it feels like it’s made by engineers. I think that’s because it’s true, most FOSS tools are made by engineers for engineers. Because most project start with someone needing something and then creating it and sharing it.

    Chances of a programmer needing something and then making it is a lot higher, than an artist needing it and then making it as then there’d be a need to have the necessary skills to make the software. As someone not from CS field I’ve seen how much of redundant programs are present for CS related tasks while barely some exists for other fields because the overlap of programmer and that field is low specifically FOSS programmers. And a few programmers that field would have don’t have the high level software development skills, so most open source tools made by them are “works on my machine, or works for this specific task” even though with less than 1% more effort they could have made a generalized tool.