mahiwaga

So I ran across an old post about the differences between Cocoa and Carbon¹².

…and, yeah, I’m not a developer of any kind, much less a Mac developer, so I don’t know why it surprises me so, but apparently Carbon was deprecated back in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) (which is also when “Mac OS X” was deprecated and replaced by “OS X”)

It’s interesting to look back at posts about how Carbon was going to last forever, but no one knew that iOS was going to be the future yet.

• I Would Not Feel So All Alone • 2003 Aug 5 • John Gruber • Daring Fireball
• Some Assembly Required • 2006 Oct 5 • John Gruber • Daring Fireball

Speaking of OS naming nomenclature, I am now wondering what if anything Apple will do when iOS 10 is released.

Jason Snell at Macworld speculates about the future of (the nomenclature of) OS X.

And with the release of Swift, there’s speculation about the impending deprecation of Cocoa.

The Death of Cocoa • 2014 Dec 29 • Mattt Thompson • NSHipster

This XKCD post (mentioned [previously]) really got me thinking too much about the analogy between genetic code and computer code.

Matthew Cobb adds more nuance (h/t Michael C.)

DNA: optimised source code? • 2015 Nov 18 • Matthew Cobb • Why Evolution Is True

Now that the Central Dogma is recognized to be more flexible, it seems clear DNA isn’t really source code. It’s more like a serialized object. While DNA can have other functions other than data storage and transmission^1,2, in general you have to process and deserialize it to generate executable code. The language DNA, RNA, and protein are written in is (bio)chemistry and the architecture it’s running on is physics.³

So, basically you have three types of byte code notation^4,5,6 that are related but not identical and all capable of interacting directly as well as being directly executed with no sandboxing whatsoever, although one form is typically used for data storage, one for message passing, and one for actual program execution. The message passing notation was originally used for all three purposes^7,8,9, but unsurprisingly it was forked and partly deprecated, although bits of legacy code still rely on its versatility.¹⁰

Molecular and Cell Biology is basically an attempt to reverse engineer a 4-billion year old OS and architecture by looking only at console messages and error logs.

DNA sequencing finally gave us the ability to read the file system directly but it’s still a long hard slog to figure out the higher level structures/motifs/moieties.¹¹

And even though we now have file system access, there isn’t any source code or even header files. We’re basically just looking at the raw binary (or quaternary?) code.

I don’t code professionally, but I’ve been a programming dilettante since I was like eight years old #nerdalert

BASIC, 6502 assembly, Logo, Pascal. A little C. (Very little C). Lots and lots of Perl. Then Ruby. I suppose it’s the programming language I’ve stuck with the longest out of all of them, really.

But one of the biggest problems with interpreted languages in a world where Moore’s Law is starting to peter out¹ is that it’s always going to be slow(er).

Now I’m not really sure that switching to a static-site blog generator written in a compiled language is necessarily going to cut down on my build times, but I’ve been looking.

(As an aside, apparently Jekyll works with JRuby now but I haven’t been able to successfully build JRuby.)

Which leads me to a list of languages with Ruby-like syntax:

• Crystal
• Reia
• Mirah

On the etymology of peter out:

1846 US miners’ slang, from 1812 peter ‎(“to become exhausted”). Various speculative etymologies have been suggested, either from St. Peter (from sense of “rock”), French péter ‎(“to fart”), or saltpeter (ingredient in gunpowder, hence used in mining)

So I think I found the post where I signed up for OK Cupid for the sole purpose of taking a Harry Potter quiz.

I didn’t actually try using OK Cupid for its intended purpose until last year after B and M told me about how they met on the site. I immediately had terrible luck.

The things about ISIS is that it really wasn’t unforeseeable. People knew that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. People knew that torturing and murdering Iraqis was going to create new enemies. People knew that creating a power vacuum meant worse people coming into power.

It’s kind of creepy to think about how obvious it was even eight years ago, after Mission Accomplished and Abu Ghraib and Fallujah.

It’s kind of sad that we don’t ever learn from our mistakes.