“Notes” is short for “lecture notes” and has nothing to do with size.

The current version is more "textbook" than "notes", but like many textbooks it originated as lecture notes because no sane person would sit down and write a textbook.

> languages like Python & Javascript have been around forever, support for them isn't going away

??? Python 2 went out of support five years ago.

I mean C89 has no support, it's not getting an update or a bugfix, the standard is what it is. So if vendor support is your overriding concern, you should be constantly updating your software to LTS versions.

I meant support in terms of there's an active community of people using the language and building things with it. It's not going to die as a language like Algol 68 or Pascal.

C89 still has an active community of people using the language and building things with it.

In addition to this, its existence and validity is still relied on by basically every other language via standard library, transient dependency, or calling convention. Heck, practically every C++ project probably depends on it.

The Linux Kernel, ffmpeg, SQLite, curl and many others chose C89 and often consider using C99, but most do not. Each of those projects also write at-length via newsletter or blog as to why they’re still not quite ready to update (and sometimes why they are.)

The Linux kernel and ffmpeg require C11.

Yes, “chose” in past-tense (and that whole clause about the tension displayed in public communications of these projects contemplating the change.

Both projects made this change in the last couple years. ffmpeg still requires c99 compatibility for their headers, and may indefinitely.

When Linux was created, there was not much choice. In reality, most active projects moved on and only projects with relatively extreme portability requirements stick with C89, mostly because MSVC does not support anything later properly.

I think that’s fair, but I also believe that the same things that make C89 meet “extreme portability requirements” are why Eskil still uses it.

Should everyone? No, probably not.

Yes, but also because he made it work well for him. He also understands that most of the innovations in programming languages is actually not nearly as useful as people think and often does more harm than good. Rejecting newer C standards is a bit too extreme in my opinion, as C is very slowly evolving already.

Is there an active community of people using Python 2 and building things with it? Meanwhile, there are plenty of actively maintained compilers for C89.

I have two different compilers that implement C89 on my computer right now and I know of at least one other. How much support do you require before you consider something supported?

One of the funny things about Bible translations is that more modern translations are based on older manuscripts than older translations, due to advances in archeology. SE can't carry any translations that incorporate the insights of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and having access to some of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts is a pretty big deal when it comes to translating the Tanakh.

It's true, modern versions of War and Peace can't be hosted at SE, but those modern versions generally don't reflect revolutionary leaps in archeology :)

> Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best."

The site already hosts a number of works that were originally written in languages other than English, and yet it had no problems making an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." The obvious solution would be to just allowing multiple translations of foreign-language books.

Right, because ChatGPT is never wrong.

It is very often wrong, but (at least ChatGPT4) outputs proper names correctly. Principles/Patters may seem similar for someone who hasn't been around long enough to see the whole hype cycle of "Gang of Four" seminal work.

Note that “Oren and Patashnik” is one person named Oren Patashnik.

Thanks! The correct authors are Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik.

So, it's a thing that appends "please format your response as the following JSON" to the prompt", then validates the actual response against the schema, all in a "while (true)" loop (literally) until it succeeds. This unbelievable achievement is a work of seven people (authors of the blog post).

Honestly, this is getting beyond embarrassing. How is this the world we live in?

It's because not everyone can be as gifted as you.

I think the (arguably very prototypical) implementation is not what's interesting here. It's the concept itself. Natural language may soon become the default interface for most of the computing people do on a day to day basis, and tools like these will make it easier to create new applications in this space.

I'm gonna love trying to figure out what query gets the support chatbot to pair me with an actual human so that I can solve something that's off script

Ideally you would jutst click the "talk to a human" button, but what do I know?

Yeah it’s basically a retry loop. I’m curious about the average response time and the worst case amount of iterations.

At best, all these “retry until successfully” are just hacks to bridge the formal world with the stochastic. It’s just useless without some stats on how it performs.

And even if it conforms. Your not sure the data makes sense. Probably .. but exactly that probably

I would not recommend using this in production.

Hm... so how do we know that the actual values in the produced json are correct???

As with anything output by “AI”: you don’t.

One of the authors is Anders Hejlsberg, the guy behind c# and delphi

I think he's probably more of an author in the way that the leader of a research team is always credited on any paper by the team, even if he didn't personally do any actual work on it?

Anyway, TIL that Hejlsberg is also involved with TypeScript...

That’s what makes it even more embarrassing.

If we exclude 0, the only solutions are 2^1 = 1^2 + 1 and 3^2 = 2^3 + 1

That is correct. Why are there no others?

Because Catalan’s conjecture.

> Catalan's conjecture was proven by Preda Mihăilescu in April 2002.

Cool, so the conjecture's a theorem.

https://xn--uni-gttingen-8ib.academia.edu/PredaMihailescu

Which has an extremely complicated proof :-(

I wouldn’t call it extremely complicated; it is much simpler than the proof of FLT.

Yes, but there is a much simpler proof.

Something related to prime factorization maybe?

Do tell.