While we've been doing pottery for about 30,000 years, and woodworking for perhaps 10,000 years, we've only been programming (digital) computers for about 75 years or so.
We're still figuring out how to do it. Trying new programming language ideas is a big part of that... I started with Fortran 77, and man oh man am I glad I can program in Go now.
And even that, in woodworking there's been three "new" methods of sharpening in the last decade or so which all became trends (and counter-trends); and new tools, new jigs, new tricks pop up all the time, so...
I do almost all hand tool woodworking, but not purist. My main smoothing plane is from 1910ish. My most new fangled hand tool is a Japanese Shinto rasp.
And you’re 100% right. I’ve changed my chisel and plane iron sharpening method twice in the last 12 months.
There’s oil stones, wet stones, diamond stones, and sandpaper. Plus a leather strop with pick-your-compound. I’ve used 2 different jigs on stones to get a more consistent bevel than by hand. There’s high speed grinders with a lot of pauses and cooling to not lose the temper. There’s expensive water cooled low speed grinders. Then there’s debate on the angle, microbeveling, and how much of the back you should flatten.
I’m now using a new jig from TayTools that uses a 3M Cubitron II sandpaper disk on a drill press when they get bad. I freehand on diamond and a strop after and between resetting the bevel. It’s the laziest way I’ve found so far.
Claiming any choice is best is likely to result in fisticuffs. And don’t start a conversation on workbench design or vice choices.
Yeah, that's totally true (and probably for pottery too). I didn't mean to say, those are totally solved areas, just that we're really in the early days, and so we have a ton of learning and experimenting to do. It's a great time to be a nerd :-)
> Shen owes its origins to work done in the 90s by Mark Tarver on applying high performance automated reasoning techniques to the problem of type checking programs. The first version of the work SEQUEL (SEQUEnt processing Language) premiered at the 1993 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence under the title 'A Language for Implementing Arbitrary Logics'.
only they bring something new. Many of the languages posted here don't fall in that category. Can't learn something if you have already learned it before
Shen was on here ages ago. Probably back in like 2012 if not earlier. Programming languages and discussions on them pop up all the time as new folks discover them and it makes for good continuing talks.
Well, this is a site that a lot of programming nerds read. Programming articles seem to interest enough people here that they keep making the front page.
Maybe just ignore the articles that don't interest you?
yep, it's great. One of my favourite things about HN.
I, for one, will lament these days when the AI overlords take over and we just ask AlexaSiriGPT to write all our code in the same breath as turning on the radio.
While we've been doing pottery for about 30,000 years, and woodworking for perhaps 10,000 years, we've only been programming (digital) computers for about 75 years or so.
We're still figuring out how to do it. Trying new programming language ideas is a big part of that... I started with Fortran 77, and man oh man am I glad I can program in Go now.
Thank you language experimenters!
And even that, in woodworking there's been three "new" methods of sharpening in the last decade or so which all became trends (and counter-trends); and new tools, new jigs, new tricks pop up all the time, so...
I do almost all hand tool woodworking, but not purist. My main smoothing plane is from 1910ish. My most new fangled hand tool is a Japanese Shinto rasp.
And you’re 100% right. I’ve changed my chisel and plane iron sharpening method twice in the last 12 months.
There’s oil stones, wet stones, diamond stones, and sandpaper. Plus a leather strop with pick-your-compound. I’ve used 2 different jigs on stones to get a more consistent bevel than by hand. There’s high speed grinders with a lot of pauses and cooling to not lose the temper. There’s expensive water cooled low speed grinders. Then there’s debate on the angle, microbeveling, and how much of the back you should flatten.
I’m now using a new jig from TayTools that uses a 3M Cubitron II sandpaper disk on a drill press when they get bad. I freehand on diamond and a strop after and between resetting the bevel. It’s the laziest way I’ve found so far.
Claiming any choice is best is likely to result in fisticuffs. And don’t start a conversation on workbench design or vice choices.
Yeah, that's totally true (and probably for pottery too). I didn't mean to say, those are totally solved areas, just that we're really in the early days, and so we have a ton of learning and experimenting to do. It's a great time to be a nerd :-)
Shen is well over a decade old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3026384
Actually
> Shen owes its origins to work done in the 90s by Mark Tarver on applying high performance automated reasoning techniques to the problem of type checking programs. The first version of the work SEQUEL (SEQUEnt processing Language) premiered at the 1993 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence under the title 'A Language for Implementing Arbitrary Logics'.
https://shenlanguage.org/OSM/History.html
Yes, counting all the work well before release was why I said "well over" for just 3 years over.
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I know. Interesting & educational, isn't it?
only they bring something new. Many of the languages posted here don't fall in that category. Can't learn something if you have already learned it before
But, of course, some of us are in that lucky 10,000 [0] who haven't learned that particular lesson yet.
0: https://xkcd.com/1053/
The hell are you talking about? Shen is absolutely wild: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUJNyHAeAc8
Shen was on here ages ago. Probably back in like 2012 if not earlier. Programming languages and discussions on them pop up all the time as new folks discover them and it makes for good continuing talks.
Well, this is a site that a lot of programming nerds read. Programming articles seem to interest enough people here that they keep making the front page.
Maybe just ignore the articles that don't interest you?
yep, it's great. One of my favourite things about HN.
I, for one, will lament these days when the AI overlords take over and we just ask AlexaSiriGPT to write all our code in the same breath as turning on the radio.
And? It is called Hacker News, not Enterprise[0] News.
[0] although nothing wrong with that too.
> [0] although nothing wrong with that too.
[citation needed]