Ben Matthews

As a kid, I learned to write i = i +1, before school maths taught me it can’t. The point is, computers do iteration well, especially to model dynamics of real non-linear systems, while classical maths is good at finding algebraic solutions to equilibria - typically more theoretical than real. Calculus is great for understanding repeatable dynamics - such as waves in physics, also integrating over some distributions. But even without knowing that well you could still approximate stuff numerically with simple loops, test it, and if an inner-loop turns out to be time-critical or accuracy-critical (most are not), ask a mathematical colleague to rethink it - believe in iteration rather than perfect solutions.

I agree. For global discussions, are many Indians going to learn Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Arabic, and vice-versa ? Meanwhile international-english is the new latin… Even within India, the south insists to keep english as an official language, to avoid being dominated by more populous hindi-speaking north.
Alternatively LLM-translation may facilitate multi-lingual discussion, but in this case the language of software development may still be influential during such transition.
By the way - this is an important topic for future of lemmy, which should expand more towards the south - where’s a good place to develop it (beyond such set of replies)?

Hmm. I’m still using a 2014 iMac, as its 27" 5k screen still very good for coding (with added memory). Sometimes develops a bunch of thin vertical lines, which come and go maybe dependent on temperature, but hasn’t changed for for ten years and i can live with those. Just wish they’d continue providing security updates for it.

I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I’d believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.

Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

Indeed to use scala-native you’d need pure-scala libraries, but the core lib re-implements most java lib, and there are now small simple external libs available for common tasks like file management, database, etc. - for example check out the lihaoyi suite.
I mainly use scala-js (to make this) which was formerly a java app - as it compiles to both js and jvm (cross-project) can gradually convert stuff you already wrote. I’ve tried native for stuff like pre-processing data files.

I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

Scala compiles either to native, js or jvm - obviously the IO / interface options vary between these envs, but the lang is the same. Recently Scala 3.5 incorporates a simple-to-use CLI which makes it easier to compile to native (or just run a small file as a script, or experiment with a repl), native binaries are small and fast, and there are some simple io libraries. Since you can also compile to jvm to interop with java, that might help with transition.

I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)

Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven’t yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion

Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).

I see that says ‘has to be local only, not federated’ (same issue also discussed on github).
‘Local only’ suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon ‘lists’ and various ways of organising and transferring them).

Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.

From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring ‘Computer Skills’ as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.

Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i’ve been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo …

I’m using Alexandrite, find it good

I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.

I began programming java climate model with UK keyboard. When I moved to the continent, switched to swiss then belgian keyboard to better type emails/docs in french, but it was so tedious for code brackets {[()]} and some other punctuation, eventually switched back. Recently converted whole codebase to Scala 3 (here’s the model), now can drop most of those brackets. I speculate whether one motivation for creating scala3 (made in in Lausanne) was swiss/french keyboards.

I like Scala:

• multi-paradigm, you can explore many ways of doing something, within one codebase - arguably the most complex language, if you want, but doesn’t have to be: start simply, later scales robustly
• compiles and interoperates with JS, JVM, native
• Scala3 dropped brackets - easily readable like python
• great tooling (recently) - compiler infers so much -> less puzzles / testing
• developed mainly in europe, not controlled by big-tech

Fwiw, here’s my interactive climate system model running in pure scala.

Too true.
I still remember when java5 came out, many new features, great potential for a massive refactoring of my interactive climate model. Within that, I had an idea called “parallel worlds” for comparing scenarios, whereby for efficiency data was shared for parts of the system, and split across parts that varied as user adjusted parameters. So I pulled apart the whole codebase, and joined it back together again… - about two years later, by which time colleagues had given up interest.
[ story simplified to relate to point of OP - not only task in two years! ].
Now I develop a derivative climate system model in scala, but evidently it’s more interesting to develop some new complex part of the science code, than fix a graphical interface for beginners. But moods vary - some days lacking energy for refactoring, could be satisfied ticking off a few small tasks in a todo list. Yet after some time, brain craving for another big new complex idea…