Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 143: 🇸🇮 SRT23 - Hiša Franko, Postojna, Podcasts and R

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

In this episode, Conor and Bryce record live from Slovenia while driving and recap Hiša Franko, the Idrija Mercury Mines and the Postojna Caves as well as chat about some podcasts and the R programming language.Link to Episode 143 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachShow NotesDate Recorded: 2023-06-20 Date Released: 2023-08-18ADSP Episode 57: Holiday Special #2 - Ljubljana, Here We Come!Hiša FrankoPredjama CastlePostojna CavesMoses Schönfinkel - On the building blocks of mathematical logicIdrija Mercury MinesTwo’s Complement PodcastTwo’s Complement Yak Shaving, Live!Two’s Complement Yak Shaving, Part 2, Also Live!Compiler ExplorerSoftware UnscriptedRichard FeldmanWhy Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm? – Richard FeldmanRoc Programming LanguageElm Programming LanguageCoRecursive PodcastFunctional Geekery PodcastSoftware Unscripted - Comparing Haskell to R with Will KurtR Programming LanguageR Pipeline Operator %>%R actuar ModuleR outerR ReduceIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusic Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0 Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-you Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

co-recursive or functional geekery we we have we have definitely gotten at least one speeding ticket already in uh slovenia he has a new podcast called software unscripted that was the second uh slovenian cat that connor made friends with i'm not sure about cobalt i know that small talk i'm such a terrible friend erlang erlang and small talk and immediately was like repulsed and my first thought was like, this is just dirt. And I was like, Bryce, there's no way we're supposed to eat this. It was kind of an evangelist for the Elm language, has done a lot of stuff with functional programming languages,

but most recently is working on a programming language called ROC. That is R-O-C. It's not vertically symmetric, but it is horizontally symmetric. And I just think there's something nice about that. But as soon as you add a semicolon to something, blah. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast, episode 143, recorded on June 20th, 2023. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we record live from the Slovenia 2023 road trip. In today's episode, we review Hisafranco,

the Idria Mercury Mines, Pestanya Caves, and we chat about some technical podcasts as well as the R programming language. Oh, man. We got none of that. You've got one job. How come you didn't test it? But it gives me a chance to redeem myself on the intro.

Hello, dear listener, and welcome to day three of the Bryce and Connor Balkans road trip. First of all, give me the mic. First of all, folks, it's not called the Bryce and Connor Balkans road trip. First of all, give me the mic. First of all, folks, it's not called the Bryce and Connor Balkan road trip. It's called the Slovenia 2023 road trip. Or, alternatively, the 2023 Slovenia road trip. Not the Balkan Bryce and Connor. And here's, folks, I'm a little upset right now. Why is that?

We've been recording for 10 minutes. Bryce had one job. Bryce had one job. Five minutes. And it was 10 minutes, man. We did the whole minutes. Bryce had Bryce had one job. Bryce had one job and it was 10 minutes, man. We did the whole intro. Bryce messed it up. I came in, saved the day. We talked about a bunch of stuff and now we got to repeat this conversation. I'm driving and I'm managing to do this. And all you have to do is hit the record button, my guy. It is true. It is true. I, uh, I didn't see the levels. The gain the gain was uh the gain was real low but uh all right so when we last left you we were in uh northern northwestern uh slovenia and uh we were headed

to dinner is that correct yeah i think so yeah yeah man this this this second recording is is nowhere near as good because you skipped over the whole part where I said, where I guess I didn't say it because I'm just upset. It's day three, folks. Last time you heard from us is day one. They need to know the number of days, right? So it's day three. Last time you heard from us, we were in Slovenia and previously we had been in Austria. So day one was Austria, Slovenia. Day two yesterday was completely Slovenia. Now we're on the road. We're leaving Ljubljana. If you recall back to our second Christmas special, it was called Here We Come Ljubljana. And we came, we left, we're on our way to the coast, Peran, I believe it's how it's

pronounced. And now we're going to redo our recap. Fantastic, Bryce. Yeah, sure. We were headed to dinner. Tell us about dinner, Bryce. So we spent the first day of our road trip driving about eight hours all the way from Vienna to rural northwestern Slovenia to this little restaurant and hotel called Hisa Franka, which I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation of. It is a two Michelin star restaurant where we had a 17 course, uh, tasting menu, which was absolutely lovely. Don't you agree, Connor? It was good. Connor, I think had more mixed feelings about the, uh, the dining experience, uh, than I did. There was, there was a lot of cheese. Yeah. So, I mean, it was, there was a couple dishes of the 17 dishes that were really, really good. Folks may or may not know this about me, I don't like cheese, though. And when you're going to a 17-course fixed menu at a two-star Michelin restaurant, you know, you don't want to be that guy that calls them up in advance and says,

you know, I got some know, I got some thoughts. I got some thoughts. I know you guys, you know, you're missing the third star. So maybe I can help you out with that. So I went ahead and I think four of the 17 courses were had cheese in them. And, you know, you got to you got to put yourself outside your comfort zone. And I think I ate three of those four entirely and the fourth course this guy is going like literally 180 yeah the speed limit is 130 and he came up like a meter behind me and was hitting his hands on a steering wheel

anyways it was a fourth course was a beignet uh i believe is how it's pronounced which is like a little mini donut with filling and the filling was fish roe and i think it was like goat cream cheese yes and connor was so excited at first because connor's wanted to have a donut in every country as part of his european trip adventure and so he saw he saw the donut he was very excited had a big smile on his face then he picked it up he bit into it and I believe I captured on camera the emotional change from Connor's excitement to

just utter disappointment that this thing was filled with cheese and I believe you didn't even finish that, I think you gave it to me to finish. No, no, no, I finished that I did accidentally spill some of the innings and then that I think upset the Michelin star, two star Michelin star They brought a napkin to finished that i i did accidentally spill some of the innings and then that i think upset the michelin star two star michelin star and they brought a napkin to an additional napkin to cover

up the mess that connor had made but here's the thing i knew i knew because they have a menu i knew it had cheese in it but i have a complex relationship with cheese in that i know it's probably like the number one thing that people are like, you don't like cheese, that like people think it's weird about me. And so I really, over time, I've, you know, I literally went to a cheese farm last summer when I was on vacation and I tried a couple of cheeses, you know. I know that when it comes to fancy cheeses, a lot of them are not like the, you know, the mozzarella and the cheddar that you buy in store. And, you know, if you get like a spreadable cheese or a fancy cheese, a lot of them don't even really taste much like cheese. They're more

just like sauces. So I'm always open to trying different cheeses because I, you know, I don't want to be that guy. And so I've had a few cheeses actually that are more just like spreadable creams that are not very cheesy. And I'm also not a huge cream guy, but it's like, you know, I don't hate this. Do I love it? No. it no is it edible though absolutely and so that's what I was hoping because I saw what the donut looked like and I was and it was warm to warm to the touch um so I was very excited but uh I bit into it and it was it was cheesy it was cheesy and it was rough but we did it so what was your favorite course? It is a toss-up between I believe it was course two which were these tiny one-bite sea salt Tacos that had that were made from like seeds. Yeah. Yeah Like sunflower seeds and some other stuff and it had this some kind of

compotes Mixed of like stuff and it was it had like little flowers in it so it looked very of the earth and this whole restaurant was like a sustainability um you know very very uh sustainable forward first you know kind of restaurant anyways that was delicious and oh man the most heartbreaking moment and this will get me to the other dish that is a toss-up for the best dish was they had a surprise dish which was a risotto and at the time it came right before this barbecue brown butter infused uh trout dish uh and i thought it was a surprise dish as did you bryce because they didn't have any trout and so they were were, like, replacing the trout dish.

The messaging was a little unclear. They seemed to have said something about, this isn't on the menu, and this is instead of the trout, but maybe they meant this is before the trout. But anyways, we thought for a moment that there was going to be no trout, and Connor was devastated. I was heartbroken. And the risotto was absolutely delicious, but I had been, from everything on the menu, this, like, rainbow trout is my favorite, favorite fish. And I grew up on the West Coast, like, with my, I had relatives that lived on the West Coast of British Columbia and would, like, freezer us and, like, greyhound us, which is a bus, like, overnight.

And so, like, I lived off of, like, fresh salmon and halibut. So I absolutely just love seafood and fish in particular anyways trout my favorite fish of all and then i thought it wasn't going to come and then the next dish came and they explained what it was and i was just like hallelujah hallelujah and it was delish um i probably if i had to choose one though i'd probably say it was the sea salt it was just this tiny time when you got to think too when we're saying trout and we're saying stuff like this was like they were the tiniest portions uh like that you could have eaten probably all of them in one bite or two usually we eat them and more but like it's a tiny piece like i remember we had what was it that uh uh that had the rabbits um was that the uh the pasta with the truffle yes yes yeah and like

there was probably like not even a teaspoon of diced rabbits in that tiny little pasta portion like it fits all in a single spoon so like all don't think like holy smokes he had a taco as a second course and now he's eating like a a trout fillet no these were like very tiny portions yeah even even for a tasting menu and you know i've seen a number of tasting menus in my uh in my day even for a tasting menu the portion sizes were uh were modest um uh like i was usually after like a a big tasting menu like that like i feel pretty full even though i'm like huh this is weird because i didn't like have any doesn't feel like i had anything substantial but this was very small very small portion sizes my favorite course

was probably the uh the roebuck um which uh they served like these two but it was basically it was really really good meat but we got each of us like two little cubes in the cube each cube was maybe a centimeter a centimeter maybe smaller than a six sided die. Probably like, probably like a quarter, a centimeter, I think. Yeah.

No, like a quarter. If you were to dice it three different ways, take like a, a one eighth of a six sided die. And that was, you get two, two of those pieces.

And there were some other things that came with that, that dish. I don't remember what, but it came with a Kiwi, uh, with a circle circle in it and then it had a muscle a tiny tiny muscle single muscle a leaf that the roebuck was on top of and then the best the best part and yeah the beat was really good and the best oh no no i'm thinking of a different course um but that one was really good the other course that i really liked was the dosa, which is this sort of Indian-style bread, and it had, like, a meat filling. But then, and it had this, like, really good yogurt sauce.

But then, as part of that dish, they brought us water from the local river, the Soka River, and it must have been chilled with liquid nitrogen so that it would mist up to create the cloud. And then they would pour it into a little bowl next to us, and they told us the purpose for that is for you to, you know, you're going to eat this course with your hands, and then afterwards you can wash your hands in the river Soka. Oh, and then at the beginning of the meal, they brought us just a bowl of moss from the nearby mountain. And they instructed us.

They're like, this is moss. It is here to greet you. Like you can touch it. You can smell it. Like they're not supposed to eat it. And I had a great time touching and smelling the moss. I think you got some good pictures of that, right, buddy? I did, yes.

We'll put them on the internet. But there is one more course we have to talk about, and then I promise we're done talking about us eating food. And that course is, just be aware of the speed camera warning thingy that Google Maps is telling us about. We have definitely gotten at least one speeding ticket already in Slovenia. Hey, why is that, Bryce? Why is that?

We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. But I definitely saw a camera flash. But I lied, actually. We're going to talk more about food. Yeah, because we're going to talk about the breakfast the next day, which actually was my favorite part.

But there was one course that even I thought was a little questionable and that was the potato let's talk about the potato i know you have i know you have a lot of thoughts you want to share about the potato well mr fancy pants to my the right of me mr bryce adelstein libel back himself he was the original one that messed this thing up. Because basically, it's a tiny little potato, like golden potato. And they put it in this, like, eggshell of what is hay. It's made of hay and sea salt. It's basically dirt. It's basically dirt.

And Bryce, the way it's explained is, like, this is enclosed in a crust. And when you open up the crust, you will find a potato inside. It was unclear, though, and I will defend Bryce in this, it was unclear that this crust was not for eating. I thought it was a little bit suspect that it was made of hay, but Bryce, as always with each dish, had started eating his before I had, and Bryce, how many bites did you get into it, Bryce? Two or three? Two or three, and I was like, boy, this is real salty and kind of tastes like dirt. And then by the time he's on his third bite, I'm looking at this thing real like, the fact that it was already made of hay was a red flag for me.

I thought that was just like poor translation. No, no, because it was on the menu. It said hay, it said hay crust. It didn't mention the sea salt in the description. And so I took the tiniest little piece with my hands off of this, put it in my mouth, bit into it, and immediately was like repulsed. And my first thought was like, holy F, this is just dirt. And I was like, Bryce, there's no way we're supposed

to eat this. But here's the thing. They serve us this potato in this little shell. And I do have some questions about how they got the potato in the shell, but Connor and I worked out a theory about that later. It's not particularly relevant here, but here's what we were equipped with to eat this potato. This potato that arrived to us fairly hot to the touch. We were given a fancy, like, butter spreader. Not a knife. Just a thing for you to spread butter. And we were given this some sort of fancy butter.

I think it was like a horseradish butter. And the potato. that's it so you have the potato in this crust you can't eat the crust which we learned and which i learned and yes now now you could take the potato out of the crust and just pick up the potato with your fingers um but the potato is hot, so that's not particularly pleasant. And you have this like butter spreader, but it's not really suitable to cut this thing. And the other thing is the potato and the crust were presented in a bowl that was filled with like local branches and leaves and whatnot. So even if you wanted to use this butter spreader to try to cut off a piece of the potato, you didn't have like a firm surface to do it on. So it was a very challenging course to figure out how to eat. And it was just a potato. It was. Yeah. Listen, listen, folks, you've learned, you're learning a lot about

my, my, my likes and desires when it comes to food. I don't like cheese. My number one favorite food in the world is in the category of potatoes, and that is the mashed potato. I haven't met a mashed potato I like. Even the store-bought synthetic mix stuff, even that, whenever I have it, I'm like, you know, I thought it was going to be worse than this. I love mashed potatoes, love all types of potatoes, and this was just a potato. No salt. Like, they give you the the

horseradish butter with it which you're supposed to you know but that that was pretty hard to spread that was but like that was it and i'm thinking when i'm eating this thing like what the f like this is just a terrible potato a very very expensive potato for the two of us yeah yeah anyway so uh but but my favorite part of that whole experience, and we did it. We're giving a critique here, but we had a very lovely evening. That was a great and magical time. Agreed? Yeah.

It was a very magical experience, even though I said that the meal was good. There were certain, like I said, that. And the reason that I like that sea salt taco the best is because the the trout it was such a small little piece it left me wanting more because i'm not used to eating fish in that small of quantities but the sea salt taco was so novel and had like little purple flowers and yellow flowers and it was a single bite thing it it was like a little experience you pop it in your mouth you close your eyes you're like oh wow this is wonderful um but yeah overall magical experience also my favorite part you're gonna get to yours the breakfast my favorite part was the kitten he's a franco the hotel had a little kitten and actually i didn't get to say hi because i didn't want to leave my table in the middle of dinner

service because like they're running an operation which admitted to ask for permission to go to the bathroom they told you at the start of the the, like, hey, give us a notice. Like, let us know when you want to go to the bathroom so that we can notify the kitchen. And Connor's about to tell you that, like, I didn't follow the rules. I asked permission when I wanted to go to the bathroom. The one time when they said no, I went and sat back down. Okay, listen, listen, folks. One thing we've learned about Bryce is,

I'm not sure if this is a general Canadian versus American thing, but Bryce is definitely not as polite or as much of a rule follower as I am. These were the precise instructions that they gave us. They said, if you would like to go to the washroom or bathroom, whatever term you want to use, depending on the country, all mean the same thing, please let us know one course in advance. Those were the instructions.

Bryce, I didn't go to the washroom once. Bryce went to the washroom three times. And every single time, he either just stood up and said, is this a good time? Or he would say, I'd like to go to the washroom. And then he would get up. And I think all, and then your defense says that your defense is your defense is is that two of the three times they said it's a good time that's fine which is still not following their

rules and then the third time they were literally bringing out the course as you were trying to leave no it at the third the third time I told somebody that after this course I'd like to use the restroom and then I got up after that course to use the the restroom after i'd been granted permission and then another person not the person that i told who had not yet been informed that i was going to the bathroom requested that i stay seated and i went back to my seat and then she came over and said ah i'm sorry i misunderstood and allowed me to go to the bathroom anyways it was a very nice place we had a wonderful time but a wonderful time. But the... I was in the middle of telling before we got... Yeah, the kitten story is,

the kitten was hanging outside the restaurant because we were indoors. And if it had been any other restaurant, you know, not as fancy, I would have gotten up mid-dinner. And if it was Bryce that wanted to pet the kitten, he probably would have. I would.

But, yes, for those that didn't catch that, Bryce said, yes, I would have. Instead, we didn't. We're not going to disrespect the restaurant by petting the cat. However, in the catch that, Bryce said, yes, I would have. Instead, we didn't. We're not going to disrespect the restaurant by petting the cat. However, in the morning service, when we had breakfast, the cat, the kitten was once again outside and I got up, went outside. It was waiting outside the door of the restaurant. And, and then I crouched down and petted it, took a little video. Maybe we'll put it on the interwebs. And what's funny is when I came back inside, uh, the two

hostesses were confused and they were like, did you just go outside just to pet the cat? Because I think they thought I was leaving to get something. But then I saw the cat and then decided to pet it and forgot what I was going to do or something. And I said, no, no, I just went out to see the cat. And then they started laughing because I think they thought that was funny. I'm not sure how Europeans or Slovenians, what their fascination is with animals or cats. But very nice kitten. And I lie, it's not my favorite part,

but it was a lovely touch, and I very much enjoyed petting the cat. That was the second Slovenian cat that Connor made friends with. Where was the other cat? It was at one of the castles, right? Yeah, it was at the castle yesterday. Oh, yes, but that was after. So that was the first cat.

And yes, we found a cat at the predjama i believe was the name of the castle uh in slovenia after we went to the postonia caves we're gonna we're gonna get to all that in just a moment yeah but we love that we love the slovenian cats we don't like the roman cats they're stray and they don't like being pet we love slovenia cats all right so the breakfast i mean and maybe it's just that i've had so many disappointing hotel breakfasts in uh recent memory because the hotel breakfast experience is usually just not not amazing i mean one of my one of my recent greater disappointments with uh airline travel has been the quality of the breakfast options at the British Airways London Heathrow Terminal 5 lounge, which is not a lounge I usually get to go to, so I was excited for it.

It was my first time there, second time there maybe, and I was just disappointed. disappointing but this breakfast um man it was it was really good they brought a bunch of local fruit and um and meat um and bread and these little uh cookies um there was somewhere between a cookie and a biscuit um and what else was there there was really good uh juice the drinks in general they had a juice pairing to go with the dinner um which i got and connor got a wine pairing um and oh boy the breakfast it was just really good and filling um and we also we ordered a little edition of a selection of local salamis including a bear salami which was uh quite good and uh folks you heard that right bear as in like polar bear or black bear or brown bear. We should ask what type of bear it was. I suspect it was not a polar bear.

I suspect it was a local bear. I'm just saying, like, it was a bear. Yeah, it was definitely a bear. Did they say something else tonight? No, it was bear. Misunderstood it because I'm listening to 2X? No, it was a bear. It was pretty good.

And I was so impressed with the breakfast that I allowed us to slip a little bit behind schedule and only really realized when Connor pointed it out when it was like 9.10 and we were supposed to have left by 8.30 and we needed to be a certain place by 10. And Connor drove. It was very impressive driving. When we left, the Google Maps ETA said 10.15 and he got it down as low as, you know, 10.05. But then there was some, as we got right near the final destination,

there was some uncontrollable traffic-related things because one of the roads was closed. They were closed in one lane, so they had those little traffic lights to only allow people to go in one direction for like five minutes, and then they would let people go in the other direction. And so slowed us down a little bit but long story short we made it to the next thing on time which was uh the idria uh mercury mines which uh connor what did you think of that zero out of five stars no notes connor was very uh unimpressed uh i think there had been a misunderstanding between connor and i about I about what a tour of a mine

would constitute. Connor thought it was one of those open mines, like basically just a hole in the ground, and did not realize that it was going to be underground, and was not thrilled about the whole being underground part, and did not find it, I think, as exciting as I did. Although I think, I do think of a part of my amusement was Connor's extreme dislike for the experience. I'm such a terrible friend. Yeah, I just, uh, I'm from Canada. Canada has a lot of oil in the province of Alberta and a lot of those mines if you will or oil sand pits etc

are just open and I did not put it together that we would be entering a small tunnel in the ground that is basically enough room for one person for an hour and 15 minutes while we learned about the history of mining since

1508. And I love history, but more programming language history, and that only started, like, you know, a couple decades ago, back in, like, the 40s, 30s, if you will. Maybe 1920s, if you want to include Sean Finkel's on the building blocks of mathematical logic. Is there any programming language history that is associated with Slovenia or Austria or Croatia,

since we're going to go there too? I don't know. Yeah, not off the top of my head, but I'm sure there is. I'm sure there's some famous Slovenian computer scientist that made some contribution, but off the top of my head, I do not know. If you do know, let us know. It is too late for us to go back and learn or visit anything related to it, but we'd still be interested in knowing.

If you find yourself in Idria, though, definitely skip the mercury mines, you know. I thought it was pretty fun, but I do think that there were perhaps more exciting things to do. Or just bring your headphones and listen to a couple technical pods, because that's also what I did. We went next to the Postogna Caves. Beautiful. Biggest, so they say. Biggest European caves. And they were very impressive. Very well kept.

Very well funded. And you take a little train ride underground. Very chilly. Bryce was not, Jesus, we're about to get pinned between two cars here. But we're still alive and we love it. We're still here, folks. And you take the little train underground.

And it was great. It was great. A little bit chilly. But I had my pods with me. And, yeah, it was great. I listened to a couple pods. Just finished listening to the most recent episode of Two's Compliment. And I actually got to lie.

Ooh, I know Matt Gobble listens to this. I find it very hard to follow the uh what do they call it yak shaving part one part two they're trying to basically host a website i might have skipped through most or all of the episode so it's matt gobble and ben rady clearly bryce does not listen. This is one of the, I mean, it's technically not a C++ podcast, similar to, it's actually more, it's definitely less C++-y than ours is, because Ben Rady, the co-host, is not a C++ dev. But Matt Gobboldt is the individual behind CompilerExplorer.com, aka Gobboldt.com, or.org, or whatever it is um and so i consider it a c++ podcast even though they talk about a lot of non-c++ specific stuff but for their last two

episodes they released once a month and they they yak shaved like standing up this uh website uh which have not been my favorite episodes. But hopefully other listeners have enjoyed them. Overall, I love the pod. You should go listen. But anyways, just finished listening to that. And Pastonia Caves, what did you think, Bryce? I thought they were amazing. Yeah, I thought it was really, really beautiful.

I mean, the only thing comparable that I've been to is Howl Caverns in upstate New York, which I went to a number of times when I was a kid. But this was, like, a lot more impressive, I've got to say. The one cool thing in Howe Caverns is that both Howe Caverns and this cave had an underground river, but in Howe Caverns they actually take you on a boat through the underground river, which is pretty cool. This place, we did not get that experience, but it was great. It was super impressive. I thought it was very fun.

We went to this castle afterwards, which was also pretty cool. With the cat. With the cat. With the cat. Lovely cat. I'd say so far, Blood Lake was the highlight for me. It's gorgeous. I think the drive through those mountains and Blood Lake was definitely one of the best parts of the trip.

It's a shame that we were not able to spend more time doing that part of the trip, but it's just that we wanted to go to Hisafranco, and it's closed on Monday and Tuesday, so we either had to do it Sunday or we had to do it Wednesday. And if we did it Wednesday, it wasn't going to be practical because I have a flight out on Thursday morning at 8 a.m. in Venice, which is like two or three hours away from there. So that would not have worked out. But, you know, I think it was great. I think it was great.

And then we got to Ljubljana last night after the castle, the Predama Castle. And kind of went for a run. And then we went out and got some food and just sort of had a chill evening. And then this morning we went to Codilla Meat Market. We got a... Meat, meat. Meat, meat. That's what it's called. Meat, meat.

M-E-E-T, then meat, M-E-A-T. Oh, wait, was it? I thought it was just meat, meat, as in the two things that you eat. I don't think so. That was how it was spelled. Whoa! There's the coast, folks. We have just hit the coast.

We can see the Mediterranean. Wow. We're only 23 minutes away. Hello, Mediterranean. And this is, I think we are south of Trestay. I think we're south of Trestay. I think we're south of Trestay. Um, let me double check whether this is Slovenia or Trestay or where we are. Um, let's see. Um, thrilling podcast content here. Um, the, so yeah, so what we're seeing right there is still Slovenia,

but to the north of us this way, Connor, is Italy, where we'll be driving through later. But this is the Slovenian coast, and we are headed to the town of Piran. This morning we got up. After two days of a very fixed and intense schedule, we had a lazier morning today to give us a chance to rest and recover. We just went and got a nice breakfast, and we went up to the Ljubljana Castle and got a great view of the city. And then we departed.

We are heading to our next destination, the coastal city of Peran, which is at the tip of the peninsula. And then we're going to go for a hike in this bay, this moon bay. Destination, the coastal city of Paran, which is at the tip of the peninsula. And then we're going to go for a hike in this bay, this moon bay. It hasn't all been rainbows and bunnies and butterflies, though. There was one pretty disappointing thing that's happened. I'm not sure Bryce, if he recalls what it was. Do you recall what it was? I do not sure Bryce, if he recalls what it was. Do you recall what it was? I do not. You know, folks, 199 days straight is my Duolingo streak.

And I went straight from bronze to Diamond League, however many, I think that's 14 weeks or 12 weeks in a row or something, straight to the top. And ever since I got to Diamond League, I've been in the Diamond League, the top league, 14 weeks in a row, just under four months. And guess what, folks? It's Tuesday, two days ago, at 10 p.m. on Sunday night when the Weekly League resets, I finished 27th out of 30 on the Weekly Leaderboard and everybody that plays Duolingo knows bottom five in Diamond League get demoted so I'm back in Obsidian League and even worse I've lost my 14 week stretch I thought it just kind of you know or actually maybe it will keep the counter it doesn't need to be contiguous once I get back to Diamond League but pretty upset that Bryce is the one responsible. This is somehow, somehow this is my fault. Somehow this is my fault.

You was entirely within your control to do this. I mean, we were having too much fun, though, and I forgot. This is, again, entirely not my responsibility. Entirely not my fault. I mean, I do hold you responsible, though. If you were my girlfriend, I might accept that. However, you, sir, are not somebody that I am dating. Well, I'm glad you cleared that up for the podcast listener.

Seeing as we just explained, we went to a very romantic, it was a, Hisa Franco, you know, we've been rooming together. I did ask Bryce when we sat down at the restaurant, because every other table, there was only about eight in total, were couples. With one exception. Yeah, with one exception. And I did wonder, in a quiet voice to Bryce, how many of the folks thought that we were potentially in a relationship together.

Yes. As I probably would have thought that we were as well. I think so. I mean, we do, with the dynamic duo, we do have that chemistry putting. Yeah. We should talk about... Okay, so when we left Ljubljana,

we were listening to a podcast a little bit. Oh, yeah, let me tell that. So, folks, you should go subscribe to Two's Compliment with Matt Gobboldt and Ben Rady, but you should also go subscribe to Software Unscripted. I discovered this rather recently, but I think it's been going on for over a year now. Hosted by the one, the only, Richard Feldman, who you will know from very popular talks such as Why Aren't Functional Programming Languages the Norm?

Link in the description if you haven't seen that one if you're a programming language nerd or enthusiast like myself you'll love that talk he uh works for i believe or at one point worked for no red ink and was kind of an evangelist for the elm language has done a lot of stuff with functional programming languages but most recently is working on a programming language called ROC. That is R-O-C. And it is designed to be basically a ELM for the server, sort of like a systems level, pure typed functional programming language. So basically ELM is a front end language. He's trying to design an ELM for the systems level.

Anyways, he has a new podcast called Software Unscripted. If you like this podcast or you like podcasts like co-recursive or functional geekery add this one to your list it's a must and we were listening and by we i mean mostly me because bryce was doing stuff on his phone sorting out hotel stuff we're listening to the most recent episode that just got released today although today is going to be months potentially years in the future for you. And it is comparing Haskell to R with Will, insert his last name because I can't remember. I think it was Will Kurt, K-U-R-T. It doesn't really matter. It was a comparison between Haskell and R. Back to

you, Bryce. And you, well, I mentioned that I don't really know that much about R. Although, based on what we heard in the podcast, it sounds like R would be a little bit more interesting than the Haskell because, uh, the, one of the two, uh, uh, hosts, uh, was positing that with, with R it's a lot easier to make something that's, uh, uh, real and useful, um, than with Haskell. But then I, I, I asked you what your thoughts were on R and you did not seem to have a positive opinion. Well, see, now that we're on the pod, I don't like to say negative things about programming languages. My motto is I love all

programming languages and there are very positive things to say about R. That being said, seeing as you're bringing off something I said off pod, I had a very negative experience with R when I was first introduced it back to university. Note that I was not a software developer back then, so I was more evaluating the language from just like a user experience, not necessarily from, you know, how good is this as a programming language, but from a user experience, the things that I remember the most control S did not save control. Oh, did not open. And they did not have an equal sign for assignment. They had a less than hyphen, which was an arrow, which... Hang on, let's take a step back. What do you mean by control?

Is R somehow associated with a particular editing environment? Yes. When you download R, it comes with... I'm not sure if it's called RStudio or that was something else, but it's basically if you've ever used the programming language Rack small talk, it comes with like a little IDE. Do you have to use that? Uh, I'm not sure if you have to use it anymore. I'm probably sure you can just use VS code. That being said, back in the day when I was in university, which was like 2009, 10, when I was discovering this, uh, a VS code was not out and I was not a software developer.

So I didn't know about things probably like Adam or or Sublime or whatever the uh you know editor of the day was back then so and you just download R and when you launch the executable it launches this little sort of where it's got a you know interface thing where you type and then little windows that will pop up for plots and stuff anyway so like that that piece of software when you hit ctrl sS and O, one of those was, like, to execute. And so I'd just be trying to save things, and I'd be accidentally executing things, which just was so irritating. And I just thought to myself, like, who overrides? That's like overriding Control-C and Control-V. Like, who does that?

If you're going to override some stuff, don't override, like, some of, like, the most popular shortcuts that is consistent across. It's like making the choice to call a mapping function transform in your language why would you why would you choose to do that i understand we had already used that but like don't make that mistake take a look at other programming languages see what they're doing before you know i i always like to say i would rather i'd rather be consistently wrong than inconsistent and uh yeah i think i think that there's something to be said for being unsurprising whenever possible, even if it's, in your worldview,

a little bit less ergonomic to do that. But your issues with R, were they solely with the IDE environment, or did you have objections to some aspects, or were there aspects of the language itself that you think could be improved upon? I mean, I was only doing tiny little scripting things to basically plot distributions,

so I wasn't building full-scale programs or things that were of substance in terms of the number of lines of code I was writing. It's kind of just like I would use it as a REPL and like a scripting engine to generate plots because that's what you were using it for in your statistics and actuarial courses back then. So mostly it was the experience with that little editor and the syntax I really disliked. But then even later on when, because I have done a little bit more R programming since I would say that I've become a software developer, there's lots of things that I'm not a huge fan of.

And they've been trying to make syntactic changes to make it more like a functional feel. Give us an example. So one of the things they've been trying to add is like a, uh, similar to what's trying to be introduced to C plus plus, which may or may not get there as like a pipeline operator that enables you to chain these operations together because, uh,

are, I think historically it has more of like an object orientation model where you're calling like methods on objects, but it was never designed super consistently. So, uh, you're you're almost always loading custom modules for a very specific uh thing that you're doing in some statistical uh

you know application so like for actuaries you're always loading the uh distrib i can't remember what the module is called but something like distrib and it stood for distributions so you could get probability distribution functions and cumulative distribution functions and like they'd have every single one under the sun so like super odd ones that don't typically come up like uh what's an example Pareto comes up often Bernoulli comes up often Gaussian uh but like Weibel w-e-i-b-u-l-l that one I had never heard before I started taking actuarial courses. They would have distributions like that where like programming the PDFs and CDFs

for those kinds of distributions is like a not, it's an easy thing to do. They're not honking at me, they were honking at someone else, just to be clear. It's an easy thing to do, but it's just irritating because like it's not, it takes time because the formulas are really complicated. And a lot of times you have like a continuous um like using integrals and stuff statement of the formula but then you have to program like a discrete version

of it anyways it's just very irritating and but like r is the only language at the time you could just upload a module and then someone will have already done all the work for it uh but it leads to this like kind of lispy racket like experience where like depending on the modules that you're depending on you have to get used to like a different sort of programming style or programming thing uh and so anyways they've been trying to add things like this pipeline operator but like the pipeline operator that they're proposing for r i think is like three characters so it's not like a pipe it's not like a pipe. It's not like a pipe and a less than. I think it's like semicolon colon less than or something like that. And it just looks absolutely awful. Like it's not symmetric across any axis, which I think a pipeline operator should be at least vertically or horizontally symmetric, which is really nice about the pipe operator by itself is that it's both of those, whereas the pipeline operator that's getting proposed for both JavaScript and C++, it's not vertically symmetric, but it is horizontally symmetric.

And I just think there's something nice about that. But as soon as you add a semicolon to something, man, semicolons suck. Except if they're at the end of lines, because you're not looking for symmetry there, you're just looking for an end statement kind of thing. Which is what a semicolon is kind of good for. It's like a separator, right?

That brings me to an interesting question. What programming languages use a period is kind of good for. It's like separating, separator, right? What, what, that brings me to an interesting question. What, uh, what programming languages use a period as their end of line thing? I think there are a couple. I think COBOL may be one of them.

I'm not sure about COBOL. I know that Smalltalk uses period for end of statement. They also use, I believe, semicolon for a word

that I can't remember. It's called, like, forwarding or something like that. Um, your message forwarding to the object that you were initially message passing to. But in order to like end a statement, you use a period. That one off the top of my head,

I think actually Erlang. Erlang and Smalltalk both use periods. I believe. I could be wrong about that. All right. Well, is there, so, but can you give me an example of like something else about all the R syntax that you dislike? Like, or that could be improved.

I know you don't like to talk negatively about programming languages, but you said that there were a bunch of things about the syntax you didn't like. I mean, the thing is, it's been so long since I've used R in anger. I just remember that I was trying to find, like, so the last point I made about, like, the weird sort of styles is that I was just trying to find an outer product. And in order to find that, I had to load some, like, custom module for something that I thought was, like, oh, I made a wrong turn, folks.

Except I was in a roundabout. You were in a roundabout. You could have fixed that. It's all right, though. I'm sure this will only add a couple minutes um we we do probably have to okay yeah let's take the coast yeah um let's do that uh we just got to figure out uh how exactly to get to to that um we're taking a little bit of a detour oh wow this is lovely i think we should probably sign off for here now because there is no parking in the actual city of Peron we have to park in a lot that's like because they don't allow cars in the city except for residents

so we have to park somewhere away from the city and then take a bus in and I have not researched how exactly to do that so we're going to have to figure that out the last thing about R is that they've got like a lot of the times the way that you know things should be done like higher order functions. They just do as parameters to functions that you have to like add for every single function.

So for instance, when you're doing like some row wise or column wise reduction or something like that, I think they have a reduce. And they've got two different arguments like by rows and by calls or something. And you have to go like true false and then also to get a scan in our that's also a call to reduce and then you also switch switch some like boolean flag to accumulate so they've got like they've got like two or three different arguments to this function called reduce one is for like by rows one is for by calls and one is for like by rows, one is for by calls, and one is for like accumulate, which is also what we call reduce in C++. And that's to let you know whether you want to, you know, output the intermediate results. Anyways, it's just like a lot of their APIs.

And by things that should be a higher order function, what you mean is that like, if you wanted to reduce by rows, like you should have some function that gives you a view by rows or something like that? Yeah, or just, like, have some, like, you know, like, in Julia or in libraries like NumPy, they've just got, like, a variable called rank. And I do think we should go right here and take the scenic route. Yeah, we're taking the scenic route. Anyways, I'm kind of, like, trying to drive, and so that might not have been super coherent, but just, like, the reduce function sucks in R.

Because this podcast is typically so super coherent. I mean, I think generally, especially if I'm not talking about a language that I haven't written that much about. So I think we're going to sign off for here. One, because my arm is getting tired. Two, because this is a fairly beautiful area and I want us to be able to focus on that. And three, because we have to figure out where we're going to park. All right. So you'll hear from us later. Bye, folks. Be sure to check the show notes either

in your podcast app or at ADSP the podcast.com for links to any of the things we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave comments, thoughts and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity. That is the tagline of our podcast. It's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.