

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>0:00</time>
      <p>
          So, uh, listener, oh boy. I have to say, I&#39;m not I&#39;m not devastated. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 52, recorded on November 13th, 2021. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we celebrate our one-year anniversary of ADSP the Podcast by talking about one versus zero indexing and our favorite episodes from the past year.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>0:43</time>
      <p>
          So I think you might have made a tactical mistake.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>0:47</time>
      <p>
          What? How?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>0:50</time>
      <p>
          This episode might turn out to be an episode about counting. Um, how many episodes do you think we&#39;ve published?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>0:56</time>
      <p>
          Oh, I know. We&#39;re zero index, bro. But uh wait, wait, wait, here. Before we do this, I&#39;ve just realized. I&#39;ll be back in a second. But hold that thought. Hold that thought.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>1:05</time>
      <p>
          What what the Connor Connor is departing the podcast recording closet? Because yes, that&#39;s how Connor records the podcast in a closet. Was he going to retrieve a drink?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>1:20</time>
      <p>
          We&#39;re back. Presumably. We&#39;re back. Folks, we&#39;re back with the black cherry. I don&#39;t know why I&#39;m showing Bryce because no one can see this. And here we go. Because it&#39;s our one-year anniversary episode, which Bryce is gonna have some thoughts on in a sec. This could end up being a long-winded episode. Here we go. Black cherry booblay coming up. Woo! That&#39;s how we get it done. That was amazing. Um Bryce, share with us what you would like to about uh counting.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>1:52</time>
      <p>
          Is it our one year anniversary? Because this is gonna be the 53rd episode, not the 52nd. You know what?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:00</time>
      <p>
          This is actually for zero index. I had like three things sort of planned to talk about in today&#39;s episode.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:06</time>
      <p>
          Wait, wait, but how is this possible? Because episode zero was published last year on November 14th. And we&#39;ve published one episode a week.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:18</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s not true. It was not published on November 14th.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:22</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s what that&#39;s what the the the app says. And that that&#39;s what the write-up says. It says Oh no, no. Date rec- Oh, date recorded.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:31</time>
      <p>
          Date recorded.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:32</time>
      <p>
          November 14th. And why, folks, to take up date date released November 20th.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:38</time>
      <p>
          Correct. And what is today, Bryce?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:40</time>
      <p>
          Today&#39;s the 13th. We&#39;ll release it.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:43</time>
      <p>
          On six days from now. Six plus thirteen. You can do it, buddy. The 19th. Which is one day, one day.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:48</time>
      <p>
          Hang on a second.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:49</time>
      <p>
          This is gonna get really philosophical. I&#39;m excited to. This is so this will be our fourth thing that we&#39;re talking about, and we&#39;ll be doing it first.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>2:55</time>
      <p>
          Just hang on one moment.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>2:59</time>
      <p>
          I&#39;m hanging on.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>3:00</time>
      <p>
          There have been 52 weeks since we started this podcast.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>3:07</time>
      <p>
          Mm-hmm. It&#39;s inclusive, bro.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>3:10</time>
      <p>
          But then how will that be? Because that will be the 53rd episode, episode number 52, because we&#39;re zero indexed. How does that math work? Disclaimer. I know that I do have a math degree, but in my defense, I was not a very good student.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>3:28</time>
      <p>
          So this is this is this is only 10% tangential. I&#39;ve really been trying to I think about a lot of things, but one of the things I think about on a weekly basis is whether uh zero indexing should be the default in array languages. Because for those that don&#39;t know, in APL, one of the uh biggest mistakes that&#39;s sort of acknowledged is they had something called quad IO. So quad was like a little rectangular uh Unicode box, or I guess it wasn&#39;t Unicode at all times. And then IO or whatever the one or two letters that followed it would be like a special function. And it stands for index origin, which by default is one, but you can set it to zero if you want. And so it&#39;s it&#39;s acknowledges like the biggest mistake, not that they chose zero or one, uh it&#39;s choosing one is that they think is the right thing to do. It&#39;s that they let you uh it&#39;s basically like a global thing that affects the way algorithms work. Like for instance, iOTA. If you have index origin set to one, iota five is one, two, three, four, five. But if you have index origin set to zero, it&#39;s zero, one, two, three, four. Um, so like the you know, the state of this quad IO affects the way that certain algorithms work that are dependent on uh quad IO. But the thing is, is there are so in J, they got rid of quad IO and they just defaulted um sort of index origin implicitly to zero. So if you go IOTA uh five, you get zero, one, two, three, four in J. And it is my evolving opinion that actually one indexing is the correct default in array languages. Uh, because so often you&#39;re doing things where the exact problem that we&#39;re running into here, where like the fact that we have episodes zero, one, two, three, and four does not correspond to first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. Like our first episode is episode zero. So we have this mismatch, which is very it bothers me. I think it&#39;s okay in like, you know, C  ⁇  and stuff.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>5:24</time>
      <p>
          Do you have thoughts on I I no, I I I I I actually think it&#39;s probably not okay in C. I mean, uh I zero index everything. You know, if I&#39;m sending an email with a numbered list, I zero index it for the simple I I&#39;ve I&#39;ve said this before on the show, I&#39;m sure. Uh uh, you know, Bryce&#39;s law, I&#39;d rather be consistently wrong. I&#39;d rather be I&#39;d rather be consistently wrong than inconsistent. Um I live my life by that. That&#39;s fair. And so because C is zero indexed, and that&#39;s like the main thing I do, or at the very least the the majority of languages and programming things that I do are gonna end up being zero indexed. So then therefore everything else in my life is gonna be zero indexed. I&#39;m not saying that it&#39;s the right thing. I&#39;m just saying I&#39;d like to be consistent. Um but I I I think that zero indexing is um was probably a mistake um because of the the hurdle to explain it to the uninitiated. Um just like off the bat, like if you if you are explaining something to somebody like who has no programming background whatsoever, um, if you have to also explain zero indexing on top of that, like it just it just adds additional complexity.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>6:52</time>
      <p>
          Isn&#39;t it I thought, and maybe this is a mistaken impression, that the computer science or software engineering society at large had agreed that for some reason that I don&#39;t know the motivation for, I don&#39;t know the reason, that zero indexing is the correct thing. Like, do you know where it comes from?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>7:09</time>
      <p>
          No, no, no, no. There&#39;s a reason for that, and I mean the reason is if you have I mean, just just like think about it conceptually in terms of the actual memory under the hood, and um uh in terms of like pointers. You know, if you have a pointer to some array, um or you have a pointer to some like contiguous sequence of memory um that represents an array, uh what is the address of the first element?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>7:41</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, that makes sense.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>7:42</time>
      <p>
          Well, the address of the first element is just you know that pointer to the array. Um But I I I I don&#39;t think that that physical reality of computers, that like, you know, memory addressing works that way, I don&#39;t think that that means that that&#39;s how we should have logically represented it in programming languages. Um and I mean, you know, like if you if you show if you try to explain the notion of an array to somebody who knows who knows nothing about programming, um just like think about how you&#39;d do it. Um and think about how much easier it would be if you did not need to explain that there was this notion of a zero zeroth element. Um and I think it it it leads to a lot of a lot of common off by one errors. Um I think when you have a zero index-based world, you tend to do um uh half open sets where the the um you know your yeah, you uh you have uh uh not not sets, uh ranges. So when you have zero index when you have a language with zero indexing, I think the tendency is that you&#39;ll describe ranges of integers um with the the first element being inclusive and the last being exclusive. Um you know, uh you know, the elements from like zero to n where it&#39;s not including the element n.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>9:18</time>
      <p>
          Right.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>9:18</time>
      <p>
          Um and and just like little disconnects like the size of an array. Right. Um uh if if I ask the an array like what size are you, I cannot use the answer to that question to get the last element. I need to subtract one.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>9:36</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. And probably thinking about it, one of the big things too, and which is why probably a motivating reason why Ken Iverson chose to be one index, is it doesn&#39;t map to English. When you say, oh, I need to grab the third element from this array, you need to use index two. And that&#39;s completely counterintuitive. And this is coming from a guy who named functions verbs and uh operators conjunctions and adverbs, and uh like so he was he was trying to map computer science and his language to literally English.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>10:03</time>
      <p>
          And and I I think that gets to you know the the crux of this decision, whether to zero index or one index. And I mentioned it a little bit a minute ago, which is um it&#39;s a question of do you model the physical reality or the logical uh concept? You know, do when you&#39;re building a programming language, do you choose a representation or a design that most accurately reflects how the hardware actually works, how the the the underlying you know facilities actually work, or do you select the design that is most natural to programmers, right? Is most natural to humans. And I think in this case, you know, zero indexing is the option that you pick if you want to model how the computer actually works. Um whereas one indexing is what you&#39;d pick if you want to model how we think, or model mathematics, or you know, um uh model physics, etc.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>11:26</time>
      <p>
          Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>11:27</time>
      <p>
          And and I th and I think that&#39;s one of the reasons why a language like Fortran, which was designed for uh numerical and and symbolic computing, uh picked one indexing. Whereas a a language like C, that was um intended as a systems programming language that very closely um and faithfully maps to the hardware in the operating system, picked zero indexing.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>12:03</time>
      <p>
          Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>12:04</time>
      <p>
          And I mean obviously C I think could not realistically have chosen a different option. Um I mean, one couldn&#39;t have chosen a different option from C just for like regular raw pointer access, because that would have been wildly incompatible. Um but also I do not think it would have, because of that, it would not have been realistic for us to have our containers, our our abstractions, not you know, built in language facilities, but our abstractions be one indexed. It would be really um again, the the it&#39;s better to be consistently wrong than inconsistent. It would be a very unfortunate world if stdd vector was one indexed, but pointers were zero indexed. Like, uh.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>12:52</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>12:52</time>
      <p>
          And like then what do you do about iterators? Because, you know, pointers are iterators, so that kind of suggests that they all have to be zero indexed.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>12:59</time>
      <p>
          So it&#39;s almost like the high levelness or low levelness of the language should almost dictate, which is sort of, you know, we just talked about that last episode, is that uh APL super high level, C super low level. Like the classic example that I run into in J or like an array language that&#39;s zero indexed is say you want to like that the algorithm take, which now exists in C20 ranges, uh, you always you&#39;re not using the zero indexing. Take zero takes nothing, and take one takes the first element. But in array languages, a lot of times you want to find you know the index at which the first you know element occurs, and so it&#39;s sort of like a take while. You want to take up until that you know element and including that element. And if that index that is returned is zero indexed, you always have to add one to it in order to get take to work sort of inclusively. And yeah, I&#39;ve always sort of whenever that happens, I&#39;m like, this seems wrong. But anyways, should we get back to episode 53? Uh are you still struggling with why? I mean, 52 weeks we record or release at the you know, either beginning or end of uh the week, and then 53rd is the Yes, yes.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>14:17</time>
      <p>
          No, I I was I was mostly um I was mostly being traumatic earlier. Um but it did when I woke up this morning and was looking through the list of episodes, I was like, hang on a minute, did Connor did Connor mess up?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>14:30</time>
      <p>
          Oh no.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>14:30</time>
      <p>
          And did we already have it? And then I uh then my brain turned on.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>14:34</time>
      <p>
          And this is the thing. I always state in the introduction uh when the podcast is recorded, because I this is like a thing that probably applies to nobody in the world except for me. Um but I like I get in the habit of um adding a podcast to my list, probably the most recent one that I went back and like listened to every single one. I don&#39;t know if it was the most recent, but I definitely did uh Cognicast, which is a closure podcast. Um so I have a very hard time like jumping into episode 120. I have to go back to episode one or zero and then and then watch them from the beginning. But because that&#39;s 120 episodes and they release once a month, it dates back all the the way to like 2012. And I like knowing like at what point in time, like was Rust just coming out, or was this pre-Rust or like what&#39;s the what&#39;s the context that we&#39;re in here? Um, which is why I always state the date that it&#39;s recorded, because I think that&#39;s actually more important than when it&#39;s released. Like we&#39;re not impacted by when we release, we&#39;re impacted by uh when we&#39;re recorded. All right, though. So uh that was what 20 minutes of uh Bryce and I talking about uh counting, sounds about right.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>15:40</time>
      <p>
          Uh I I I I told you this was gonna become the episode about counting.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>15:45</time>
      <p>
          Um but yeah, there&#39;s two or three other things I figured we could chat about. So I&#39;m not sure. I gave Bryce some homework to um pick what he thought were the top three, top five episodes.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>15:55</time>
      <p>
          I didn&#39;t really do my homework. Well, I mean, like I did the homework, but like I started doing the homework about three minutes before I jumped, jumped on the uh the Google Meet call.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>16:08</time>
      <p>
          I mean, I haven&#39;t fully ranked my top three or five either, but I definitely know.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>16:14</time>
      <p>
          I know one of my what definitely one of my favorites is episode 13. Do you know which one episode 13 was?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>16:20</time>
      <p>
          I mean, I&#39;m staring at the list, so I just skipped a 13. Um I don&#39;t know.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>16:24</time>
      <p>
          I wanted you to guess. I wanted you to guess what what you thought my favorite would be.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>16:28</time>
      <p>
          Okay. Uh I&#39;ll I&#39;ll stop looking at the list. Like, I mean, I know what that one is now because I just looked at it, but it&#39;s uh the I&#39;m an Excel wizard.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>16:35</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Yeah. So so I I like that episode um because I think one it tells the listener a lot about Kant. And two, I like it because I think it&#39;s very accessible to a wide audience because almost everybody uses Excel, even if you&#39;re not uh a programmer. Um yeah, so that that&#39;s one of my favorites. Um, definitely that&#39;s definitely I think my favorite of the ones that&#39;s just you and I. Really?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>17:13</time>
      <p>
          I don&#39;t even think that would have made I don&#39;t that wasn&#39;t in my tentative top five. Um, although I th I don&#39;t even really remember it that well because I think I was just in a haze because I was too excited um to be talking about Excel. I&#39;ll have to go back and re-listen to it.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>17:28</time>
      <p>
          Um so episodes 17 and 18, the first time we had Sean Parent on. I did know those numbers.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>17:35</time>
      <p>
          Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>17:36</time>
      <p>
          I think that that was that was just magical. I mean, every time we have Sean on the podcast, it&#39;s just magical.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>17:41</time>
      <p>
          What of the of I think we&#39;ve had I think we&#39;ve we&#39;ve recorded with him three times and that&#39;s been turned into I think eight or nine episodes. Which of those um because definitely uh, you know, a couple of the Sean parents are in like my top five. Um, but I tried to only choose one. And uh of those it&#39;s hard.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>18:01</time>
      <p>
          I I I really did like the first time we did it. I don&#39;t remember which of the Sean stories we went through, but if it&#39;s the one that I think it was really quite good. Um I&#39;m really I really loved the Steve Jobs and Sean Parent one. That might be my favorite, because like that was like the the second time we had Sean on, like, we&#39;d figured out how to like do guests well, and like you know, Sean sort of knew the format then, and it&#39;s just like just awesome stories, just like Sean has just had it&#39;s like Sean yes, Sean has had an interesting career, but Sean has also had like an interesting career that&#39;s just been he&#39;s just a magnet for these odd circumstances that just lead to great storytelling.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>18:51</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, and so I think you&#39;re referring to episode 28, which is the well actually we won&#39;t ruin it, but it it culminates in sort of uh Steve Jobs, you know, calling the CEO of Adobe with some things to say. Uh so if you haven&#39;t listened to that episode, um I&#39;d probably say my favorite just because it was I had not heard so several of the stories when we&#39;ve had Sean on, I had heard over, you know, a CPP con, um, which it&#39;s amazing to hear it, you know, for the second time because his stories are just so wild. Uh but episode 39, where Steve Jobs, it&#39;s called How Steve Jobs Saved Sean Parent. Once again, I won&#39;t I won&#39;t give away because I had no idea that what direction that podcasts. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what? I didn&#39;t know that story at all.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>19:37</time>
      <p>
          I forgot that he told that story on that episode.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>19:39</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, that one is I won&#39;t give anything away, but at one point I legitimately thought he was about to say that like a couple people died. Um and I like straight up was like, Sean, you&#39;re are did everybody live? Because like we can&#39;t let you talk about how you potentially killed some people in the past, and he&#39;s like, and then he said, No, no, no, everybody survived, and then my blood pressure just sort of dropped a little bit. And I was like, Okay. Uh um, but yeah, that I think that was just because I had not heard that story, and um, it&#39;s also once again, yeah, just sort of and that&#39;s the thing, is that at some point it was before this podcast started that I realized about um Sean is that he&#39;s this like peripheral character in sort of all these movies that have been made about you know Steve Jobs and stuff, is that like he knows the people that are being portrayed in these movies. Like he&#39;s like one person removed, and if he had chosen to stay at Apple a little bit longer, like he would have been he would have been one of the people in the movie, um potentially. Uh which I just think is I don&#39;t know. When I watch like the Steve Jobs biopic films, I don&#39;t think of it as like, oh yeah, like I know people that are adjacent to that. Um, but that&#39;s exactly what what I mean. I think it&#39;s even it&#39;s not generous enough to say that Sean&#39;s adjacent to it. He um yeah, he he&#39;s been working at Apple and Adobe for anyways. Enough about uh enough about uh Sean. Um what&#39;s your next uh or do you have do you have more episodes?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>21:02</time>
      <p>
          I really liked um I liked episode 19, Finding Your Way in Tech, where we sort of gave our origin stories. Um again, uh it&#39;s uh it&#39;s an episode I like because it&#39;s sort of like accessible to any audience. Um and I I hope uh I hope was helpful to somebody. Um and likewise the the episode where we talked about should you drop out of college.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>21:25</time>
      <p>
          Damn, all of your episodes are so wildly different than than the ones that are on my list. So this is this is interesting.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>21:31</time>
      <p>
          Well, well, okay, so so I I do have a couple that are that are more uh I think more what you might pick. Um so episode 25, The Lost Reduction. Um all I remember about that episode was being just so so excited and enthusiastic when we were recording it.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>21:51</time>
      <p>
          I think that I think that is actually our longest which says something. It&#39;s our longest episode.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>21:59</time>
      <p>
          No, no, no, no.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>22:01</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s tied with the Ben Dean and Tony Vanyard.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>22:03</time>
      <p>
          No, no, no. It&#39;s got it by 19 seconds. Got it by 19 seconds. And I can&#39;t say I liked, but I think it was good. I think episode 21, Galaxy being a few.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>22:19</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s top five for me for sure.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>22:21</time>
      <p>
          Unprompted was uh was pretty great. Um and um I liked I liked the inclusive scan um episode, the episode 37. Um and in general, I like all of the times that we&#39;ve talked about scans or reductions, which has been probably at least five or ten episodes.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>22:47</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s definitely the most retold story. Uh Bryce, we&#39;ve already told that. It&#39;s alright, we&#39;re telling it again. It&#39;s alright.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>22:55</time>
      <p>
          And I and I I really liked episode 51, the efficiency versus uh speed.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>22:59</time>
      <p>
          Um that&#39;s gotten some decent uh feedback online. We&#39;ll have to have a follow-up episode at some point. Someone shots fired. Did you see the one comment that said uh, no offense, but do we do you even understand pre-fetching? I don&#39;t know, I don&#39;t know who that was, and I&#39;m not gonna look it up, but you gotta be you gotta be nicer. You gotta be nicer on Twitter.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>23:21</time>
      <p>
          Um I uh I did not see that comment. Um I&#39;m gonna go out on a limb and say I probably know more about prefetching than that person.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>23:32</time>
      <p>
          Watches that person is like one of the architects of uh I mean I don&#39;t have these in any order. Um I think the one that overlapped was episode 39, although I sort of convinced you that uh that was the most exciting of this the Sean Parent episodes. Um super surprised you didn&#39;t say episode 29. Um I mean I know we love Sean, but that might even be I it it&#39;s it&#39;s a close call between Chandler&#39;s story of going from like living out of his car slash girlfriend&#39;s place, you know, uh and working at Papa John&#39;s to his meteoric rise at Google. Um I had no idea. I mean, I think maybe that was the thing, is that you you knew Chandler or know Chandler a lot better than I do and might have heard that story before. Uh that was all news to me.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>24:20</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, but like to be to be fair, I&#39;ve heard well, I I&#39;ve heard most of the Sean&#39;s stories before. I think I&#39;ve only heard the episode 39 Sean story once, and I&#39;m not even sure about that. Um yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>24:33</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Um but that&#39;s and also just that whole four-part series with uh Patricia and Chandler, I think is great. Um we gotta have him back sometime. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um and then of the sort of just you and me episodes, um the loss reduction, I think, was up there more because of two, like the hilarity of the fact that it was what the third or fourth time that we had tried to record that episode.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>24:59</time>
      <p>
          I completely forgot about that aspect of it. I completely forgot about that. That was the one where like I like texted you after we&#39;d originally recorded and was like, no, no, no, no, no, you gotta come back.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>25:12</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, we need to do a 10-minute addendum. This is Bryce. Now I know that when Bryce says 10 minutes, what he really means is like 30 to 50 minutes. Um the 10-minute addendum, yes, took about 50 minutes. And then we ended up throwing it away because at the end of it, I think we realized, oh, no, we still need to figure this out.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>25:27</time>
      <p>
          And so yeah, there was But we like eventually, eventually we got it. Yeah, eventually we got it.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>25:32</time>
      <p>
          And um, so yeah, the last production definitely galaxy brain programming languages. Um, for those that haven&#39;t watched or listened to the the backlog, that was where I quizzed Bryce on, I think it was eight or nine uh quote unquote galaxy brain programming languages that were invented before I think the 1980s, or maybe 19 yeah, I think 1978, I think, was the old youngest programming language, and so Bryce had to guess them. And I think you I think you nailed it. Uh you were definitely above 500. You batted above 500.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>26:04</time>
      <p>
          Um I&#39;m not sure if I would if I would may maybe maybe you edited it very creatively to make it sound like I did not, no, I did not.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>26:12</time>
      <p>
          I mean, uh the most disappointing uh part, although you wouldn&#39;t make this mistake now, is that you didn&#39;t guess APL until like the seventh language or something.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>26:20</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, that was that was like in the early days of you becoming an APL fanatic.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>26:24</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, that&#39;s true.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>26:24</time>
      <p>
          And and and that might have even been before it was embarrassing because that may have been prior to me becoming chair of the US Um Programming Languages uh Standards Committee. Uh and the reason that would be embarrassing is because APL, of course, is one of the languages for which said committee that I chair is responsible for. I think we actually did something with the APL standard recently. I don&#39;t remember what, but I seem to recall something like that crossing my desk.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>26:56</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, I have no idea, but potentially. Um and uh and then yeah, I think probably um to round out the list, uh episode 47 where I just got to wax rhapsodic on combinatory logic, my favorite topic of the moment. And then probably my favorite moment just between you and me was on episode 45 when I forgot that you were a big fan of birds. Um and then in that moment, it was probably the closest I&#39;ve been that excited since you mentioning that like Sean Parent was gonna be at a conference I was at or something, or something like that, or I think maybe that&#39;s what it was, is you said, Oh, I could introduce him during his keynote at CBP Con, which didn&#39;t end up happening. Um and then uh, anyways, you said, Oh yeah, I love birds, and then I was just like, Oh yeah. And then when I was like, I had forgotten how excited I got when we were recording, and when I was editing it and listening to it, I was just like killing myself laughing um at how amped I got. Um anyways, so we&#39;ll put all a link to all of those. Um I mean, if you&#39;ve been listening from the beginning, then you&#39;ve you&#39;ve just been heard us talking about stuff you&#39;ve already listened to. But if you&#39;re a new listener, those are those are you know the ones that you might want to go back and listen to if you have an empty catalog.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>28:15</time>
      <p>
          Oh if you&#39;re if you&#39;re an existing listener, you can go back and re-listen to the episodes. Like, in fact, go back and do it like ten times from different fact from different devices with unique uh Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>28:27</time>
      <p>
          While you&#39;re while you&#39;re working from home, just uh whether you&#39;re on VPN, hit up our website, you know, just uh hit that play button, put it on mute, and uh or don&#39;t put it on mute, you know.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>28:36</time>
      <p>
          Maybe uh and and make sure to VPN into was it Slovenia?
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>28:42</time>
      <p>
          Oh yeah. Slovakia, Slovenia.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>28:45</time>
      <p>
          One of the two.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>28:46</time>
      <p>
          I bet we&#39;re doing quite well. We were like number 13 at the time. We&#39;ve gotta be we&#39;ve gotta be the one like the top technology. There&#39;s gotta be at least one country. There&#39;s what, 200, is there 206 countries in the world, or is that bones in the body? I can never remember. Um I know that there&#39;s 54 countries in Africa because I read a behavioral economics book where they tell you to guess a 90%. Um It might have been one of the Richard Thaler ones. Um yeah. I had to actually read a bunch of those for my actual exams.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>29:16</time>
      <p>
          Um but they have this like my my mother, uh, before being a lawyer, was uh an economist, and so one um when I was like starting like a very young age, our dinner table conversation was like brief lectures in uh the fundamentals of economics. And two, um, I have a strange affinity for economics, and like uh a lot of the podcasts I listen to are economics podcasts.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>29:45</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, I mean baby behavioral economics is it&#39;s fascinating stuff. One of the uh my favorites is a bit of a tone, but um Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. They describe probably what&#39;s one of my favorite sort of phenomenon, which is called the peak end rule. And it basically the it says that your memory of an experience is largely defined by like the end of it and the peak of it. So that, you know, sort of one of the things they say is you should try try not to like, you know, end a great vacation day or something with a fight because you&#39;re largely going to remember that day by like the fight or something. And the study that they do is they get people to submerge their hand in uh really ice cold water for 60 seconds, and then they do the same experiment um with the same group of people, but they do it for 60 seconds and then uh add 30 seconds afterwards, which is also freezing cold, but like one temperature warmer, and then they say, What do you prefer between the two? So one of them is a superset of the other one. So they should clearly just, you know, if if they were you know perfectly rational and could experience things, you know, the way they were, they&#39;d just they prefer the 60-second freezing cold instead of 90 seconds of freezing cold plus freezing cold plus one degree. But largely, overwhelmingly, like I think 90 plus percent of people prefer ending on the slightly warmer, even though it&#39;s still uncomfortable, um, which I just I just think is fantastic. So uh peak end rule. I got lots of those. Yeah, and yes, 54 countries. I know that because um one of the books talks about how people wildly underestimate like confidence intervals. So if I asked you to give like a 90% confidence interval of where there&#39;s like 5% on either side that you&#39;re wrong about some guess, um most people don&#39;t, they they wildly, they think they know they&#39;re way closer than they are. And like the classic example, I mean I&#39;ve ruined it because I&#39;ve already said the answer, but they say, How many countries do you think are in Africa? And on average, people think it&#39;s like 20 or 30. And when you ask them to give a when you ask them to give a 90% confidence interval, they go, oh well, 20 or 30, okay, we&#39;ll say 25 plus or minus, like maybe 15 on each side, maybe maybe 20 on each side, but even 20 on each side is five to forty-five. Most people will only do plus or minus 10. So you get a range of 15 to 35, and it turns out to be 54. But the the the truth of the matter is, is like, do you why do you think there&#39;s 20 or 30 in Africa? Like the the truth is that, like, oh, you know, there&#39;s a few in North America, so it&#39;s like Africa&#39;s got a lot more countries, right? Uh so it&#39;s gotta be like what, like, you know, times 10 or something. Um, but the truth of the matter is, is like you really don&#39;t know. And if you don&#39;t know, you should just be like zero to a hundred. You know, that&#39;s my that&#39;s my 95% uh or you know, like two to one hundred. Like I&#39;m almost positive there&#39;s no there&#39;s not one country in Africa. And I&#39;m pretty sure half the countries in the world. Also, too, we didn&#39;t get back to, we&#39;re totally on a tangent here. 206, is it bones in the body or countries in the world? Do you know?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>32:40</time>
      <p>
          I think it&#39;s I have no clue.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>32:43</time>
      <p>
          I think it&#39;s countries in the world. Let&#39;s look it up. And uh and also too, how many bones do I think in their body?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>32:48</time>
      <p>
          Probably that also kind of depends on how you define countries.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>32:52</time>
      <p>
          Uh I mean Google will tell us a single number, guaranteed. And I&#39;m gonna say bones in the body are ninety-five. Oh shit. Oh sorry, I swore.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>32:59</time>
      <p>
          Um, Google in the world. I&#39;m not again, like I think that there&#39;s different counts depending on how you count countries. There&#39;s 195 UN recognized countries in the world, but I do not I think that the actual number is uh uh slightly more than that.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>33:18</time>
      <p>
          I was wrong, yeah. So it was 206 bones in the body. Um it&#39;s a sad day. Uh it&#39;s a sad day. Alright, so we can do um there&#39;s two more things. Uh so this is gonna be a bit of a longer episode. We&#39;ll probably keep it as one though. So do you want to do a little APL plus plus play along? Because this is gonna wind back to a great point that I want to make. Uh, why are we doing this on the year anniversary? Cause I want to, and it&#39;s gonna be awesome.
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>33:47</time>
      <p>
          Connor is the is the editor, so I have uh I have no realistic say in this in in this matter. He&#39;s also got a very evil grin right now, so uh listener, oh boy.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>34:04</time>
      <p>
          I have to say, I&#39;m not I&#39;m not devastated. The last time I was devastated was when I injured my deltoid ligament to my left ankle, link ankle uh a month and a half ago. I was devastated then. Um I&#39;m probably like 20% as devastated as I was back then. But what just happened, so we we&#39;ve been recording for almost an hour and 40 minutes. And at the 44-minute mark, at which point we hadn&#39;t even gotten to this huge journey that we went on where I walked Bryce through a BQN solution to a leak code problem. I&#39;m pretty sure, well, because the the part that was where it got lodged was when you were looking up um partition in uh programming pearls. And then I I locked, I think I knocked it out then, and so we hadn&#39;t, I think you had probably said the solution in C, but we hadn&#39;t even gotten to the BQN stuff. Um so I think we lost all that, and it was it was gold. It was gold. I mean, and it was it&#39;s a it&#39;s uh it was done in such a way that uh it&#39;s not gonna have the same effect the second time around because you&#39;re gonna under you&#39;re gonna understand. We can do it, we&#39;ll do it. We&#39;ll do it. But um uh oh yeah, so I gotta say, wow, it&#39;s uh my heart my heart hurts a little bit. That&#39;s not the thing, is a week ago or whatever we had to re-record, but it was uh we were we were talking about sort of you would you would think that production quality would go up while we were doing this, but no. My my defense is that I was so excited about this that I just was oh moving all over the place and oh man, oh ma&#39;am. Yeah, and that&#39;s the thing is like when you were you were about to explain something, and then I was like, wait a second, wait a wait a second, I I knocked out my mic thing, that probably stopped Audacity, and then I went and looked, and then Bryce was still like, he was like, Oh well, I think I no, I think this is what&#39;s happening, and then I was swearing in the background, and like I was like, Bryce, no, we gotta Bryce, you gotta stop. And he was like, Oh no, what what?
      </p>

        <cite>Bryce</cite>
      <time>36:04</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. So we should probably call but but but it&#39;s okay because we&#39;re gonna have an awesome feature episode where we&#39;re gonna completely redesign Thrust&#39;s partition algorithm now that now that we&#39;ve discovered that it is uh it is subpar.
      </p>

        <cite>Conor</cite>
      <time>36:18</time>
      <p>
          Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.
      </p>