Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.

I’m in middle of a Rust module of a course, so I’ll do some Programmer Friendly Error Messages:

Line 10: You do not need to dimension a dimensionless variable such as a standalone string variable. (This ain’t Visual Basic.)
Line 20: input doesn’t do parentheses, sorry
Line 20: Input accepts a string: Perhaps you meant prompt$?
Line 30: Concatenation is too modern, perhaps instead of + you meant ; just saying?
Line 40: Invalid syntax with play, maybe you meant play "g3c4e4"?

Well they train me in JavaScript frameworks and such. I allege this knowledge will be useless in a few decades. Or even less so, based on my meagre knowledge so far.

I’m literally on an internship training course where the Exercises Left For The Readers are implementing Number Guessing Games on the various technologies talked about on the course. I’m like “thanks, but I read about this particular exercise extensively the BASIC age. I’m not going to redo these things unless your training material will have little cartoon robots. Like, you know, in the Usborne books or something.”

The font is Revue! People often say that their first love-hate font was Comic Sans - well, this was the first font I thought was pretty damn cool and I saw it getting run to the ground with overuse in early 1990s. It was pretty much in half of the ads in early 1990s. (My theory: It was bundled with a popular graphic design passion package / clipart bundle, Arts & Letters, and everyone made their ads with it. I can’t wait for the day when I finally get arsed to install Windows 3.0 environment and my copy of Arts & Letters and prove the doubters wrong)

I half expected the first comment about the font to be about The Room to be honest.

Sorry for the potato photograph, my phone was a potato, I was a student after all

/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.

/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.

And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.

To me this doesn’t sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it’s just a sidebar that displays a web page.

Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. “Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?” “Well it’s a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don’t like it, you can just remove the button.” “Well I still don’t like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?” “What bloat? It’s just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible.”

Well this was Vista era, they were probably doing that to ensure some sort of expectation from particularly tricky legacy apps. Windows prefers not to break old apps if at all possible.

Like I said this was in the Vista era. Or possibly before the Vista release, part of the Longhorn hype train (Longhorn got some super hyped features, such as an epic next-generation filesystem to replace NTFS, which Microsoft ultimately canned, and Vista ended up, you know, being Vista).

This was so long ago that I unfortunately don’t remember what exact feature this was about, but it was about some new Windows component.

I can’t remember it, but I read one Microsoft blog post (in Vista era?) about how one team at Microsoft would develop some amazing new Windows component. They’d proudly name it AmazingNewService.dll. And then the operating system team would come in and say “that’s all fine and good, but you have to conform to the naming convention.” 8+3 filenames. First two letters probably “MS”, because of reasons. …and 15 years later, people still regularly go “What the fuck is MSAMNSVC.DLL?”

This was so long ago that I can’t actually remember the actual reason why things had to be done by hand. Part of it may have been a conversion snag, but there were probably some other reasons why it wasn’t as simple as writing a script to do the job. Because I distinctly remember I wrote some scripts to help with other data conversion jobs.

Flashback to my first job. Coworker designed a giant complex web app with bazillion UI messages. Another coworker (in the Management) sent me the UI messages. As an Excel file.

I was tasked to manually convert the messages to a PHP data structure of some description (because this was 2002 and Excel files didn’t exactly lend themselves to scripting in Linux). Surprisingly, the management person did acknowledge my complaint that the conversion process was far more painful than necessary. Not that this helped, because soon after the startup got acquired and as far as I know the tech currently only exists in conceptual level in some big corporate vault or other.

Not exactly boned but it probably doesn’t make practical difference to store “local time + tzinfo timezone” than just UTC time.

• You record an event occurring at local time
• You store it as UTC
• Local time zone definition changes
• Well whoop de loo, now you need to go through tzinfo to make sense of the past data anyway rather than relying on a known offset

Even if you store everything in UTC, you may be safe… but figuring out the local time is still convoluted and involves a trip through tzinfo.

Just today I heard someone whining about how in LinkedIn and other recruitment sites there’s like five bazillion profile tag options for RDMBSes and various dialects of SQL… when in actuality the recruiters are probably only concerned if the developer can do a bloody SELECT and stuff.

Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”