RIP xtranormal

C is a little older than namespacing and object orientation. C++ wasn’t even a glimmer in Bjarne’s eye when these conventions were laid down.

And yes, having to google it is part of the design. Originally C programmers would have had to read actual manuals about this stuff. Once you learn the names you don’t really forget so it works well enough even now for ubiquitous standard library functions.

And yet, C was an ergonomic revelation to programmers of the time. Now it’s the arcane grandpa that most youngsters don’t put up with.

Gentoo or Manjaro are to Arch? What do you mean? Those two are very different from each other especially in their relationships to Arch.

Turns out massively parallel computation has applications beyond video rendering.

That’s essentially it, but Gentoo has never required systemd.

Nope and yep. It’s an incredible tool, but it’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.

Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it’s just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.

Holy shit I think I have the same problem, mesh network and all. I assumed it was a driver issue; thanks for the pointer!

Don’t give Java the credit of inventing bytecode, it’s a much cooler concept than that

Bad code, yes, calling it ‘shit’, no.

Stuff like this is a big part of why software circles are seen as so hostile and unwelcoming to outsiders.

You can be completely clear and frank without resorting to insult, mild though it may be. Just because you and people most like you understand that calling their work ‘shit’ doesn’t reflect on them personally, doesn’t mean it’s not significantly exclusionary.

Now, obviously you can get to know your reports well enough to understand whom would take ‘shit’ well, but that doesn’t mean it’s not generally important to temper criticism with kindness. Kindness never has to mean holding back criticism, just avoiding stooping to insult.

“You’re dumb” is disrespectful, but “your code is shit” isn’t? How does the latter not reasonably imply the former?

Being respectful is taking the time to moderate “your code is shit” to something like “your code is not acceptable”. You might even go a modicum further into kindness with “there are aspects of your code I need you to improve”.

All express the same idea, some will leave the listener more open to internalizing the criticism.

Yep, 2020

I suppose I don’t see what is conceptually challenging about chords; they’re just physically annoying and require memorization. Most people are used to control key chords at least, so emacs benefits from that. Whereas vim requires a deeper shift in thinking.

Memorizing chords is conceptually simpler than taking on a modal mindset. I sure got pissed at insert mode plenty of times while I was learning vim.

Thankfully this was during my college masochistically-acquiring-skills-that-make-me-feel-cool phase where I was also learning LaTeX, so I just focused on the future gainz. I’m so glad I did on both counts.

Well of course, but some of us want to be well-informed on the tradeoffs we’re making.

What do you mean? Payment isn’t anti-FOSS at all, it’s just a lot harder to make money when the source is libre.

It’s good exercise.

‘Need’ as in why do they need to stretch their development resources to cover a video player when they’re already stretched thin and perfectly serviceable alternatives exist.

I have no actual idea, but that’s what was meant. My guess is they want everything written in Qt6 so it can all be portable to windows etc.

What’s being discussed here is the hiring of engineers rather than consumer choices. Hiring an engineer is absolutely an expression of trust. The business trusts that the engineer will be able to concretely realize abstract business goals, and that they will be able to troubleshoot any deviations.

AI writing code is one thing, but intuitively trusting that an AI will figure out what you want for you and keep things running is a long way off.

The thing with Ruby clusterfucks is you have to go looking for them. Languages with implicit type coercion and loose comparison like PHP and JS have clusterfucks lying in wait for you and it takes concerted effort to avoid them.

What do you mean regarding weird typing?

Ruby gives you all kinds of tools to make clusterfucks, but it’s not hard to keep your hands out of the metaprogramming cookie jar.

But with careful application even fucky features can be put to good use. Like monkey-patching a problematic method to only throw an exception rather than allow accidental misuse. With a nice verbose error message and good testing practices there’s almost no risk.