Every deluded twat thinks they’re the realist

The idea that all politicians are corrupt and conniving bastards is mainly a right-wing fiction. They assume everybody acts exactly like they themselves do

Wonder if using first-past-the-post has something to do with that. Seems like a pretty terrible system

Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.

It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.

XML has a bad rap because people went a bit (ok a lot) overboard with it in the early years, pretty much like what happens with a lot of other technologies, but as far as structured and human-readable data formats with good schema and tooling support go, it’s pretty much unbeatable. Now that JSON is the New Good Tech and XML is the Old Bad Tech, too many developers use JSON where XML would absolutely make more sense, and then we end up with unholy abominations like Portable Text, which is JSON pretending to be XML, and is so incredibly verbose and monumentally stupid that it feels like some sort of joke esolang data format rather than something being used in a production system. But no, here we are, god is dead and JSON is XML.

XML is terrific for building eg. structured markup languages with more complex markup than what something like Markdown can provide, and have the resulting files be comparatively readable, at least in comparison to the JSON-based alternatives – compare HTML to Portable Text, for example. XML has such a bad reputation – partially deservedly – that people just automatically assume it’s not a valid tool for anything modern, even when the modern “NoSQL”, “structured and typed data is for nerds, suck it” JSON solution is a giant pile of shit compared to the XML alternative

“If sex isn’t a baffling ordeal then it shouldn’t happen” really did me in

I’m not sure which thought is scarier: that you don’t know what you’re signing up for, or that you do know and you enjoy fixing undecidable formatting fuckups manually

Semantic whitespace problems can easily be literally impossible to solve automatically. One of the dumbest fucking ideas anybody ever came up with in computing and its inventor if anyone belongs in YAML Hell. As a fuckup it’s not quite as bad as null, but that ain’t exactly a high bar

There’s a special place in hell for the inventor of semantically significant whitespace.

YAML itself is one of the circles of hell. You have to copy-paste YAML from web etc sources with dubious formatting for all eternity, and the editor doesn’t have YAML support. Also you can only use Python

I dunno; people bitch about Haskell too

for thousands of years dates counted upwards from a negative number

wat

Mission accomplished

I honestly don’t quite get why it’s so common to hate Javascript.

I mean, it’s not my favorite language to put it mildly (I prefer type systems that beat me into submission) but as far as popular dynamically typed languages go, it’s not nearly the worst offender out there. Yes, lol, weird things equal weird things when you use == but that’s not exactly unique among dynamic languages, and some people couldn’t come to terms with it not being like Java despite the name so they never bothered learning how prototypal inheritance works, and also who the fuck needed both null and undefined when either of those by itself is already a mistake and introducing them to a language should be grounds for a nice, solid kick to the groin.

But, warts and all, the implementations are generally reasonably performant as far as these things go, the syntax is recognizable because eg. braces are common whether we like them or not and notably also survives copy-pasting from eg. the internet or anything that doesn’t use the same whitespace you do, and it’ll happily let you write code in a quite multiparadigm way, leading to some people to insist Javascript is kind of like Scheme and other people to insist Javascript is nothing like Scheme.

So, shit could be worse. And by “shit” and “worse” I mean eg. Python, notable for achievements such as: being one of the first if not the first language with a designer who huffed enough solvents to think that semantically significant whitespace is a great idea especially combined with no real standardization on whether you need to use tabs or spaces, and which often doesn’t survive being copy-pasted from the web and is a nightmare to format; being unable to actually run anything in parallel up until very recently because lol why bother with granular locking in the runtime when you can just have one global interpreter lock and be done with it; or being popular in part due to the fact that its FFI makes it easy to write modules for it in languages that aren’t a crime against common sense and can run faster and more parallel than an 80’s BASIC interpreter. And let’s not even go into the whole “virtual environment” thing.

So while Python’s not quite INTERCAL-bad, at least INTERCAL doesn’t have significant whitespace and its manuals are really damn funny.

And then there’s eg. Ruby, with 9999 ways to do everything and all of them so slow that it aspires to one day be as fast as INTERCAL, and PHP which is a practical joke that went too far and somehow managed to eventually convince people it’s actually a real language.

edit: oh and if you don’t know about INTERCAL, I can highly recommend checking out the the C-INTERCAL revision’s manual, which includes eg. a very helpful circuitous diagram and a logical table to explain one of its more odd operators. There’s also a resource page that’s maintained by one of the perpetrators of the C-INTERCAL revision.

please apply a logistic transformation to your dates

Which is definitely a totally normal and everyday operation that normal people do with dates

That’s one thing that really bugs me about Javascript (weirdly enough I’m okay with eg prototypal inheritance and how this works, or at least worked before the bolted on classes that were added because apparently I’m like one of the dozen or so people who had no problems with those concepts). The fact that all numbers are floats can lead to a lot of fun and exciting bugs that people might not even realize are there until they suddenly get a weird decimal where they expected an integer

It’s technically only supposed to be used for a question, but language is based on how it’s most commonly used

Ah, I see you’re also a descriptivist 😀

But yeah I know you were just continuing the joke; I’m a language nerd (well, general nerd really) and I just got curious about what the rule actually is. While English orthography rules related to punctuation usually seem to be pretty much the same as with Finnish, the rule for question marks seems to be more relaxed in Finnish because it can “officially” be used to mark any expression as a question. The rules for commas are also different, ours are closer to German and we tend to spray commas everywhere

That’s great to hear. It’s thankfully becoming more common in general, and we can all do our part in spreading these practices.

I tended to actively evangelize for it when I was managing coders or teams. Unfortunately it’s still not all that uncommon for coders to be downright offensive when giving feedback, like not necessrily quite Linus-level rants but things like “this is idiotic, this is stupid, that’s shit, why would you do that” etc etc. The usual explanation I’ve gotten is that they’re just being “honest” and saying what they think, and it’s not their problem if the reviewee (is that even a word‽ I can’t English today) gets offended. Some even get all huffy about it, like “oh we’re just supposed to coddle them and never say anything negative so their little feefees don’t get hurt?” And I mean, yeah, getting honest feedback definitely a good way to learn, but it’s not like the only way to point out errors or problems is to be a cunt about it.

A-ha, but this most decidedly not formal writing! UNO REVERSE CARD.

But on a more serious note, I did intend it as a sort of question because I’m not 100% sure, because the rules for quote use might well be different in English than my native language. I actually also don’t know the rule for question mark usage in English; is it generally considered a crime against orthography to plonk a question mark on something that’s a statement, or is it valid in some cases?

Notably, a good code review should also bring up the good parts of the submission, and not just concentrate on the errors. Not only does it make the recipient feel better to get positive feedback among the negative, but it helps them learn about good practices too. Just concentrating on the errors doesn’t really tell them which things they’re doing well.

Many reviewers concentrate on just finding mistakes, and while it’s useful it’s sort of the bare minimum; a good code review should be educational. Especially if the submitter’s a more junior coder, in which case it’d also be a good idea to not just outright tell them how you’d fix some problem, but sort of lead them to a solution by asking them questions and pointing things out and letting them do the thinking themselves. But still, experienced coders will also benefit from well-structured feedback, it’s not like we’re “finished” and stopped learning.