Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Programmers are also human" channel.

  1. Did a search of “no longer deprecated” on the PHP website, and found quite a few hits. E.g. on the “OOP model” page: “5.1.3 Changed: In previous versions of PHP 5, the use of var was considered deprecated and would issue an E_STRICT level error. It's no longer deprecated, therefore does not emit the error.” Or how about: The “instanceof” operator was introduced in PHP 5. Before this time “is_a” was used but “is_a” has since been deprecated in favor of “instanceof”. Note that as of PHP 5.3.0, “is_a” is no longer deprecated.
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  2. I set up an MTA for a client that identified itself to a HELO as “Sendmail 8.8.8”. Of course it wasn’t really Sendmail, let alone such an ancient version. The security auditors even made a comment when they saw that, but of course there was no actual vulnerability, so nothing they could really complain about.
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  3. I keep adding to my Emacs customizations little by little, just as I need them. My published emacs-prefs repo is currently up to about 1500 lines of Elisp code, and it took over a decade and a half to reach that point.
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  4. Someone tried to submit a bug report to Microsoft over trouble with Powershell scripts on Linux. Microsoft rejected it, on the grounds that it had to remain bug-for-bug compatible with the Windows version.
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  5. In physics, the electron has a wave function that has to be rotated through 720° to bring it back to its original orientation. #Relatable
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  6. A lot of tools use FFmpeg behind the scenes, without you realizing it.
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  7. Emacs isn’t just a text editor, it’s an editor. I have successfully used it to directly edit binary files. Because it doesn’t assume a file has to consist of lines, it doesn’t need different commands to navigate/edit across line boundaries versus any other character byte in the buffer.
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  8. One note is that if you download a prebuilt binary, you can never (legally) get the full functionality of FFmpeg. This is because the build options include both “-enable-nonfree” and “-enable-gpl”, and if you specify both, you end with a build that says its licence is “unredistributable”. But at least you have that choice if you build it yourself.
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  9. I did GUI programming in MATLAB once. Let’s just say, a matrix-centric language is not suited to GUI programming.
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  10. I charge for my time developing software for in-house use and providing support, on top of a Free Software stack. Some of that Free Software is my own.
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  11. Python is a good tool for building wrappers. I did a job a few months ago involving extracting telemetry data from videos recorded on GoPro cameras. Yes, did you know there are extra data streams on those videos, besides the regular video and audio? Besides the ffmpeg command itself, the suite also includes ffprobe, which lets you analyze a video file and determine the locations and timestamps of every packet in every stream. Once I had this, decoding the data was quite easy (barring discrepancies between documented formats and the actual data generated by different camera models ... c’est la vie ...).
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  12. Fun fact: Jupyter notebooks are used for production code. It includes quite advanced rich-output facilities, after all.
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  13. I did GUI programming in MATLAB once. Let’s just say, a matrix-centric language is not suited to GUI programming.
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  14. “Why is he wearing a false beard?” “Because he can’t afford a real one.” The above was posted to celebrate “Give An Elderly Joke A Home” week. Thank you for laughing.
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  15. The Vi/vim family is the only group of editors that requires separate commands for inserting text before the current position versus after the current position. All GUI editors (and all normal editors, including Emacs), let you insert text at the current position.
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  16. I put up with vi for many years, while the main part of my sysadmin work was on proprietary Unix systems. Once those went extinct and were replaced with Linux, I could now depend on having Emacs available wherever I went, so I switched to that.
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  17.  @LKRaider  You do realize Emacs can display images directly in the text buffer, right? It’s even shown in the video.
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  18. I once had to do GUI programming in MATLAB. I feel pleased about the fact that I got money for it.
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  19. Fear and loathing at Web3 Berlin ...
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  20. As any fule C programmer kno, if you are outputting a literal string that is not a formatting template, you use fputs, not printf.
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  21. IDEs also require you to use their particular build systems. Text editors are more general than that. And editors like Emacs are more general still. Because they don’t assume that your file consists of a sequence of text lines, they can edit binary files. Because they don’t need special commands for moving/editing across line boundaries--newline is just another byte value in the file.
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  22. One common reason I’ve found for videos failing to play on other platforms is that the pix_fmt defaults to yuv444p, which is unnecessarily high quality. Change this to yuv422p or even yuv420p, and most decoders should be fine.
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  23. If you’d done that, you could make a fortune from the eggs right now.
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  24. It’s like agile blockchain meets extreme waterfall.
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  25. Been done. I think it was the legendary Fabrice Bellard who implemented an x86 emulator in JavaScript, then got a Linux kernel to boot in the browser.
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  26. Ada was designed in the 1980s specifically for embedded and safety-critical systems. For example, the life-support system on the International Space Station is written in Ada. Now there is a project, called SPARK, to create a provably memory-safe subset of Ada, with the intention to bring in more of the Ada language over time. Nvidia has been making use of this.
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  27.  @lele_l  Certainly tutes can only be an adjunct to the docs, never a replacement for them. What I have in my browser bookmark list is not tutes, but reference docs.
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  28. I always render individual image frames out of Blender. Then I can experiment with different encoding options (fast), without having to re-render (slow).
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  29. Here’s the kind of stuff I have written, from my Python wrapper qahirah_xcffib, for keeping track of initialized X11 extensions: self._ext_inited = dict \ ( (key, {"query" : def_query_version(key, args), "done" : False}) for key, args in ( (xfixes.key, (xfixes.MAJOR_VERSION, xfixes.MINOR_VERSION)), (xrender.key, (xrender.MAJOR_VERSION, xrender.MINOR_VERSION)), (xshape.key, ()), ) )
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  30. I got that joke too. The trick to surviving PHP is to cleanse your palette with a bit of code in some other language afterwards.
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  31. Vi/Vim is the only editor family that has separate commands for inserting before the current position versus inserting after the current position. Because normal editors (including all GUI ones) do their insertion at the current position.
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  32. I think that’s a hazard of the traditional “parenthesis pileup” way of laying out LISP code. I would recommend avoiding that. Do it like this instead: (defun convert-to-region-codes (beg end) "converts alphabetic characters in the selection to “region indicator symbols”." (interactive "*r") (unless (use-region-p) (ding) (keyboard-quit) ) ; unless (let ( deactivate-mark (intext (delete-and-extract-region beg end)) c ) (dotimes (i (- end beg)) (setq c (elt intext i)) (cond ((and (>= c ?A) (<= c ?Z)) (setq c (+ (- c ?A) #x1F1E6)) ) ((and (>= c ?a) (<= c ?z)) (setq c (+ (- c ?a) #x1F1E6)) ) ) ; cond (insert-char c) ) ; dotimes ) ; let ) ; convert-to-region-codes
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  33. The trick with Emacs is to have it always running, and use emacsclient to tell it to open files for editing. In my ~/.bashrc I have the line alias e='emacsclient -n' Then in any terminal window, I just have to type e «filename» to open that file in my Emacs session.
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  34. “killall vim”
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  35. Every name in Python is a variable. Every value is an object. Every object is an instance of a class. Functions and classes are also objects. Logical conclusion: classes are also instances of classes.
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  36. The libraries can demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the language. For example, look at Python: quite a compact core language, with a remarkable variety of libraries built on top. Many of them could rightfully be described as full-on DSLs (domain-specific languages), which shows the power of the core language.
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  37. In the last edition of The Mythical Man Month (from 1995), Fred Brooks discussed how the next major advance in programmer productivity would have to come from techniques like “metaprogramming” -- the use of very high-level languages to orchestrate toolkits written in lower-level languages. That is indeed how things are commonly done these days. And one of the most popular of those high-level languages is Python.
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  38.  @kamertonaudiophileplayer847  I’m sure Python is playing a significant part in planning of interplanetary missions. It’s become a staple of scientific-quality data analysis, after all.
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  39.  @kamertonaudiophileplayer847  Now that, there is no such thing.
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  40. One aspect of PHP from their early, Perl-copying phase: they rightly tried to avoid the feature of Perl where, if a variable was not explicitly declared local, it must be global. So they added the requirement to declare a variable global. But then they needed to add a bunch of exceptions for built-in variables that became the “superglobals”. Python went at this a different way: you could refer to globals/nonlocals without having to declare them, but you could not assign to them without declaring them as coming from an outer scope first. Otherwise the assignment always creates a local variable (unless there is already a reference to the same-named variable from an outer scope, in which case the assignment is an error). This may seem like an unwieldy rule, but I think it works well in practice.
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  41.  @GSBarlev  This is why people post their config files on GitH
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  42.  @GSBarlev  ub. So on a new machine, your custom setup is never further than a git-clone away.
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  43. CG folk understand things like linear algebra and quaternions and vector algebra. And the difference between metallic and non-metallic specularity. How do you make fun of people like that?
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  44. All that (Ana)Conda/Homebrew business is for Windows and Mac platforms, where package management is not quite as advanced as Linux.
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  45.  @MrRedstonefreedom  It’s not how GUI editors work--notice the insertion indicator is a thin line that goes between or before/after characters, not on top of them. And it’s not how Emacs works. And Emacs arguably has a more sophisticated command language than any vi/vim derivative.
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  46. Java adds the twist of a class whose entire set of methods is deprecated, yet the class itself is still needed elsewhere.
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  47. ProRes uses DCT compression, just like JPEG. Why not use wavelet-based compression instead?
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  48. Does your editor’s extension language understand closures and lexical binding? Emacs’ Elisp does.
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  49. Emacs is an editor, not (just) a text editor. I have successfully used it to edit binary files. Because, you see, Emacs doesn’t assume a file is split up into lines. So it doesn’t require special commands for moving/editing across line boundaries versus within a line--it’s all the same.
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  50. The kinds of things I need JavaScript for, a few dozen lines of code directly in a page, without any external libraries or frameworks, does the job just fine. I feel pleased because I figured out how to use “<script type="module">” inserting some code directly in a web page, so that it could be accessed elsewhere on the page, as though imported from a real external module.
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