Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Fireship" channel.

  1. 8:12 He was actually forced to create Git. What happened was that BitKeeper was made available as freeware to the Linux developer community, hedged around with a great deal of caveats. One of these was “no reverse engineering”. Torvalds felt for some reason he could agree to these terms on behalf of the entire Open Source community. So when Andrew Tridgell was commissioned (by the FSF, I think) to reverse-engineer BitKeeper’s formats and protocols, Torvalds ordered him to stop. To which he responded in the predictable way. So Larry McVoy gave notice of the termination of the BitKeeper licence. Torvalds went off to ruminate on things for a couple of weeks, and came back with the beginnings of Git. And the rest, as they say, is history.
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  2. Don’t use an RE to parse e-mail addresses.
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  3. 5:38 That “security” aspect was a bit of a joke in the early days, when Red Hat installers tended to load on everything by default. A client of mine got hacked through a vulnerability in the SunRPC service, which we weren’t even using.
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  4. 0:52 I used punched cards in a University summer job. The keypunch was a think an IBM 129 unit -- it actually had a memory for storing the contents of a card. You keyed it all in (you couldn’t actually see the characters you were keying, just a column count), then pressed the Punch key to actually punch the card, and if there was a mistake, you just advanced to the column where the error was, fixed that, and punched a new card from the updated memory.
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  5. GCC could be made more modular internally, for example by adding a plugin API. However, this was resisted for a long time by Richard Stallman because he was afraid it would be (mis)used to hook proprietary code into GCC and thereby evade the GPL. This allowed LLVM to get an edge in areas where GCC could not compete.
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  6. Previously, it was Twit-rated. Now it is X-...?
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  7. 1:01 Overlooking the fact that C++ is already so insanely complicated to begin with, that it becomes exponentially harder to add new features without tripping over undesirable interactions with existing ones. Python 2→3 was one big bang of breakage, and evolution since then has been able to proceed much faster with minimal backwards-compatibility trouble.
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  8. The original plan was to make an educational machine that could only run Python code. The developers were surprised to discover that it would actually be cheaper to make it a full general-purpose computer. And so they did.
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  9.  @ko-Daegu  Fun fact: collage is an art form consisting of cutting and pasting.
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  10. Here’s a trivia question. In C++, you use “new” to create a class instance on the heap; when declaring a class instance on the stack, you don’t use “new”. In Java, all class instances live on the heap. So you would think that “new” would be redundant, and would have been omitted (as in Python). Yet Java still requires “new” for creating class instances; why?
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  11. Statements were not limited to the length of a single line. FORTRAN had continuation capabilities (put any character other than blank or “0” in column 6) since the beginning.
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  12. Yes, but Autodesk has by far the bigger advertising budget. Telling people how wonderful you are tends to count for more than actually putting out a superior product.
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  13. I can remember a computer consultant I met once, whose job it was to help people with their FORTRAN code, stating that he would never even look at a user’s program unless it had IMPLICIT NONE at the top.
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  14. Emacs doesn’t just have a GUI, it also provides a GUI toolkit you can access from Elisp code. Think of how the menus, status line, windowing etc are implemented -- yup, all in Elisp.
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  15. That particular writer was known for writing stories about enigmatic, baffling events where the characters have no idea what’s going on. Like one about a trial where the person on trial is not even told what the charges are.
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  16. The world’s most popular DBMS is so widespread, you probably have a copy literally within arm’s reach right now, in your purse or pocket. It’s SQLite, and it ships with every Android smartphone.
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  17. In other words, you cannot properly automate GUI testing, but algorithms can certainly be tested.
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  18. Worth mentioning the fundamental schism between “LISP-1” (e.g. Scheme) and “LISP-2” (e.g. Common LISP, Emacs LISP) languages. The first kind put both function names and variable names into a common namespace, while the second kind put them into separate namespaces.
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  19. Key points to remember about Python: * Every name you can define is a variable. This also includes function and class definitions: they are not declarations as in other languages, they are just special forms of assignment statement. * Every value (that you can return from an expression, put into a variable etc) is an object. * Functions and classes are also objects. * Every object is an instance of some class.
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  20. It was supposed to be “business-oriented” for the 1960s concept of “business data processing”. This meant fixed-field records and ISAM files, and certainly did not include dynamic string processing. Then, a decade or two later, relational databases came along, and became a rather important business need. And the best way of interfacing to these turns out to be via dynamic generation of query strings. Which COBOL can’t cope with very well. They did some nonstandard kludges to cope with this, but the reality is that even klunky old PHP is better at interfacing to relational databases than COBOL will ever be.
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  21. I use functional constructs heavily, and I like languages that support this (Python, LISP, JavaScript). But a pure-functional language just seems like a waste of time.
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  22. Emacs: the world’s most powerful editor. Does ∗your∗ editor’s extension language understand closures and lexical binding? Emacs’ Elisp does. Notice I didn’t say “text editor”, I said “editor”. I have successfully used it to edit binary files.
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  23. 0:53 Also worth mentioning filesystems, network protocol stacks, and security management, as additional important parts of the kernel.
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  24. 0:17 Command-line interpreters (CLIs) were not a revolutionary concept in 1971. After all, every interactive OS had them, and there were quite a few by that time. What was revolutionary was the idea that the CLI ran as just another ordinary process with no special privileges, rather than being built into the OS.
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  25. 0:51 Actually, the OpenGL term “fragment” refers to intermediate pixel values. They are not called “pixels” until they are composited into final pixel values on the display surface.
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  26. Worth noting that Larry Wall, renowned creator of Perl and Patch, described laziness and hubris as two of the most important programmer virtues.
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  27. We already do. GPS already needs to take General Relativity into account. Because, you know, clocks run slower down here than up there.
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  28. I mainly use MDN as my reference for things Web. That has handy compatibility matrices for all the important features (that I’ve come across so far), so I know to only use stuff where all the boxes are green.
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  29. Consider what language an “enterprise” company like Facebook uses: they created “Hack”, which is their own dialect of PHP. They even open-sourced its implementation, the HHVM.
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  30. Python handles its rational Fraction type with the regular “/” operator. E.g. from fractions import \ Fraction as F print(F(3) / 4 * 1 / 2) prints out 3/8
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  31.  @qandak  As I understand it, Autolisp manages to leave out the features that make LISP so powerful (e.g. macros, lexical binding), leaving only the mess of parentheses.
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  32. The original name for JavaScript was “LiveScript”. Doesn’t seem to be used much nowadays ... just sayin’.
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  33. Speaking of “frameworks”, a logical next step would be to look at RATFOR, a.k.a. “RATional FORtran”. It was basically a preprocessor that translated into regular FORTRAN, but introduced some nicer statement constructs.
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  34. Jupyter is great for “scratchpad” programming, when you are trying things out.
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  35. Remember, Microsoft is not going to offer you Python-in-Excel for free.
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  36. I’ve never felt the need to use the C API. One project I did involved extracting telemetry data (accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS) from videos captured from GoPro cameras. I wrote a Python script which called ffprobe to identify the right streams and the exact locations of the data packets and their timestamps, then I could read those parts of the video file directly and decode the packets using the standard “struct” library.
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  37. “Modernizing” and “PowerShell” in the same sentence ... 🤣🤮
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  38. There’s a lot of truth in that. Everything is a file, every kernel API is a filesystem, and every kernel object can be accessed via a file descriptor. This makes it very easy, for example, to use regular shell commands to poke around /sys to manage the state of your hardware, you don’t need special tools written to special APIs. Sometimes you see signs of “file envy” on the part of Microsoft. Like when Powershell tries to make the Registry API look like a filesystem, only it isn’t, really, because that abstraction doesn’t work outside of Powershell.
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  39. You don’t have to “configure” Emacs to start using it. I just started gradually accumulating custom settings over the years I’ve been using it.
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  40. Did they ever fix the weird issue with how arguments were passed to functions and subroutines? Namely, if the actual argument was a simple variable or an array element, it would pass the address of that. If it was a more complex expression, then that would be evaluated into a temporary location and the address of the temporary was passed. In other words, the called routine could modify the actual argument in one case, but not another. Imagine you had declared a constant “PI” in your program and set it to π = 3.14... Now imagine that, due to a bug, you passed this to a routine which modified it. Suddenly your “PI” value, that you thought was a constant, is not so constant any more!
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  41. Just leave out the “Excel” part.
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  42. The key point not mentioned here is that information content is a statistical concept. The closer your data stream looks like to random noise, the less compressible it is. It is inherent in the design of compression algorithms that they produce a data stream that looks very much like random noise.
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  43. Quoth the Lambda: “Servermore” (With apologies to Edgar Allan SaaS.)
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  44. If a language reference is that complicated you need to have it handy for daily programming, then take that as a hint that the language is too complicated. I was able to internalize nearly all the core Python language after a few months of use. What I do refer to daily is the standard library docs (and docs for whatever other libraries I might need). Oh, and the page of the language spec listing the special method names.
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  45. “select *” is not something I would ever use in production code. Always select exactly the fields that you need, no more, no less.
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  46. The main use for archives that I see is not for saving my own data, but for distributing collections of files. And normally when you get one of those you want to extract everything.
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  47. You are free to change your shell to perl, if you want. You can even do it permanently by editing your /etc/passwd entry. You will soon discover why that’s a bad idea.
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  48. The PHP developers had no idea about Perl. They saw that “$” syntax, but didn’t understand what it meant in context (denotes scalar variables), and decided to use it for all their variables. Now they are looking at Python, and they still have no idea how its features work together. So they are copying ideas like iterators, and screwing them up.
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  49.  @Celastrous  Python is characterized by a compact core language with a great deal of extensibility. All the rest is library modules building on that. That’s what makes it so powerful.
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  50. zstd is widespread enough that you can consider it portable nowadays. And tar supports it, too.
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  51. MATLAB was originally designed for matrix manipulations. For that, it seems to be fine. However, I once had to use its GUI functions, to build a real-time display and processor for multichannel EEG data. Let’s just say, if it’s a choice between that and being covered in honey and tied down in the hot sun next to an anthill ... maybe the ants aren’t so bad ...
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  52. Python, like Linux, became popular entirely through its own merits, not because there was some marketing-behemoth megacorp promoting the hell out of it. All the marketing-behemoth megacorps have done now is notice that these stars are rising while theirs are waning, so they are trying to embrace the new things just in the hope that some of the shine will rub off on them.
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  53. Copyright law was created to shore up the monopoly of publishers. It was never about the artists, or any actual sense of “morality”.
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  54. Does Java have unsigned integers and typedefs yet? Those are just basic niceties that you get in regular languages.
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  55. Lua was designed to be an embeddable scripting language for extending apps. Yet somehow Python has taken over that role.
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  56. Sorry, I don’t follow GUI fashions. I don’t have the brain cells to waste getting that joke.
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  57. Anybody else immediately thought of the mathematical definition of a “step function”? AWS seems to use it to mean “some component that performs one step in a workflow”, as opposed to the sense of “a function that changes discontinuously at a point”, like when you integrate the Dirac delta from -∞ to a given value x . Ah, it’s called the “unit step function’.
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  58.  @EidosX_  This is why pure-functional programming doesn’t make any sense. The real world is innately procedural.
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  59. I only use JavaScript in web pages, not in the back end (my preferred language for that is Python). So far I’ve only needed maybe a couple of hundred lines of JavaScript at most at any one time, and writing it directly has been quite tolerable.
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  60. In the Ada programming language, you can write integer literals in any base from 2 to 36. Don’t you wish more languages had that feature?
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  61. If you’re a PHP expert, can you explain what’s going on here: $array1 = [1, 2]; $array2 = [1, 2]; $x = &$array2[1]; $array1a = $array1; $array2a = $array2; $array1a[0] = $array2a[0] = 23; $array1a[1] = $array2a[1] = 22; echo "\$array1 = " . print_r($array1, true) . ", \$array2 = " . print_r($array2, true) . "\n"; Do the two arrays print out the same? Why/why not?
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  62. They want to make money from it.
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  63. One interesting difference in Python’s syntax is the precedence of operators. Java follows C, which means that testing bit masks requires these parentheses: (val & mask) != 0 whereas Python lets you do it without the parentheses: val & mask != 0 You’d think that might cause incompatibility or confusion when trying to move expressions between Python and other languages? Yet lots of people do this all the time, and they don’t even notice the difference.
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  64. 0:27 SQLite is the world’s most popular DBMS. Consider that it ships with every smartphone being sold today, so likely you have a copy about your very person right now.
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  65.  @theshermantanker7043  Microsoft only called it “Dotnet” because mentioning “Internet” in your marketing materials was pretty trendy back then. Even though the technology wasn’t really useful for that.
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  66.  @androdeveloper7261  Correct. But: Why do we need to distinguish? Isn’t the name enough?
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  67. Emacs is one of those things you can start working with very quickly. Then as you get more familiar with it, you feel the need to add a little customization here and a little bit there. Looking at the Git repo containing my custom Emacs prefs, the first commit was made in 2007. Currently the main file is about 900 lines. I wouldn’t consider myself an Emacs expert, by any means.
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  68. Google’s Play Store actually banned an app using this library, supposedly for violating the “Sexual Content and Profanity Policy”.
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  69. I think a Jupyter notebook would be far more flexible: each cell can hold as much or as little code as you like, and can produce multiple associated items of rich output — graphics, sound, video, maths, formatted HTML, plus interactive widgets to control same — interspersed with cells containing narrative text so your notebook can be self-documenting. And you can include code in other languages besides Python.
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  70. JavaScript is the only language you can use for interactive web pages without having to load an entire bunch of framework packages.
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  71. Meanwhile, Emacs runs rings around them with a scripting language that’s over half a century old.
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  72.  @pabloripoll  Server side needs async and also things like WebSockets now. Which PHP can’t quite manage.
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  73. I don’t understand the point in a special “imager” app. If you want to do a sector copy from an image file to a block device (or in the other direction), just use the standard Linux “dd” command.
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  74.    And all built on a much nicer core language!
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  75. Larry Wall is known for two major accomplishments: he created patch, and he created Perl. Of the two, the concepts of patch have spread to permeate the whole of open-source collaborative development. So that will likely live on in some form forever. Perl? Maybe not so much.
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  76. They tried, with “Linux is a cancer”, back in Ballmer days. And failed. And they had much more control over the market back then than now.
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  77. The trouble with a big company like Apple is that there can be different factions. For example, the more savvy engineers likely look on Asahi as a cool project, and would like to unofficially support it as much as they can. But the beancounters and lawyers and basically Tim Cook’s entire inner circle are going to see it as an obstacle on their path towards the move to eventually renting out, rather than selling, Apple hardware and software, so at some point they will likely move in and put a stop to it.
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  78.  @androdeveloper7261  No, that’s not the reason. After all, methods can return objects, too.
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  79.  @androdeveloper7261  No, they won’t clash. That’s why “new” is needed: because you can have a class or data field that has the same name as a method, in the same scope .
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  80. If your images use a compression like JPEG, then they already look very much like random noise. In which case further compression isn’t going to work very well.
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  81. 1:40 Are people assuming this 🇺🇸 bill somehow applies to the whole world?
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  82. 2:30 No, Emacs is not an IDE. An IDE wants you to group your files into a “project” and use a particular build system for building that project. Emacs doesn’t impose any such restrictions. It can work with any build system and any project organization (or lack of organization) you like.
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  83. There is an old game called “Core Wars”, where you write machine-language programs for a simulated machine, the aim being to destroy other programs running on the same machine. Not as simple as you might think -- a lot of room for trying different strategies and counter-strategies.
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  84. The death of Microsoft Internet Explorer has been very liberating, shall we say.
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  85. I thought the C++ “<<” output operator was quite neat, until I realized it doesn’t allow easy localization. When you need to be able to reorder the parts of a sentence to fit different language grammars just with template strings, without having to change your code, printf works a lot better.
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  86. Nobody uses Dotnet for anything important, not even Microsoft.
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  87. Think of this as Python+Jupyter+Pandas+etc embracing and extending Excel. Guess what happens next ...
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  88. In A.D. 2101, War was beginning. Captain: What happen? Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb. Operator: We get signal. Captain: What! Operator: Main screen turn on. Captain: It’s you!! CATS: How are you gentlemen!! CATS: All your base are belong to us. CATS: You are on the way to destruction. Captain: What you say!! CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time. CATS: Ha ha ha ha ... Operator: Captain!! Captain: Take off every ‘ZIG’! Captain: You know what you doing. Captain: Move ‘ZIG’. Captain: ... For great justice!
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  89. And presumably also roof his house.
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  90. I think PHP is the ur-example of a language designed by people who have no degrees, only “experience and a solid portfolio”.
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  91. Excel spreadsheets are notoriously hard to debug. What’s worse is that most of its userbase has no idea about debugging techniques anyway, since that requires programming knowledge, and they use Excel because they hate programming. There have been many embarrassing cases of wrong data being published because of Excel spreadsheet bugs -- even in scientific research papers. When other researchers want to replicate those results, they ask for the original spreadsheets, only to discover that their formula ranges are incorrect, that kind of thing. The most depressing case I heard of is that geneticists are changing the names of some genes, because when they import info into Excel, it wants to interpret those names as dates.
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  92. All the compute-intensive stuff is done in lower-level toolkits like NumPy, which are written in C or other such fast, compiled languages. So for example if you have an array of a million data points, you would not process them one by one in Python, you would let the lower-level toolkit perform some operation on them in bulk.
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  93.  @CdrRogue  Yeah! Some features which were originally deprecated are no longer deprecated! Can any other language claim that kind of progress?
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  94. I don’t like the traditional way of writing LISP code with “parenthesis pileup”. I find that putting openers and closers on matching indentation levels makes it easier to see the structure of the code. Example: (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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  95. Emacs isn’t just a text editor, it is an editor . I have successfully used it to patch binary files.
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  96.  @percivalpenncoloring  Input delay?? I’m a fast typist, and I have noticed no such thing on any Linux or Unix boxes where I have used it. Are you running it on Windows, by any chance?
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  97. 1:11 “Official” moon landings ... so were there “unofficial” moon landings?
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  98. Nowadays you can run any language in the browser, just by compiling it to WebAssembly.
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  99.    I recall that. Tridge just Telnetted into the BitKeeper server, typed “help”, and it told him a lot of what he needed to know. Also, reverse-engineering is explicitly permitted under 🇪🇺 law.
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  100. I don’t use TypeScript. Looking at those examples in the video, it really looks like Microsoft has brought C++ to JavaScript.
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  101. C♯ is really just a Java wannabe, and still carries around that 1990s baggage.
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  102. The Greeks used letters as the digits of their number notation.
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  103. 0:31 There were some in-between steps, like Autocode.
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  104.    Every name in Python is a variable. That means its value can vary, by assigning a new value. That’s what “variable” means.
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  105. Remember, VS Code is built on Electron. So if you don’t consider it “slow” and “bloated”, I shudder to think what you are comparing it to ...
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  106. 0:59 PHP started out by trying to copy Perl without really understanding how it worked. These days, they’ve moved on to trying to copy Python, again without really understanding how it works.
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  107. One good thing is, you don’t have to do “using namespace «ns»” to bring everything in, you can individually import names into the current namespace with “using «ns»::«name»”, e.g. “using std::cout” etc.
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  108. The best way to double your productivity, regardless of what particular editors/IDEs/toolsets you use, is to learn to touch-type.
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  109. If you need fractions, try using fixed-point numbers (scaled integers). Can be fiddly to work with, but faster than floats.
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  110. I’m not so sure. That AI only exists because of training sets. What happens when there are no more training sets?
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  111. GMT is actually not well defined. If you look at the legal definition, it’s not clear whether they’re referring to UT1 or UTC. Since the two could differ by up to 0.9 seconds, you can see where a problem comes in.
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  112. And the Asahi install has to leave 38GB free for macOS, otherwise the poor Apple OS is no longer able to update itself.
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  113. ORMs are a waste of time. When they try to map more advanced DBMS features, they just end up creating a new syntax that is no simpler than the underlying SQL.
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  114. Dijkstra called it “the language of tomorrow to solve the problems of yesterday”.
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  115. Rust is already infiltrating the Linux kernel, arguably the most successful and productive software project of all time.
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  116. Things to consider: * There is a book called JavaScript: The Good Parts . There is no book called PHP: The Good Parts . * PHP has a “===” operator (and so does JavaScript). Python doesn’t have one, doesn’t need one. * PHP has no module system. You have to “include” source files, so everything gets defined in a common namespace. Python has no “include”; instead you “import” separate modules, and their contents stay in their own namespaces. Even JavaScript has figured out modules now.
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  117. The fact that variables are global by default is a definite misfeature. Even JavaScript fixes that in “strict” mode. I think Perl has a strict mode too, but I don’t really use it any more, so I can’t be bothered to find out. Trivia question: before Perl had “my”, it had “local”. Why wasn’t that good enough? Why was “my” added?
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  118. Why do you need the word “call”? Why not just have that line as addition(sum, 1, 2) as in other languages? Because there are no reserved words in FORTRAN!
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  119. If using PHP is like having a tooth pulled without anaesthetic, then using a JavaScript framework is like having a tooth pulled without anaesthetic, and having a leg broken at the same time.
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  120. I once tried to use the “Reflection” API in Java. It’s a whole bunch of classes and methods, with various complicated calling sequences to make use of them (because functions and classes are not first-class objects). In Python, the equivalent is maybe half-a-dozen built-in functions, and that’s it.
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  121. The whole point of the automatic memory management was supposedly to do away with memory leaks. Yet, when I started learning Android, I found you still had to watch out for memory leaks!
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  122. Trivia question: in what base does “9 × 6 = 42” come out correct?
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  123. That means having to use Windows, though.
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  124.  @iwant2tryhard337  Those who want to get the most out of their Raspberry π do.
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  125. I have only so far used type annotations in Python as a documentation aid. None of my individual Python projects has gone much over 10,000 lines so far.
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  126. If you look at the size of the language references, Python is about 25% or less the complexity of Java. Yet Python manages to include features that Java does not, like defining your own operator overloads, metaclasses, properties, and import-as. Just compare the conciseness of the Python “select” module with the monstrosity collection of classes and methods that is the whole “Selector” mechanism in Java, and you might see what I mean.
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  127. Does PHP/Laravel do async yet? How do you handle WebSockets?
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  128. Technically, “symmetric” encryption is where the encryption and decryption algorithms are the same (e.g. exclusive-or stream ciphers). Here we have ones where the algorithms are different (inverses of each other), but the key is the same. Ones where the same key is used for both are called “secret-key” encryption, where “secret” is used in the sense of “knowledge that is carefully controlled”. I like to refer to RSA and similar algorithms as “key-pair” encryption, since that is less unwieldy than “public-private key pair”. Key-pair encryption is typically about 1000 times slower than secret-key encryption. SSL/TLS (the encryption protocol used by HTTPS, but not exclusively by it) negotiates the secret session key using something called Diffie-Hellman key exchange. This has the interesting property of offering “forward secrecy”: even if someone had full access to the decrypted session-key-negotiation packet exchange, they would be unable to work out what the session key was.
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  129. Which could lead to its own mistakes. There was a story about code for a space probe where the line DO 10 I = 1,10 became instead DO 10 I = 1.10 What’s the difference? The first is the beginning of a DO-loop, the second is a simple assignment of the value 1.10 to a variable called “DO10I”. No compiler error, but the program behaves entirely differently.
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  130.  @adriantrummer6126  You invited me to change your mind, now you are saying it is closed anyway.
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  131. Because you like to copy-lot.
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  132. So which “one thing” does tar do? It was originally about saving files to tape, but that function is essentially obsolescent now.
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  133. Yeah, particularly when Copilot can create your bugs for you!
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  134. I thought go tos were considered harmful?
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  135. I used TECO, back in the early days. Just about every character you can type is a command. Emacs left its TECO roots and embraced LISP a long while ago. But it still bears some traces of those beginnings. For example, using CTRL/G as the cancel character: that came from TECO. No other software has that convention!
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  136. So, a plug for Spark. . . . Spark ... plug ... geddit?
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  137. Writing your C code structured according to Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams (which means avoiding gotos) helps a lot.
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  138. Annotations would presumably be like in Python, where the compiler simply collects the information, attaches it to the constructed object, but otherwise ignores it. It is left to additional lint-type tools (e.g. MyPy) to do the actual static type checking.
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  139. I know a couple from Mumbai who reckon that’s quite a nice city. Nicer than Delhi, anyway.
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  140. But if it’s written in Rust, isn’t that violating Atwood’s Law?
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  141.  @SimonWoodburyForget  Note that Python handles this same issue without the “new” keyword. And C++ lets method calls work the same way, regardless of whether the object was created with “new” or not. None of which you address in your so-called explanation. This issue has already been explained further above. Read my posting on that before digging yourself in further.
    2
  142. Let the Olsen Database worry about it for you.
    2
  143. Remember that Microsoft is doing this because it has to, not out of the goodness of its heart. The only reason it has to pay attention to Python is because it is dominating the professional-quality data-analytics industry, and leaving the noddy Excel jocks in the dust. This is a way to make those Excel jocks feel they are still somehow relevant, and also pay Microsoft for the privilege.
    2
  144. Semicolons: yes or no? Once you understand the statement-continuation rule, you can do without!
    2
  145. Some of the brains behind the Skia graphics engine originally worked for Apple, where they created the QuickDraw GX graphics engine in the early 1990s. Back then, it would have been a major advance on the old QuickDraw, with integer-only coordinates, that the Macintosh was using for its interactive graphics, and I was a big fan. Unfortunately, it died.
    2
  146. You couldn’t use VScode to edit binary files, though.
    2
  147. The trouble with “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is when it does break, you find you don’t know how to fix it. The idea of having essential mission-critical business functions depend on obsolete, unsupported software ... especially at a bank ...
    2
  148. Yes, it is definitely becoming more popular. Blender has removed the option for gzip compression when saving its documents (though it can still read existing gzip-compressed ones) in favour of zstd.
    2
  149. Or, better still, get rid of the Microsoft part and run the Python+NumPy+Jupyter+Pandas+Matplotlib+etc part directly. For free.
    2
  150. The way PHP copied iterators from Python -- and screwed them up -- is just another episode of PHP sadness, in my view.
    2
  151. Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.
    2
  152. That would be a side-effect ...
    2
  153. And here I thought the name was either from Flash Gordon , or Blazing Saddles . “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”
    2
  154. FORTH really only belongs in a museum. I don’t see any reason to use it any more. PostScript, on the other hand, had some interesting ideas. Give it proper local variables and lexical binding, maybe even module scoping, and you could have quite a useful programming language. Just dump the obsolete built-in graphics.
    2
  155.  @zilog1  I know all that. I understand the difference between YOU FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN and you PostScript love {honk} if But FORTH’s memory management is still from the Stone Age. Avoid.
    2
  156. Start with an editor that will grow with you. For example, I moved from vi/vim to Emacs about 20 years ago. I started with very minimal customization. But gradually, here and there, I noticed things I was doing repeatedly, that could be done faster with some automation help. So bit by bit I added custom commands to help with those. Currently my main ~/.emacs file is up to about 1200 lines.
    2
  157. Futhark!
    2
  158. Remember the rule: never use a .0 version of anything. Wait for 0.1.0.
    2
  159. This is YouTube. Use the playback controls, Luke!
    2
  160.    If you are objecting to the way Python is designed, take it up with the Python designers. I am merely pointing out how it actually works.
    2
  161. This is an opportunity for Microsoft to squeeze a bit of revenue out of those too dumb to realize that they can drop the Excel part—indeed, the entire Microsoft part—and run this entire advanced Python-based analytics stack for free.
    2
  162. Dijkstra called APL “the language of tomorrow to solve the problems of yesterday”.
    2
  163. One thing experience teaches you is to hold off on optimization until you get the code actually working correctly. I revisited a personal command-line script of mine a few days ago. It was taking about 6 seconds to start each time. I soon discovered a couple of things: * Importing matplotlib is quite slow. So if I defer that to the actual plotting function, so it only gets imported if I use that function, that speeds up the invocation of other functions. * When computing stats over a particular sampling interval, my database query was iterating through all the samples and discarding ones outside the range, because I couldn’t be bothered narrowing things down within the query itself. That made sense at the time, but now I have accumulated over 150,000 sample records, it was time to revisit this decision. So I added a couple of extra queries to determine more appropriate time bounds for the actual query for samples. As a result, displaying accumulated counts over the last 30 days went from 6 seconds down to about 1 second.
    2
  164. Fun fact: Python allows semicolons in places like that.
    2
  165.  @marcasrealaccount  Show me the “using” equivalent, and explain why it’s better.
    2
  166. Base 30 seems a better compromise: it has the same prime factors 2, 3 and 5, so it can express all the same numbers as base-60 in terms of exact ratios.
    2
  167.  @yokowasis  We have proper command-line tools and scripting APIs to do automation, we don’t have to struggle to pull puppet-strings through a GUI.
    2
  168. On the contrary, these new features are increasingly tied into CSS.
    2
  169. VS Code is an Electron app. So that means it’s never going to be as slim and fast as proper native Linux code.
    2
  170. “I’m having a Windows problem—” “Run as administrator!” Please don’t ...
    2
  171.  @wlockuz4467  I have NFI what that means.
    2
  172. The card punch I used might have been an IBM 129. It stored the entire line in memory, with no display (other than a column number) until you pressed a key to punch the card. Make a typo? Hold down a key to advance the column number (preserving the existing contents of the line prior to that) to the point where you need to make the correct, press the correct key, then advance past that to the end (again preserving the existing contents of those columns), and punch a new card.
    2
  173. It was better than getting the data-entry people to input the programs. They made so many typos -- confusing “O” and “0” and “1” and “I”, for example. I just found it quicker to input the programs myself.
    2
  174. Emacs didn’t get GUI support until it had already been around for about 20 years. That was in the 1990s.
    2
  175. 0:41 “\” instead of “/” -- yet another case of DOSlexia.
    2
  176. In Computer Science we learn about “abstract syntax trees” (ASTs), which are an intermediate representation when parsing a programming language which just represents the structure of the code, getting rid of layout details. Think of LISP as a language that is already in AST form -- I think the term for this is “homoiconic”. Since language constructs can be directly represented in terms of data structures in the language itself, this makes all kinds of powerful manipulations possible. For example, have you ever tried to use “♯define” macros in C or similar? These macros work by string substitution, and that is notorious for being fiddly and troublesome, and prone to mysterious bugs. In LISP, on the other hand, the macro facility works at the syntax level. This lets you do many useful things very conveniently and with much less trouble.
    2
  177. Just a note that, to get the most out of FFmpeg, you have to build it yourself. This lets you enable certain options together that have incompatible licences (e.g. non-free + GPL), so the result ends up as “unredistributable”.
    2
  178. Not sure why I would want to use custom structured data types in a DBMS. That breaks normalization.
    2
  179.  @jonathanalonso6492  Point-and-click maybe OK for one-off tasks, not so good for things you need to do a hundred times a day. Then you discover that GUIs cannot be automated.
    2
  180. Nobody uses Dotnet for anything important. Microsoft itself won’t use it in anything worthwhile, like Office. Even when they were developing VSCode, they decided to go for, of all things, Electron with JavaScript/TypeScript, instead of DotNet.
    2
  181. So where does it put the entire Universe, exactly? Given that “Universe” means “everything there is”, where is the machine located whose state represents all these Universes?
    2
  182. JavaScript/TypeScript for that!
    2
  183.  @armincal9834  You tell me. Why doesn’t Microsoft use it in VS Code or Microsoft Office, for example? Actually, I know why. Trying to build core parts in Dotnet was a key reason for the problems in Windows Vista.
    2
  184. Linux system logfiles used to use some idea of a “system” timezone for timestamps. Luckily, systemd does away with this: internally timestamps are stored as UTC, but you can display entries in any timezone you like, by setting your TZ variable in the usual way.
    2
  185. Maybe it could have been implemented faster if more developers had contributed to it.
    2
  186. They are the smart ones who don’t get taken in by a big company’s ad campaigns into somehow believing that it does favours for its customers. Above all, they believe that, if you buy something, you own it. That’s not an attitude that Apple is comfortable with these days.
    2
  187. Certainly the traditional “parenthesis pileup” way of writing LISP code just looks ugly to me. Here is how I write my code: (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
    2
  188. Instead of “idempotent”, it should be described as a “makefile for distributed configuration”.
    2
  189. Got reminded of this item from The Onion : “Prague's Kafka International Named Most Alienating Airport”.
    2
  190.  @GSBarlev  He also gave up his post as Python BDFL. Coincidence? You be the judge.
    2
  191. Do any of his reasons make sense?
    1
  192. Meanwhile, Emacs can still run rings around it with a scripting language that is over half a century old.
    1
  193. “My machine is supposed to be fast. Why is my code so slow?” “Do you understand the locality principle?”
    1
  194. Even with SRP, anybody who gains unauthorized access to the hashed password on the server will be able to impersonate the server.
    1
  195.  @tobiasb6200  The server has to have some information to allow it to authenticate itself to the user. Anybody getting hold of that information can impersonate the server. QED.
    1
  196.  @tobiasb6200  How does your user know they’re connecting to the right server?
    1
  197. I always felt that original fixed-function-pipeline OpenGL was the easiest to learn. As they got rid of the fixed functions and replaced them with custom shaders, things got a lot more powerful, but also harder for beginners.
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  198. Best described as a “makefile for distributed configuration”.
    1
  199. If you are doing “scratchpad”-style programming (a few lines of code to calculate something), I would recommend using Jupyter notebooks with Python code. Makes it very easy to try things out. You can even get graphical plots and other rich output. And basic widgets for simple interaction.
    1
  200. So Python code that uses Mojo reserved words (like “struct”) as names would not be a strict subset of Mojo, since it would fail to compile with syntax errors.
    1
  201. I have done “clever” things. In one recent Python project, I wanted to support both synchronous and asynchronous versions of the main API classes. So I implemented a mechanism involving processing the parsed ASTs for those class definitions to generate two versions of each. That way I could write all the common code just once. The final size of the module was about 2500 lines. The code for implementing the macro-processing mechanism is about 160 lines (including comments explaining in detail how it works). If I wrote out all the expanded code by hand, it would add about 1000 lines to the code size. Less of course the macro processor, so the net gain is say 840 lines. Less code means less effort to write, and less effort to maintain, and less chance for bugs to get in. In my view, a net gain. And quite a significant one.
    1
  202. I wonder why a function like this isn’t built into JavaScript: function escape_html(s) { return s .replaceAll("&", "&") /* always do first, rest can be in any order */ .replaceAll("\"", """) .replaceAll("<", "<") .replaceAll(">", ">") .replaceAll("\t", " ") .replaceAll("\n", " ") } /*escape_html*/
    1
  203. 1:20 iostreams turned out to be a poor idea. When writing localized messages, you may need to rearrange the variable parts to cater to different language grammars: printf-style formatting has support for this, iostreams does not.
    1
  204. Python is dynamically typed, yet also strongly typed. To understand the difference, think about why PHP needs the “===” operator, and Python doesn’t.
    1
  205. Why not counting Threadrippers?
    1
  206. Remember that Microsoft is doing this because it has to, not out of the goodness of its heart. The only reason it has to pay attention to Python is because it is dominating the professional-quality data-analytics industry, and leaving the noddy Excel jocks in the dust. This is a way to make those Excel jocks feel they are still somehow relevant, and also pay Microsoft for the privilege.
    1
  207. 2:07 Unfortunately, there was this misfeature (or may be it was just an ambiguity in the original language spec) whereby a loop would always iterate at least once, even if the termination condition was true at the start. Not sure if this was ever fixed.
    1
  208. Notice I didn’t say anything about “do-while”.
    1
  209.  @chri-k  Guess which one I was talking about. Consider the equivalent of for i in range(len(s)) : ... do something with s[i] ... ♯end for where s might be empty in some situations.
    1
  210.  @chri-k  CONTINUE was a no-op. Other languages didn’t have this problem.
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  211.  @chri-k  I noticed.
    1
  212. I actually wrote some code many years ago to do Marquadt-Levenburg curve fits.
    1
  213. Least-squares is the most common way to optimize a curve fit.
    1
  214. Is the Universe too complex to have arisen by itself?
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  215. If the Universe is too complex to have arisen by itself, then there must have been some precursor agency that created it. But wouldn’t this Creator agency have been even more complex than the Universe?
    1
  216. But if the Universe is too complex to have arisen by itself, how could something even more complex have arisen by itself?
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  217.  @vincentgoudreault9662  Other languages (like C or Python, even old Pascal) don’t need a keyword to distinguish the two. Why FORTRAN?
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  218.  @vincentgoudreault9662  Try giving the same name to an array and a subroutine in FORTRAN, and let us know what happens.
    1
  219.  @WielkiKaleson  So how does that explain the need for CALL?
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  220.  @WielkiKaleson  Maybe read the comments before replying next time.
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  221.  @andresmartinezramos7513  Which doesn’t answer the question I asked, which is why subroutine calls need the word “CALL” in FORTRAN, but not in other languages.
    1
  222. It was so that FORTRAN didn’t have any reserved words.
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  223. It's integrated in lots of open-source apps, like Blender, Inkscape, GIMP ... basically, it’s become very popular glue for content-creation industries, among others.
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  224.  @fred.flintstone4099  If it can be integrated into GPL’d software, it can be integrated into anything (open-source).
    1
  225. I must remember that. The next time I need to do such a thing, I need to resist the temptation to do it with “grep -v” (which can operate on arbitrary-sized files) and use vim instead.
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  226. All the caffeine, I suppose ...
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  227. 0:40 Every time I see repetitive code, I think “why don’t you refactor that into another function?”.
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  228. I don’t use Anaconda. Is that a Windows thing?
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  229. Trouble is, he said that before the rise of very-high-level languages like Perl and Python. Also he probably never used LISP.
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  230. Think of this as Python+Jupyter+Pandas+etc embracing and extending Excel. Guess what happens next ...
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  231. Hint: everything that Excel does can be done much more nicely by those other tools.
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  232. I assume that, in Ruby, function/method definitions and class definitions are declarative, as they are in conventional languages. Remember in Python, these are just special forms of assignment statement, and the function names and class names are just variables that are assigned those objects. (Yes, functions and classes are objects.)
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  233. Winget has been in development way too long. Last I checked, it was little more than a wrapper around your existing software installers, and didn’t even handle library packages. What’s the bet Microsoft will lose interest and give up, as it has so many times before?
    1
  234. You can encrypt arbitrary long messages with any decent encryption algorithm using any key.
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  235.  @vishalmishra3046  Consider that there is no limit on the length of a TLS certificate.
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  236. 0:28 While “International Earth Rotation Service” remains a cool name, I don’t think they officially use that any more.
    1
  237.  @notbobbobby  The fact that you can customize Emacs with just a few lines of code, rather than having to download and install a whole “plugin”, makes the barrier to entry quite low.
    1
  238. For example, setting up a custom character table for Python identifiers, which can include any Unicode characters that are classed as “letters”: (defvar identchars (make-char-table nil)) (map-char-table (lambda (key value) ; include all uppercase and lowercase letters (when (or (eq value 'Lu) (eq value 'Ll)) (set-char-table-range identchars key t) ) ; when ) ; lambda unicode-category-table ) (set-char-table-range identchars '(?0 . ?9) t) (set-char-table-range identchars ?_ t)
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  239. I have experimented with using melt. This lets you create an XML control file that defines all the edits. It uses FFmpeg underneath anyway.
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  240.  @pabloripoll  Do PHP programmers use references in any “real project scenario”, then?
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  241.  @sudeshryan8707  Hint: try the code and see what it actually prints.
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  242. Here’s an example of commented code that I write: my_wait_avail = asyncio.get_running_loop().create_future() if self.wait_avail != None : # somebody else using this socket -- wait till they’re done await self.wait_avail ♯end if assert self.wait_avail == None self.wait_avail = my_wait_avail # claim ownership of socket Now, would you suggest getting rid of those comments, or not?
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  243.  @hamm8934  Show us how you would do it, then.
    1
  244. Arduino can do microsecond-level response times, Raspberry π cannot. That’s the difference between a full computer running a full OS, and a bare-bones one running just the code you compile for it and nothing more. Each has their uses.
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  245. @VoidField101x The π Pico, with its programmable I/O channels, is purpose-built for that. There is a demonstration somewhere of it doing real-time emulation of the video interface on the old BBC Micro.
    1
  246. He can see us, even though we can’t see him ...
    1
  247. Why don’t you write one?
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  248. 0:46 In the immortal words of June Whitfield: “Just the one, dear?”
    1
  249. Even with higher taxes, socialist-style (i.e. Government-provided) healthcare still only has about half the cost per capita of US-style medical insurance.
    1
  250. Except he’s talking about Anzible instead of Ansible.
    1
  251. Those over-complicated, bloated, borderline-useless and paywalled tools are targeted at Windows users who have no idea about command lines.
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  252.  @MK-bs3dq  is Swoole compatible with Laravel?
    1
  253. Is that a Microsoft thing? I use Emacs, which doesn’t do squiggles (though there is probably a module for it somewhere). I don’t even have syntax colouring enabled.
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  254.  @maccsguitar  You have to learn to treat comments as an essential part of the code, not some optional extra.
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  255.  @rumfordc  No, they are not “optional”, “extra” or “redundant”. They are vital.
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  256.  @rumfordc  That’s what I mean by “vital”. Imagine trying to get the program functional without understanding what it does. For non-trivial code, that can be come an impossible task.
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  257. Fun fact: “Y-combinator” is a mathematical concept from λ-calculus. It’s a function for creating recursive functions.
    1
  258. Use the GNU “date” command to check: ldo@theon:~> TZ=CET date -d "now" Fri 18 Mar 2022 23:07:59 CET ldo@theon:~> TZ=CET date -d "+ 2 weeks" Sat 02 Apr 2022 00:08:01 CEST
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  259. There is a whole website devoted to embarrassing mistakes resulting from entrusting important data analyses to Excel jockeys.
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  260. Python has the NumPy engine for operating efficiently on large multidimensional arrays, including sparse ones. With custom operator overloads, you can express complex manipulations in a single line of code.
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  261.  @Migoyan  I don’t see any Fortran code in the NumPy source tree. Can you point me at any?
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  262.  @vincentgoudreault9662  And not FORTRAN, either.
    1
  263.  @vincentgoudreault9662  If they were originally written in FORTRAN, why change to C? Unless perhaps FORTRAN wasn’t good enough.
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  264.  @vincentgoudreault9662  I wonder why, if FORTRAN is such a good language, you can’t find “people good enough” to work in it.
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  265.  @vincentgoudreault9662  Why is it not being taught in schools? Does it take more “discipline” to “master” FORTRAN than C?
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  266.  @vincentgoudreault9662  What is the point of FORTRAN, then, if you can do the same things more easily in C?
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  267.  @vincentgoudreault9662  Wonder why that old “fast” FORTRAN code was recoded into C, then. Have you looked at the NumPy code? Maybe you could offer to speed it up by rewriting it in FORTRAN.
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  268.  @vincentgoudreault9662  It is up to you to back up your claim with actual, working code. Otherwise, why bother to make it? We have plenty of such code for C; show us some for FORTRAN, if you can. And if you can’t ...
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  269. 5:53 Why couldn’t you just put the -1 inside the square brackets? Because then it would be interpreted as a dictionary key of “-1”.
    1
  270. Would you entrust mission-critical business functions to an OS that can only handle 26 drive letters?
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  271.  @adriantrummer6126  Or how about basic office functions like reliable printing, or trusting that the system will not suddenly delete all your files? In other words, the sort of areas where Windows has been spectacularly lacking of late?
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  272.  @adriantrummer6126  It happened to others.
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  273.  @adriantrummer6126  So you were not really here to argue any kind of objective truth, but merely to bore us with your own personal opinions.
    1
  274.  @adriantrummer6126  But you can’t find anybody else who does.
    1
  275.  @adriantrummer6126  Aren’t Windows users supposed to be in the majority? Yet you know I’m right.
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  276. @Adrian Trummer You were the one trying to claim “the majority isn’t always right” ... are you now walking back on that? Yes, they do deliver a better user experience, actually. If only because they are more customizable than the one-size-fits-all Windows interface. You see this in the number of people complaining about limitations of the Windows UI that don’t happen in Linux. And in how Microsoft keeps copying features from Linux.
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  277. I basically learn stuff as I need to. And keep things like MDN (and of course the Python docs) in my bookmark list!
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  278. Here’s one: are you still using hex codes to specify colours? Or have you discovered the CSS colour functions yet?
    1
  279.  @aoeu256  Tools exist, but they don’t work reliably.
    1
  280. At least you know about LibreOffice, instead of hoary old OpenOffice.
    1
  281. Python has ASGI for Web development. PHP doesn’t seem to have any equivalent.
    1
  282. That logo looks too close to the X11 logo.
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  283. Having created your edit list, this is the sort of engine you could use to render out the final video.
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  284. Microsoft itself won’t use it for anything important. For example, VS Code is built on Electron with TypeScript/JavaScript.
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  285. To me, the app includes both client and server.
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  286. Yes, continue with Python. Think of the Excel jocks who get excited by this, until they discover that, to take full advantage of it, they have to learn Python. Or hire someone who knows it. That’s where you come in.
    1
  287. Can a Windows machine be the control node?
    1
  288. In my first job outside of University, everybody had a degree, but mine was the only one in Comp Sci.
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  289. If they don’t update their browser, then clearly they are not part of most companies’ target market.
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  290.  @goldydog1  Companies are only going to pay attention to customers, or potential customers. No point wasting time and money on anybody else.
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  291.  @goldydog1  It’s not “user data” that matters, it’s “customer data”. If they’re running outdated systems, why should they spend money on your product?
    1
  292. Automating a GUI is a recipe for despair.
    1
  293. Variables should not be global by default.
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  294. 1:36 Echoes of λ-calculus! See, the thing with JavaScript is, it’s a mix of really dumb things and really advanced things that only CS majors (and LISP programmers) can appreciate. Compare this with PHP, which is a mix of really dumb things ... and that’s it.
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  295. But surely it is the site’s own fault for including all that JavaScript bloat -- a lot of which is specifically designed to make such scraping difficult.
    1
  296.  @AyrtonGomesz  Java objects are always on the heap.
    1
  297.  @gmodrules123456789  It’s already been explained: it’s to specify which namespace the name comes from.
    1
  298.  @SimonWoodburyForget  Functions and methods are also objects, with their own memory allocations, in Python. This issue has already been explained, anyway (see above).
    1
  299.  @philipp1717  It’s to distinguish between the two namespaces, one for method names and one for field/class names, as already explained.
    1
  300. Amazing the number of incorrect answers that continue to crop up, even after the correct one has been given.
    1
  301. Your VM had to do a GC at that point.
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  302. Best left in a museum.
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  303.  @ThatOneRobloxDev  Not worth using any more. If you want a stack-based language, PostScript still has some interesting features worth redeeming. FORTH ... none.
    1
  304. You have a very noticeable senpai. What do I win?
    1
  305. It’s great for DSLs. What I find a pity is the lack of ability to define entirely new operators: languages like C++ only allow you to overload existing ones. Smalltalk lets you define new operators using one or two characters from a limited set. Algol 68 also allowed defining new operators according to limited rules. At first sight, Python seems no better. But thanks to the use of descriptors, you can give sense to constructs like v1 .cross* .v2 .cross* v3 which are not only syntactically valid, but also make semantic sense.
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  306. 1:13 Actually XML.
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  307. Or try a Jupyter notebook. Each cell can have any number of lines of code, and produce any number of items of associated rich output—graphics, charts, sound, video, mathematical formulas, even arbitrary HTML. And interactive widgets to let the user control that cell output. You can intersperse code cells with narrative text cells, so the notebook becomes self-documenting. And you can use languages besides Python, if you want. Where is there a spreadsheet that comes close?
    1
  308. Of course. Then when some Excel jock discovers they can’t use this new feature without knowing Python, they’ll hire you.
    1
  309. I still think that.
    1
  310. That’s nothing ... try a “zip bomb”.
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  311. 3:10 Subtly wrong answer. The length of a string is measured in code points, not characters. Don’t believe me? Try this: from unicodedata import normalize s = "naïve" s1 = normalize("NFC", s) s2 = normalize("NFD", s) print(s1, s2, len(s1), len(s2)) Output: naïve naïve 5 6
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  312. One question I don’t see addressed is: why Nginx and not Apache? Apache was around before Nginx, and can do much the same things; why is the new guy preferable?
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  313. 1:42 Unfortunately, functions can either be first-class, or be named, but they cannot be both.
    1
  314. Did the Emacs you write have a LISP core? Emacs without Elisp seems ... incomplete.
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  315.  @BobFrTube  I had fun with TECO, back in the day. That’s where Emacs gets the odd choice of CTRL/G for cancelling input. Did your LISP have lexical binding and token-based macros? It’s not really LISP otherwise. ;)
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  316. Yeah, but monads are only needed for functional programming, which nobody in their right mind would use for anything important.
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  317. I learned it from a book called “The Compleat Cybernaut”. The bio said the author was working in some city (might have been Liverpool) as a blacksmith. She must have led an interesting life ... I devoured that book over a weekend. But in those days, I had no access to an actual computer -- not for another three years.
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  318.  @arinahomuleba4165  I have done, successfully, with Emacs.
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  319. That’s a lot of code to do something so simple. Try this: import functools, operator for i in range(11) : print("%d! = %d" % (i, functools.reduce(operator.mul, range(1, i + 1), 1)))
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  320. Same here. put the application logic in the application language, not the DBMS.
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  321. Now it can have the full-grown sheepdas as well.
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  322. It already does. All you have to do is leave out the Microsoft part.
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  323. Once they realize that everything they do in Excel can be done better in Python+NumPy+Jupyter+Pandas+Matplotlib+all the rest of it, then Excel just becomes the shell you start to get to the other stuff. Microsoft will likely make some money off the crowd who are too dumb to realize that they can dump the Excel part and use the rest of it ... for free.
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  324. Doesn’t matter how advanced a framework is, if it’s built on a crappy language. Example: str_split() doesn’t work properly on empty strings. Yet when I try adding a note about this to the PHP docs, it gets deleted.
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  325.  @rafadydkiemmacha7543  Python has strict typing. Every object is an instance of a class.
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  326.  @rafadydkiemmacha7543  It’s a very fundamental feature. Functions and classes are objects. All objects are instances of some class. That means that functions and classes, too, are instances of classes.
    1
  327. PHP users have no idea about Python, do they?
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  328. In the same way that VBA is the best programming language!
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  329.  @cmaxz817  One common headache with all these stack-based languages is keeping track of what’s on the operand stack at any moment. This is why, in my doodlings around a PostScript derivative, I added operators to manage additional operand stacks. So you temporarily create a new stack, with a known number of items transferred to it from the previous one, which is now temporarily inaccessible. Then when you have finished a calculation sequence, you expect to find a particular number of items remaining, which you transfer back to the previous stack, which becomes the current stack again, getting rid of this one.
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  330. The trouble with C♯ is that it’s Windows-only. That’s not enough any more.
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  331.  @Bourn77  In theory. But Microsoft has never given a guarantee that it won’t sue cross-platform users for patent violations.
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  332.  @firstlast-tf3fq  Maybe you have, but nobody uses C♯/Dotnet for anything important. Even Microsoft won’t use it for something as important as Office.
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  333. Emacs can do that. (Which is in fact the usual answer whenever anybody asks “Why can’t my editor do that?”)
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  334. It’s officially “Unix”, but it is far from working the way normal people expect a “Unix” system to work.
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  335. “Time dilation in 100 seconds”
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  336. By the way, are you Zarch?
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  337.  @fred.flintstone4099  “Decorative” ... I can imagine your house at Christmas time, festooned with XML hanging from the eaves ...
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  338. The GIL is integral to the reference-counting memory management system. Get rid of it, and Python becomes totally garbage-collected, like Java. You wouldn’t want that. Because currently you can write Python programs which run for a long time with reasonable memory requirements; if it became like Java, then you would need to impose a limit on the heap size to keep it from gobbling up all the memory on your system.
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  339. 0:49 What’s the most obscure language on that diagram that you know something about? In my case, it’s probably Algol 68.
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  340. Emacs was originally implemented in TECO, which goes back to the 1960s. TECO used basically every ASCII character to mean something, so a TECO script was sometimes described as looking like “transmission line noise”. Fun game: enter your name to a TECO interpreter, and try to guess what it will do as TECO commands. Later Emacs was rewritten using its own custom LISP implementation (I think Stallman had a hand in this). But there are still one or two odd traces of its TECO heritage. For example, the keystroke to cancel a macro definition or other keyboard input is CTRL/G. No other software on Earth used that keystroke for that purpose, apart from TECO.
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  341. It’s a way to squeeze some more revenue out of those Excel jocks too dumb to realize that they can leave out the Excel part—indeed, the entire Microsoft part—and run a full professional-quality Python-based data-analytics stack for free.
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  342. Java is what COBOL used to be.
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  343. 1.
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  344. They know where the revenue opportunity lies. And that is with Office 365, not Windows.
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  345. If Jesus is God, and Jesus is the son of God, does that mean that Jesus is his own grandpa?
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  346. “GitHub Copy-Lot” FTW!
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  347. I used to use Perl, before discovering Python. With Perl, I always felt that there were esoteric implications to the constructs I was using, that the Perl masters understood and I did not. With Python, I found it quite clear from the beginning what all the constructs did. Surprises were few.
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  348. Somehow I don’t think that anything built on Electron can be considered “lightweight” ...
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  349. Submit a patch.
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  350. I thought the C++ “<<” output operator was quite neat, until I realized it doesn’t allow easy localization. When you need to be able to reorder the parts of a sentence to fit different language grammars just with template strings, without having to change your code, printf works a lot better.
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  351. Java is just way too wordy and convoluted. One example is the whole “Selector” mechanism for managing nondeterministic I/O. It’s something like 4 different classes and I don’t remember how many dozen methods. For comparison, Python sums it all up in its “select” module, where you only need one class with just a few methods.
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  352.  @CottidaeSEA  So is there some simpler alternative to the “Selector” mechanism now? Enquiring minds would like to know.
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  353.  @CottidaeSEA  Just look at the APIs I mentioned, and compare them.
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  354.  @CottidaeSEA  In Python I can wait on a file descriptor with just 3 calls: * Create a poll object * Register my FD * call poll.poll(), with or without a timeout. Try doing the equivalent in Java.
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  355.  @CottidaeSEA  Show us some code to demonstrate how you do FD selection.
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  356. Even Microsoft won’t use Dotnet for anything important ...
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  357.  @Vexxel256  Electron is for lazy programmers who don’t care about their users.
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  358. Actually tar will automatically recognize the compression format when extracting, so “xvf” should work on all compressed tar archives.
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  359. Most download tools and protocols very quickly acquired the ability to resume interrupted transfers, precisely to get around this problem.
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  360. Sounds like this is why Microsoft created git-lfs.
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  361. Not just strings, but any value of a sequence type can be multiplied by an integer to perform replication.
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  362.  @CottidaeSEA  And laziness, too, is one of the three programmer virtues, according to Larry Wall. This is the kind of code I had to add to narrow down the query interval (×2, this one for the lower limit, another similar one for the upper limit): limit = eval_expr \ ( conn, "min(artwork_timestamp) from" " (select max(timestamp) as artwork_timestamp from" " artwork_stats inner join artworks on" " artwork_stats.artwork_url = artworks.artwork_url where" " artworks.artwork_url in (%(artworks)s) and timestamp <= %(since)d" " group by artwork_stats.artwork_url)" # minimum of latest sample for each artwork that is not after since % { "artworks" : ", ".join(sqlite.format_sql_value(a) for a in prev_timestamp), "since" : since, } ) if limit != None : where.append("timestamp >= %d" % limit) ♯end if You can see why I avoided doing it until it became necessary.
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  363.  @CottidaeSEA  The triply-quoted strings introduce spurious whitespace. Suddenly the query doesn’t look so neat.
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  364.  @CottidaeSEA  I also consider readability of the query itself.
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  365.  @CottidaeSEA  You don’t like the way I write my code. So sue me.
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  366.  @DjoumyDjoums  Code performance generally follows a pareto distribution. Find and speed up the performance bottlenecks, and that improves things overall. As in my example.
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  367.  @adamestrada7610  Still only Python 3.7!? Because the current oldest upstream-supported version of Python is 3.8! Are Microsoft providing their own support for 3.7? (Somehow I doubt it.)
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  368. Including instil feelings of inadequacy in the Emacs-envious.
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  369. I was able to do a database dump from old MYD files by starting an instance of a compatible-version MySQL server in a container.
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  370. Nevertheless, an IDE still has the “project” concept, and you have to go out of your way not to use it. Emacs doesn’t have that concept at all.
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  371. Bloomberg Finance did a presentation at a Python conference a few years ago, where they demonstrated how they create quite amazing-looking custom dashboards for their users inside Jupyter notebooks. They even open-sourced the add-on toolkit they use to do it.
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  372. Yes. For example, I saw a PHP password algorithm using MD5, which sounds bad. But it iterates the hash 8000 times, which is good. Not suitable for cryptographic message hashes, but good for password hashes.
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  373. Python lets you “import «fullname» as «nick»”, to shorten the references a bit without resorting to wildcard imports. Has C++ got that feature yet?
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  374. With single-character names, you can adopt conventions like implicit multiplication. E.g. instead of “a × b”, you can just write “ab”. That doesn’t work with longer names: how would you know that “widthheight” is supposed to represent “width × height”?
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  375.  @miguelguthridge  With maths formulas, the structure tends to be more important than the pieces, and the ability to manipulate that structure, e.g. to solve for different variables, is also important. In short, concentrate more on “derivation” than “memorization”.
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  376.  @miguelguthridge  Try it and see.
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  377. Idempotency is particularly important for resource-disposal routines. The canonical† example is free(3) https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/free.3.html : when given a NULL pointer, it does nothing and returns no error. I go into more detail about why this sort of behaviour makes it easier to write robust code here https://github.com/ldo/a_structured_discipline_of_programming . †Did you include “canonical” in your list? Get your definition from here http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/canonical.html .
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  378. 1:27 That should be “$nums[1]”. 1:34 And that should be “$friends{'Larry'}”. Welcome to Perl syntax. Does it make sense yet?
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  379. SQL is de rigueur for interfacing to just about any RDBMS. Even the non-relational ( née “NoSQL”) DBMSes are now adopting some form of SQL as their query language.
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  380. They have to get it via a trusted channel somehow. It’s not a large amount of data.
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  381. 1:32 This is one aspect of PHP’s language design which shows what happens when you only think about things part way. Understandably, they did not want to copy the Perl (mis)feature of implicitly declaring all variables as global unless specified otherwise. So they decided that all variables would be local unless specified otherwise. This turned out to be a nuisance for global data like “GET” and “POST”. So they decided that built-in globals would become “superglobals”, visible everywhere without having to be declared global. Too bad about not being able to do the same with your own globals! Python adopted a different, admittedly slightly more complex rule: assigning to a variable would automatically create it as local, unless declared otherwise; but you could refer to an existing global/nonlocal variable without having to declare it (provided you did not also try to assign to it).
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  382.  @blackplaydoh3522  Java-only programmer?
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  383.  @marcasrealaccount  Yuck.
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  384.  @blackplaydoh3522  Couple of convenience examples, from C++: typedef std::map<RegionCode, IDType> RegionCodeTable; /* mapping from region code to name ID */ typedef RegionCodeTable::const_iterator RegionCodeTableLister;
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  385. @The Adjudicator What do you think an “enterprise” like Facebook runs on? Hint: they created their own variant of PHP, called “Hack”, with their own high-performance implementation, the HHVM.
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  386. 3:23 Spot the false equivalence between the C++ and Python code ...
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  387.  @xrafter  The OP did say “archiving a folder”, not “archiving a single file”.
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  388. Because building an IDE on top of such a bloated framework as Electron is perhaps not such a smart idea ...
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  389. Embittered Visual Basic fan speaking?
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  390. Different parts have different licences. You can build it without any non-free parts.
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  391.  @matthewboyer4212  Depends on whether you prefer a licence that guarantees the same rights to the recipient of the software that the giver has, or not.
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  392.  @matthewboyer4212  Copyleft has been described as a kind of “copyright jiu-jitsu”, where you use your adversary’s strength against him.
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  393.  @matthewboyer4212  I would. And I’m not the only one. Linus Torvalds said deciding to release the Linux kernel under the GPL was the best decision he ever made. You don’t like it, you know what you can do.
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  394.  @matthewboyer4212  ∗Yawn∗
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  395.  @matthewboyer4212  Like I said, you know what you can do.
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  396. Trying to automate a GUI never really works that well.
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  397. Other countries also have the number-one cause of death of their children be by gunshot wounds, right? ... Right?
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  398. 3:29 Here’s the funny thing: in Python, “everything is an object” is true even more so than Java: the latter has “primitive” types which are different from “object types” or “reference types” (can’t remember what they’re called). For example, in Python, “int” values are objects with methods like any other objects, while in Java they are “primitive”, and you need to have “boxing” and “unboxing” mechanisms to convert between “int” and the “Integer” object type. And yet, Python manages not to devour all your RAM the way Java does. Why not?
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  399. LO Writer can open multi-hundred-page documents without choking.
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  400. Anybody remember what happened to WebSQL? That failed for an interesting reason ...
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  401. “self-thought” ... I guess studying psychology does that to you ...
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  402. Don’t let your cluster get into a fluster!
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  403. Does that explain why he likes PHP?
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  404. If your OS manages time as UTC, you can still figure it out. If your OS only keeps track of local time, you’re stuffed.
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  405. tar supports a number of different compression methods these days, not just gzip. Which is the best? I was going to say bzip2, but I think zstd is taking over nowadays.
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  406.  @astral6749  Does it? Ah, it’s the way you pronounce “z”.
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  407. You know how if you use “<script type="module"> ... inline content ... </script>” inside a web page, there is no module name to import from, so it would appear you cannot access any function defined in that inline content part from outside? Actually, there is a way you can.
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  408. I think the browser sends you the same cookies as for the page itself. So if your Web connection is already authenticated, you can depend on that.
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  409. Because only VBA or PHP programmers would think it worth including.
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  410. Lambdas are just functions. If you think lambdas are bad, then that must mean functions are bad.
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  411.  @supercellodude  OK, so if it is Java that is “brittle”, rather than lambdas in general, you would get no argument from me. ;)
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  412. Java was supposed to be simpler than C++. But if you look at the language spec, the one is now almost the size of the other.
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  413. I wonder why it’s not just pronounced as it’s spelled. Think “ng” followed by “inx”, then run them together.
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  414. “f” means create an output file, rather than writing to a tape drive.
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  415. Setting it up on Windows is a pretty manual process, though.
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  416. Some of us run multitasking workstation OSes, which means we do multiple things at once. The idea of devoting the entire computer to doing just one thing seems so ... quaint.
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  417. Linux is easier.
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  418. Think about what “sunk-cost fallacy” means ...
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  419. Anybody else want to see LISP in 100 seconds? As old as it is, its macro facility is still streets ahead of struggling with #define in C.
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  420. If a straight line maps to a straight line, then that’s the definition of a “linear transformation”.
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  421. There is static type, there is dynamic typing, and there is no typing at all. JavaScript is one of these.
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  422. Quantum computers that can run Shor’s algorithm are vapourware, and destined to remain that way indefinitely.
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  423.  @jonathanalonso6492  The successful businesses are the ones that produce quality results. Are you really going to pay for someone to perform a manual process over and over? Automation is what computers are for!
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  424. Sure, the programmers will use the Python and the Jupyter and the Pandas and all the rest of the data-analytics toolkits they already do. Just leave out the Excel part.
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  425.  @EidosX_  Which doesn’t make any sense to have only a teentsy bits of procedural code at the edges with pure-functional code in the middle. That’s just pretending to be functional.
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  426.  @EidosX_  So, does Haskell have I/O (i.e. procedurality) or not?
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  427. Cold Fusion, WebObjects, Java applets ... how many more names can I drop to confirm I was alive before this century?
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  428. Go is not for systems programming. When Google were looking at what language to use for implementing their Fuchsia† kernel, they decided Rust was a better choice than Go, even though Go was created by Google itself. †As to why Fuchsia even exists, is entirely another matter.
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  429. DOSlexic confusion of “/” with “\”?
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  430. Look at VS Code--
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  431. they used Electron with
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  432. It’s for those Excel jocks who are too dumb to realize you can access all this stuff directly, outside Microsoft’s walled garden, for free.
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  433. Too bad.
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  434. Sure they do ...∗clik∗ ... sure they do ... ∗clik∗ ... sure they do ...
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  435.  @bit2shift  Perl used other characters with variables as well. Yet it was “$” that PHP chose to copy. Fun fact: in Perl a name can mean at least four different things, depending on which of these characters it is prefixed with. And also depending on whether it is followed by a pair of parentheses, brackets or braces (or none of these).
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  436. Similar here, I guess. My main reference was the man pages (just type “man -s1 -k perl” to see how many there are). But I was never entirely sure I understood the implications of some of the language features I was using. Then I discovered Python. That had a much cleaner syntax, and all the language features actually made sense. So I switched, and pretty much stopped using Perl.
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  437. Let there be an end to dotfile clutter! Doing a listing of your home directory and seeing it filled with hundreds of these stupid little things is not a good look. The XDG conventions try to confine these to a small number of top-level locations, like .config and .local; your app can simply create a directory tree of its own under these. Much tidier, don’t you think?
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  438. 2:33 ∗titter∗
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  439. Guido also gave up his post as Python BDFL. Coincidence? You be the judge.
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  440. They pretty much invented it.
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  441. I think you have to concat each stream independently, then combine them.
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  442. Can a Windows machine be the control node?
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  443. I prefer Circulartine, since I think it’s a more well-rounded drink.
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  444. I’m using 7.3, and it still sucks.
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  445.  @mjacobim  You first.
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  446. It would take you longer than the age of the Universe to come up with a hash collision.
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  447. There is a phrase you might have heard: “cattle, not pets”. If a container instance malfunctions, you don’t bother spending time and effort trying to fix it: you just dump it and create a new one. Should I explain the analogy further...?
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  448. FORTRAN actually has no reserved words.
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  449. They did: it was called “IronPython”, built on DotNet. Nobody wanted to use it. Because ... DotNet.
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  450. Anybody tried Jupyter? Now there is an integrated terminal.
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  451. That “unix philosophy” is a half-truth. People use it to attack things they don’t like.
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  452. Remember why Windows Vista got delayed and was so buggy with such lousy performance when it did ship? It was because Microsoft had the great idea of writing core parts of it in Dotnet languages like C♯. The performance turned out so bad, they had to abandon the project (the infamous “Longhorn Reset”) and start again.
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  453.  @reddragon2358  Can it indeed? Can you name any robotics applications using C♯? Just for comparison, NASA’s Mars helicopter has a Linux installation on it, but is Dotnet-free as far as I know.
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  454.  @reddragon2358  “Microsoft Robotics” ... that’s a laugh. This is the company that cannot even offer a meaningful OS for the Raspberry Pi.
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  455. I think also GDPR discourages a lot of 🇪🇺 developers and businesses from jumping wholesale into 🇺🇸-based cloud services.
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