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

  1. C♯ is really just a Java wannabe, and still carries around that 1990s baggage.
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  2. The Greeks used letters as the digits of their number notation.
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  3. 0:31 There were some in-between steps, like Autocode.
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  4.    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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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  9. 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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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. Dijkstra called it “the language of tomorrow to solve the problems of yesterday”.
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  15. Rust is already infiltrating the Linux kernel, arguably the most successful and productive software project of all time.
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  16. 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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  17. 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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  18. 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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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. 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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  22. Trivia question: in what base does “9 × 6 = 42” come out correct?
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  23. That means having to use Windows, though.
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  24.  @iwant2tryhard337  Those who want to get the most out of their Raspberry π do.
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  25. 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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  26. 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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  27. Does PHP/Laravel do async yet? How do you handle WebSockets?
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  28. 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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  29. 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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  30.  @adriantrummer6126  You invited me to change your mind, now you are saying it is closed anyway.
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  31. Because you like to copy-lot.
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  32. 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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  33. Yeah, particularly when Copilot can create your bugs for you!
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  34. I thought go tos were considered harmful?
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  35. 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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  36. So, a plug for Spark. . . . Spark ... plug ... geddit?
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  37. Writing your C code structured according to Nassi-Shneiderman diagrams (which means avoiding gotos) helps a lot.
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  38. 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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  39. I know a couple from Mumbai who reckon that’s quite a nice city. Nicer than Delhi, anyway.
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  40. But if it’s written in Rust, isn’t that violating Atwood’s Law?
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  41.  @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.
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  42. Let the Olsen Database worry about it for you.
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  43. 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.
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  44. Semicolons: yes or no? Once you understand the statement-continuation rule, you can do without!
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  45. 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.
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  46. You couldn’t use VScode to edit binary files, though.
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  47. 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 ...
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  48. 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.
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  49. Or, better still, get rid of the Microsoft part and run the Python+NumPy+Jupyter+Pandas+Matplotlib+etc part directly. For free.
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  50. The way PHP copied iterators from Python -- and screwed them up -- is just another episode of PHP sadness, in my view.
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