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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Compilation is a form of boredom ;-)

No shit. I would much rather spend $10k in hardware than have a developer bored while waiting for something to finish.

Part of the problem, though, is tools. A lot of things are built for resource use minimization. That made sense 20 years ago, but now I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 fast cores on my desktop, and most of that capacity just sits idle. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm typing and the compiler isn't already running then it's missing an opportunity.

I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but this is entirely true. I'm sat here watching a data mining job. It's wasted time, largely brought on because the job doesn't have unit tests, so I have no confidence it'll actually complete correctly, so I need to watch the log and see what its doing.

This not a good use of my time, and I hate seeing that console, and I feel bad for being on HN when I could be productive.

  ./data_mining_job && growlnotify -m "Success!" || growlnotify -m "Failure :-("

(season with while, read and grep to taste)

Hah, if only it was so simple! The integrity of the job is the problem. It's been coded to failover problems (as the original data integrity its mining from isn't good), so it will happily do something stupid for hours. That's why I have to watch it, and make sure its not doing something stupid.

Unit tests would ensure stupidity was not a possibility, and regressions could be tracked. Too late for that, unfortunately.

So I watch.

Couldn't you write unit tests while you wait?

Fair point :)

Whoops. Too late to edit, but a correction:

  growlnotify -m "Success! "

(the space tells bash to treat the exclamation point as text)

Or just use \!

Good call. Though for multi-word messages, you'd have to do something like:

  growlnotify -m "$(echo Great\! Success\!)"

For arbitrary messages:

    sub escape {
        my $arg = shift;
        $arg =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_])/\\$1/g;
        return $arg;
    }

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