IsaacSchlueter

The text didn't seem to do much besides present the stats. But he say this:

    I knew that with age coders tend to switch careers, but I
    was surprised to see the size of the drop. After the peak
    age of 27, number of developers halves every 6 to 7 years.

Have you ever done it? It's very comfortable. It reduces one element of friction in the daily thought-work of the programmer.

By the same token, a comfortable chair or nice text editor won't turn an amateur into an all-star programmer in the absence the other important stuff (smarts, work, etc.) It can be a huge waste of time to fret over your editor or your chair adjustments. But that's not going to make me less likely to sit in a nice ergonomic chair and use vim rather than notepad.

Comfort isn't everything, but it's certainly not nothing.

Node's first commit:

    commit 9d7895c567e8f38abfff35da1b6d6d6a0a06f9aa
    Author: Ryan <ry@tinyclouds.org>
    Date:   Mon Feb 16 01:02:00 2009 +0100
    
        add dependencies

> What happened to this?

There's been some preliminary stuff on giving spawned node processes a more slick API, with the intent of then being able to optimize them in some way.

Whether or not it'll end up at the WebWorker API is yet to be seen, but that'd certainly fit with node's "don't reinvent BOM conventions where they fit" pattern.

The problem with just automatically re-installing those is that npm 0.x only had a global install space, and that was typically used for modules that were loaded via require().

In npm 1.0, you put require()-able modules in the ./node_modules in your project (local install), and you usually want to install CLI apps globally, so that their bins end up in /usr/local/bin. The 'npm link' command puts packages in the global space, and then symlinks them locally.

See `npm help folders` for more info on the differences.

There's no way for the install script to know what you were doing with each of those. Just cat'ing the list to `xargs npm install` isn't very helpful, because that's going to just install them in ./node_modules.

What you really want to do is use your human brain to split that list into two lists, and decide where each item should go.

    npm install fibers

Maybe I'm just weird.

One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages, such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions outside of hand and finger gestures.

ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a mouth morpheme and a hand gesture.

If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.

    <html>
      <body>
        <div class="test1">
          <pre>
          <?jspp
          dicks = require("dicks").dicksSync(10)
          $(this).html( dicks.join("\n") )
          end()
          ?>
          </pre>
        </div>
        </body>
    </html>

Mr. Chess, I both admire and fear the potency of your absurdism. I would compliment you further, but I am too afraid.

    function getCount () {
      return undefined
      { // open code block
        'count': /*labelled line*/  1  //numeric expression
      } // close code block
    } // close function

I spent significant chunk of the post explaining that a) I don't care how you code, and b) there are some good reasons to choose a different style than mine.

I'm asking JS thought leaders to stop encouraging falsehood. That's all. "Don't code like Isaac because it's ugly." Fine. I can dig that. Maybe you won't date me because you think my face is ugly. You wouldn't be the first one, and thankfully for my social life, it's not a universally held opinion.

But "don't code like Isaac because ASI is unreliable and no one understands it"? Patently false, and OMG PEOPLE ARE WRONG ON THE INTERNET.

This is so far beyond goofy. Don't we have jobs or something? Who posted this? Jeez. Get that guy something better to do.

A little boy may grow up to be the doctor who cures cancer. But that's not why you have children.

If there is pedantry, it is about the importance of either telling the truth or shutting up.

My recommendation against lying is much more forceful.

For a while, I tried to stick to the rule that "return\n" was not allowed. When I meant to return undefined, I'd write "return undefined".

In the end, I abandoned that rule, because too many of my functions return undefined. But it's kind of a nice thing. When I do get around to building that linter, I might make `return\s*\n` verboten.

It'd be nice if I had a linter to catch things like this. But really, it's not so hard to spot. I was bitten by missing semis often enough to start prepending [ and ( already, before I started just leaving them out entirely.

No one's going to cry if you don't contribute to npm. When I contribute to your project, I'll follow whatever style you like, and if I find it to onerous, I'll move on. Life is tradeoffs.

I'd mind it if you told people that omitting semicolons causes cancer. (Or bugs.)

-- EDIT:

I just looked up your book to the point where you make this recommendation. You don't threaten any catastrophes, which is good. I disagree with the "complex and weird" conclusion, but it's certainly a valid decision to leave them out of the book if you'd rather not go into it.

My opinion of you: Not Evil. <3

Just stop talking trash about how I do things. If the story is more interesting than the grammar, then shut up about grammar and go back to writing stories.

My problem is with telling people that there is a problem when there is no problem, and at the same time calling yourself a scholar.

Carry around a notepad.

Week 1: Every time you say "but", make a mark. Don't try to change anything, just keep track.

Week 2: try to not say "but", ever.

For weeks 3 and 4, do the same thing, but with commas.

Periods are more powerful than commas.

Weak: "Look, to be honest, I don't know why the server crashed, but I'm doing what I can to find out."

Strong: "I don't know why the server crashed. I'm working on finding out."

Weak: "I'm not saying the deal's off, but unless we can sort out clauses 3 and 4, I don't see how we can move forward."

Strong: "Clauses 3 and 4 are blockers. I would like to figure them out so we can move forward."

Weak: "I'm not saying your brother is fat or lazy, just that he could do with some more exercise and maybe get a job."

Strong: "Your brother is fat and lazy. He should get a job and lose weight."

Weak: "I know it's none of my business, but she could do a lot better."

Strong: "I don't like her boyfriend. Luckily we're grownups and don't have to agree on everything."

For every person who is shocked and offended by this approach, two people will respect and trust you for it. It's a net win.

Your desk lamp doesn't emit X-Rays, you don't force droves of people to stand underneath it, and no oncologists ever told me to be wary of your desk lamp until it has received further study.

So, yeah. Not the same thing. Not even remotely. In fact, your analogy is a bit silly.

1: http://github.com/hns/ringo-node-benchmark/pull/1