eevee

Unless it's the norm for people to cross-reference the races of all their potential neighbors before deciding on a house, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the issue is a little more complicated than who sits with who at lunch.

A much more likely factor is your socioeconomic status (which is, granted, also related to your career), and race/class are not at all proportional in the US.

> People in Norway are more free to pursue what makes _them_ happy.

And why does engineering make men happy but women not? Put another way: are there women who are being made _unhappy_ with engineering? And vice versa for nursing? Is that not worth speculating upon and addressing, rather than taking for granted that the penis is the part of the brain responsible for enjoying math?

You normally only hear jokes propagated if they're funny. You have a selection bias.

Isn't it a little self-defeating to make indentation visible? The whole idea is that it's easy to pick out blocks by the shape of the left margin, i.e., where the first visible character is.

If your indentation scheme only works when configuring your editor to mark whitespace, we might as well go back to MUMPS and indent with dots.

Rebind dedent to a little-used key, perhaps? I don't dedent so often that hammering a key twice is a big deal, though.

Editors aren't the only place code appears. I see it in my terminal, in git, in various web-based tools, in email, in browser textareas, etc. I don't want to reconfigure all of these things to make your code look like you see it (if they're even possible to reconfigure), also potentially breaking other applications that take for granted that a tab character aligns to 8.

Curious, why's that bother you? Different things should look different, and all. :) The alternative for class names is Camel_Snake, which will get you smacked in virtually any language.

Python code does tend to use UPPERCASE_SNAKE for "constants" as well, probably inherited from C (sometimes via Perl or Ruby).

Do any variable-width fonts actually do that? Looking at your comment, for example, the spaces after periods look the same width as those between words to my eye.

I prefer not to have to juggle invisible characters when editing plain text.

If I see `from subprocess ...`, I know immediately that this module does something with subprocesses, and I don't much care about the rest of the line.

If I see `import os, sys, foo, bar...` then I don't get that information without actually inspecting the rest of the line.

The difference is minor, but skimming is valuable.

No, thanks. Reasonably short lines means I can get a good idea of what's going on by skimming in one direction: downwards. If there are lines that run off towards the eastern horizon, even if they fit on my screen, I still have to follow along them to make sure nothing of interest is being hidden.

Plus, just getting the code to do the thing I want is enough work; let's not also start worrying about how to write code in such a way that most tools will understand how to wrap it. That sounds like bringing all the joys of CSS to my plain text. Because the tools are _not_ going to be perfect. Have you ever seen Perl code with punctuation in a comment at the end of a line, because some idiot syntax highlighter got confused about where a regex ended?

Surely Google could just preinstall something. The Python templating docs say GAE includes both Jinja2 and the Django template engine.

I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch for GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else.

I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole section on templating with an example autoescaping setup using Jinja2.

I seriously only added this metaphor as an afterthought, after pulling it out of my ass to explain all the furious typing to my partner. It's pretty funny that it's become the most famous part of the article.

So you're saying that, as a programmer, it's in my best interests to learn something other than PHP so I'll be less affordable...?

Weird things you've never seen anyone actually do? Test for equality, build data structures, handle error conditions?

There's lots of example code, inline, but much of the article is about missing/broken features and artifacts of the design that make it unfriendly to wetware.

I've never generated an API key, and Linode showed it as blank. I generated a new one anyway, but I can't imagine how they'd have a default key and somehow not show it in the UI.

You say that like I'm the one missing out when I don't use your new social cat 2.0 viewer. Do you not want me as a user? How many of me are there?

It's not just people like myself; it's people writing one-off scrapers, people writing new search engines or browsers (Google is not the entire universe), everyone when you forget a brace and break all of your JS, etc. The Web is not and has never been merely human beings sitting at a keyboard and using one of three known GUI browsers.

I run noscript. If I encounter a site that's broken or useless for seemingly no reason (e.g. not an interactive thing like Google Maps), I often don't even whitelist; I just leave. Relatedly, I've stopped clicking on Photobucket or Blogspot links.

I kinda resent being expected to run your pile of arbitrary code just to render static text and images on my screen—something that worked just fine without JS twenty years ago.

Some of this is inherent to the nature of plugins that alter the guts of a large program—look at the issues Firefox has had. At best Wordpress could rewrite itself to be insanely parallel _just in case_ a plugin in any particular area is slow, but that's a whole lot of work, the result is harder to maintain, and PHP isn't particularly amenable to it.

Why downvote? It's true, and we need to be stealing that somehow.

Perhaps you meant `transform`, which will actually work in WebKit browsers (you forgot the leading `-`) and also be translated by jQuery to other browsers' prefixed property names.

Oh, sure. I don't mean "controller" necessarily in the sense of MVC; just the idea of using a class as a bag of unrelated functions. Web frameworks trying to be MVC happen to be the most egregious offenders.[1] I'd actually forgotten that I made up the name "controller pattern". :)

[1] I blame this on MVC not making sense for Web backends; the controller is supposed to make sense of a stream of realtime user actions, but that doesn't apply so well to the discrete request/response model of HTTP. Your URL layout itself is, in effect, already doing most of the work of a GUI controller, and what's left is a relatively small bit of glue between the model and view. (Pyramid even bills itself as an MV framework; it refers to request handlers as "views", rather than reserving the name only for templates.)

Can you enlighten me?

> But then I have to hit the Back button. Who hits the back button on the Internet anymore, especially techies like myself who live off of keyboard shortcuts? Why make me go from using my keyboard to using my mouse or trackpad just to go back? No one uses the Delete key to go back, let’s be honest.

I don't know what SEO-flavored koolaid you've been gargling, but FYI, the Back button is _still_ the most-used part of browser UI, beating out even _the address bar_: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap-study-20...

I'd think "techies like yourself" would also know that there are also at least four ways to open any link you want in a new tab: ctrl-click, middle-click, context menu, or ctrl-enter while it has focus.

As for the Back button, I tend to have one hand on my mouse while browsing anyway (so I can, you know, click links), and I usually go back by clicking mouse4. That's the bottom of the pair of buttons on the left side of the mouse, where my thumb goes. The top one, mouse5, even goes forward. I think this is default behavior in every browser by now.

Opening in a new window by default is a crappy idea anyway, but it's particularly bad on a news aggregator site line HN, because I almost certainly want to read _more than one article_. Why would I click a link and alt-tab back ad nauseum, when I can just scan down the front page and middle-click anything that looks interesting, then browse through the collection of new tabs at my leisure?

The only remotely compelling excuse for this behavior is that users may not know how to open links in new tabs, but they absolutely understand Back, and one would assume HN has a reasonably technical audience anyway. So that just leaves us with: spawning new tabs forces me to look at the origin site at least once more so I can _close_ it. Well, fuck your cheap tricks and fuck your "engagement". I'll do my own window management, tyvm.

Yes, I can see how giving an employee time off to perpetuate the species might be inconvenient. How dare she! I need her to work on my social networking website, not make more people.

People quit their jobs, frequently, for a wide variety of reasons. Women have a potential reason that men don't have. Cry me a river.

Wait, wait.

> Safety - Standardized smart pointers, nullptr, better type-safety

> Of course, those who use the language just avoid them and those who don't use the language keep bitching about them. Strange.

Dumb pointers are built into the language. They just look like an asterisk.

Smart pointers are, at best, something like `unique_ptr<...>`.

So C++11 continues to have the error-prone variant as the default, and you have to import a stdlib thing and put some ugly incantation on every pointer in your entire program to finally get memory safety. But you expect those who use the language to "just avoid" broken features like dumb pointers -- the features that have dedicated syntax, the features that take 92% less typing and reading effort, the features that have been around for twenty-nine years.

Your argument is that C++11 is great because they tacked on a bunch of stuff to fix the core language, and obviously I should just ignore the core language because the other facilities are so great. In fact, you deride anyone who uses the core language as merely not understanding C++ well enough or creating "poor design"—even though multiple inheritance has built-in syntax and component-based design does not. (Rust has no MI, and its traits look like they'll map quite well to components. Hm!)

You are blaming the user for not using the tool in a way it was clearly not designed, because that other way happens to work better. Maybe it's not just me. Maybe, just maybe, this tool sucks and you're so used to it that you can't believe anyone else would possibly not want to use it.

I'm interested in Rust because it lets me do systems programming without having to avoid the entire core syntax because it's all broken, without having to worry that whatever I'm doing might be bug-prone but only hanging around because C did it, and without having to deal with rhetoric like this implying that anyone who doesn't think favorite tool X is the height of perfection must just not understand it well enough. I've had my fill of that crap from the PHP crowd.

This is a hard problem, because it involves mindshare and resources; even a perfect language would take years to gain a serious foothold. But it'll never be solved if nobody tries.

I'm glad someone's trying.

From the outside, C++ appears to be such a mess that I actually cannot tell whether C++11 made it better or worse.

I don't think systems programming is going anywhere—I mainly stick to Python, but would like something lower-level available that I actually enjoy writing. The thought of having nothing better than C++ for the next however many years is terrifying.

That's fair. I'm conjecturing somewhere into the future: D never really took off, but I'm hoping Rust will.

Rust statically prevents leaks and double-frees, warns about implicit copies of large structures, and has GC built in if I want to use it. It's certainly more familiar to a Python dev than C++. The whole trait system is even like a built-in and vastly simpler zope.interface.