samwho

There's a comment thread further down that disagrees with you.

I think it's pretty common for folks to enter the software field without a CS degree, start building apps, and see big O notation without understanding what it is. These people have jobs, deadlines, they want to ship features that make peoples' lives easier. I'd bet many of those people don't care so much about calculus, but a quick intro to what all this big O nonsense is about could help them.

I'd love to hear more about how a quadratic sorting algorithm could be said to be O(n^3). That isn't intuitive to me.

It was, thank you so much <3

Part of the problem is that a lot of people that come across big O notation have no need, interest, or time to learn calculus. I think it's reasonable for that to be the case, too.

I'm aiming this at junior software engineers without math or computer science backgrounds. My own computer science background is very old at this point, and I never did have the math. So I'm not surprised I've made mistakes that are being pointed out by folks that live and breathe this stuff. I want to impart enough useful (if not strictly correct) information to folks to make a difference in their day jobs.

That framing really helps, thank you. <3

No, I'm grateful for the time you're spending time helping me understand. I'm struggling to come up with wording that satisfies everyone and venting some frustration at you. I'm sorry, that wasn't fair of me.

It's not clear to me based on what you're written what I should change. With the "always" wording changed, what else do I need to do for this to be correct? Ideally I want to avoid talking about asymptotic bounds.

Thank you.

I appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me, thank you.

I feel like the way I have it is a reasonable, if strictly incorrect, simplification for someone new to the material.

When I write these, I have the newly-hired bootcamp grad as my target audience. Someone who has been taught the basics for how to write code for the web and work as a junior within a company, but has no computer science background. I want them to understand enough to make sense of what they see.

This is how you would explain it?

So your contention is with the word “always”? It doesn’t always mean worst case? I got told off by someone else for _not_ saying this.

I really just want to find the way of describing this that won’t net me comments like yours. It is very disheartening to spend so much time on something, and really try to do the topic justice, to be met with a torrent of “this is wrong, that’s wrong, this is also wrong.” Please remember I am a human being trying to do my best.

I’d love to hear how those two things differ, and how I could include it in the post in a way that won’t be too scary for a beginner to the topic.

That section in particular has already seen several revisions based on other peoples’ comments.

It’s okay, you’re not the first to point it out to me!

I’d be interested to hear how you would explain it when you’re at a more appropriate device.

I couldn’t resist.

Thank you! I’m really glad you enjoyed it.

Your talk is a lot better than my quiz.

Interestingly you say comments aren’t valid in the middle of the local part but I thought they are, and the parser I used agreed. Maybe obsolete behaviour?

I didn’t realise quotes could be dot separated but it makes sense now I look back over the EBNF! That’s really cool.

Sorry I made you think I’d stolen your content, I can totally see why you’d think that. I promise you that was the first time I watched that video.

Thank you <3 which one got the biggest laugh?

Are there valid emails without an @? I’m very vaguely aware of bang paths but didn’t want to include them because they’re a bit too esoteric.

It’s okay <3 it doesn’t surprise me that both of these topics have been covered before, and both are fairly small input spaces so there’s bound to be similarities or overlap.

I do love Gary’s “wat” talk, it was certainly part of the inspiration to make these.

I do have a short sentence on the homepage saying I used https://github.com/jackbearheart/email-addresses as the validator for the examples. It could be more clearly defined, though.

Similar to this I got my examples for jsdate.wtf through reading the v8 date parsing code and experimentation. Wasn’t aware there was a talk with similar examples for JS dates, would be interested to see it.

Coincidence. I hadn’t seen this.

I got my examples mostly from looking through https://github.com/jackbearheart/email-addresses/blob/master... and reading the EBNF in RFC 5322.

Will watch your video!

Good eyes! Code is at https://github.com/samwho/e-mail.wtf if you’d like to open a PR

Yeah, I almost put a disclaimer at the end saying that while these examples are valid according to the spec, that has no bearing on whether they’re usable in practice. Email is the Wild West.

Ohhh! Thanks again for your feedback on my posts <3

A couple of other comments have noted, and Brendan Eich himself actually replied on Twitter (https://x.com/brendaneich/status/1944156296212886005?s=46), to say that it was a copy of Java’s Date class behaviour. I haven’t dug into the history of that, though.

It’s a mean thing for me to have done, and I did originally have an extra little disclaimer on the questions where it was relevant, but I removed it because it felt like the shock value was more funny.

Hopefully this quiz helps with the first point :)

Dangit I’m not recognising your username, sorry!