spacecow

Heartwarming to see iSCSI still in use! I originally made this account while certifying devices against good ol' RFC 3720 at an interop lab quite a long time ago now...

Oh, finally, something that supports actual hierarchical state diagrams (that isn't Graphviz, no offense)... Mermaid's "You cannot define transitions between internal states belonging to different composite states" [1] has driven me up a wall for years.

  parentA.childA -> parentB.childB: voop
  parentB.childB -> parentA: vorp 

shouldn't be that hard!

[1] https://mermaid.ai/open-source/syntax/stateDiagram.html#comp...

> Sidetrack: I actually looked up what the point of arg0 even is since I failed to find any usecases some months back and found this answer[0]. Confused, and unsatisfied by the replies, I gave up trying to understand "why arg0?" as some sort of legacy functionality.

I struggle to think of how the answers provided here could be clearer or more satisfactory. Why write an article if you're going to half-ass your research? Why even mention this nothingburger sidetrack at all...? (Bait?)

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24678056/linux-exec-func...

Lord, did anyone else click through and read the actual attached "POC"? It's (for now) hilariously obviously doing nothing interesting at all, but my blood runs cold at AI potentially being able to generate more plausible-looking POC code in the future to waste even more dev time...

Tiny bug report: The second code example's output is still ">>array's<< sum is 6" (emphasis mine) even though the code snippet's printout is "struct's sum is {d}"

I think Zed is being disingenuous (or just plain not reading anything that isn't code on the Dive Into Python site). One of his main points is that Dive Into Python is bad because it's supposed to be for beginners, and makes Python seem to complicated. But, here's the first sentence on the front page of diveintopython.org:

"Dive Into Python is a Python book for experienced programmers."

Not beginners. Zed's "I could see if Mr. Pilgrim had a giant disclaimer or something warning people that this isn't a beginner's book, but he doesn't." is totally unfounded.

Zed also laments that the first example requires readers to "suddenly comprehend" a bunch of random language features. But right above the example he links to:

"It probably makes absolutely no sense to you. Don't worry about that, because you're going to dissect it line by line. But read through it first and see what, if anything, you can make of it."

(I will totally agree that the example program is at best uninteresting and at worst confusing, but you don't need to know anything about ODBC to understand it. I certainly didn't when I first read Dive Into Python.)

Zed's brand of hyperbolic vitriol has never sat particularly well with me, but this article in particular sounds like he just has an ax to grind with Pilgrim. He certainly spends almost no time actually discussing how the book has poor design decisions, or why it is "weird," or what instructions are hard to follow, or what expert needs it is not fulfilling. There's almost no substance whatsoever here, just sanctimonious character assassination. I will never understand why this guy has an audience.

"When given two choices, always choose the harder one."

Stated slightly more poetically by Robert Frost:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

:)