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Well sure that’s fundamentally true, but really doesn’t give any sort of accurate picture of how estimates are done any more than “humans are just collections of cells” does, and anybody who does estimates without using some sort of data as the basis and is purely guessing is doing it wrong as fuck.

It’s not like we have no idea how long certain tasks have taken in the past, or what affects how long something will take.

XML has a bad rap because people went a bit (ok a lot) overboard with it in the early years, pretty much like what happens with a lot of other technologies, but as far as structured and human-readable data formats with good schema and tooling support go, it’s pretty much unbeatable. Now that JSON is the New Good Tech and XML is the Old Bad Tech, too many developers use JSON where XML would absolutely make more sense, and then we end up with unholy abominations like Portable Text, which is JSON pretending to be XML, and is so incredibly verbose and monumentally stupid that it feels like some sort of joke esolang data format rather than something being used in a production system. But no, here we are, god is dead and JSON is XML.

XML is terrific for building eg. structured markup languages with more complex markup than what something like Markdown can provide, and have the resulting files be comparatively readable, at least in comparison to the JSON-based alternatives – compare HTML to Portable Text, for example. XML has such a bad reputation – partially deservedly – that people just automatically assume it’s not a valid tool for anything modern, even when the modern “NoSQL”, “structured and typed data is for nerds, suck it” JSON solution is a giant pile of shit compared to the XML alternative

Rewrite in Brainfuck!

Looks like it’s written in C of all things, huh

Well it collects data from you, and one use case for your data is allowing a nice 💰 exit for the venture capital -backed company building it.

Other than that, not a whole lot that’s worth yet another “powered by open web standards” Electron piece of shit

penisii

It’s “penopodes”

Edit: also actually penes (pēnēs)

Because no way could I dislike modern PHP. Maybe you just have low standards when it comes to programming languages?

I’m not sure which thought is scarier: that you don’t know what you’re signing up for, or that you do know and you enjoy fixing undecidable formatting fuckups manually

That’s a good point about the synergies, something like eg. a type system that’s expressive enough to be Turing-complete is going to have some effects. You’re right that it might just feel like a “kitchen sink language” due to complexity of the features it has, but then again I suppose it’s sort of one and the same where a language’s complexity comes from.

But it’s no Swift, at least; now that language really does have everything and the kitchen sink.

Semantic whitespace problems can easily be literally impossible to solve automatically. One of the dumbest fucking ideas anybody ever came up with in computing and its inventor if anyone belongs in YAML Hell. As a fuckup it’s not quite as bad as null, but that ain’t exactly a high bar

The guy in the blog says mb (millibits)

a) does anybody actualy use that? How many people reading this thread can say they’ve actually seen that in real use or used it?

b) I’m fairly convinced you knew what was meant because it’s not like it’s uncommon to use a minuscule m for “mega” in colloquial usage

Weird performative pedantry or a joke that flew over my head? I give about a 0.5 probability for both

I mean, wouldn’t it essentially have to be storing every possible move (well, state) for as many rounds as you want for the player to be able to play at most? And I’m not sure he can take advantage of the fact that you can end up in the same state from multiple other states, which would remove a lot of the redundant ones

There’s a special place in hell for the inventor of semantically significant whitespace.

YAML itself is one of the circles of hell. You have to copy-paste YAML from web etc sources with dubious formatting for all eternity, and the editor doesn’t have YAML support. Also you can only use Python

I think it’s the PHP, makes people doubt your soul’s status that you’d subject yourself willingly to it

“Sufficiently powerful” is a bit of an understatement when it comes to Scala. Honestly may have a bit too many features for my taste, it’s not a small language

I’ve been meaning to give F# a go but I never seem to get around to it. Seems like an interesting language

INTERCAL

The unfathomable horrors of modern life

git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

(source)

Edit: but to actually have content in this comment, I’m not sure the mental model is the problem. It’s not that alien that a good explanation wouldn’t help, but it took a long time for git to start paying any sort of attention to “human readability.” It was and still is in a way “aggressively technical” and often felt like it purposefully wanted to keep anybody but the most UNIX-bearded kernel hackers from using it. The man pages were rarely helpful unless you already understood git, the options were very unintuitively named, etc etc. And considering Linus’ personality, I’m not exactly surprised.

With a little bit of more thought on how to make it more usable right from the start, I’m not sure it’d have such a reputation as it has now. The reason why I think this endofunctor joke is so funny is that that sort of explanation to “simplify” git wouldn’t have been at all out of place – followed by the UNIX beards scoffing at the poor lusers who didn’t understand their obviously clear description of what git branches are.