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alixander's comments

alixander | 8 years ago | on: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?

That point hasn’t been hit yet. Discouraging people from learning programming because you anticipate that point to come soon is unfortunate coming from a manager of programmers. Regardless of job opportunities, which I disagree with but is beside the point, being able to program increasingly allows people to create value and bring ideas to existence.

alixander | 11 years ago | on: Programmer Passion Considered Harmful

Passion implies things other than working longer than everyone else. For example, people passionate about programming often are better at debugging in those 8 hours than someone who wants to just get out.

Also, I don't understand the use of images here. Your first one is basically the equivalent of a cliche speech starting with, "The Marriam-Webster dictionary defines passion as..."

alixander | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: PyScribe – A Python library to make print debugging more efficient

You think you misunderstood; I didn't try it and not like it, I just never tried it. I'm most productive on Vim/Terminal right now. From a quick google search, it doesn't seem like I can use all the Vim commands in an IDE (though I see some articles on using Vim AS an IDE). Have you personally tried both and preferred an IDE over Vim/Terminal?

alixander | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: PyScribe – A Python library to make print debugging more efficient

Negative or not, I really appreciate the constructive criticism.

In response to your comments on watch: Indeed, right now it only identifies AST nodes of type "asgn". I imagine other mutations like append and others have different types too, I just haven't gotten around to implementing that. My bad for posting this in a pre-release state.

"Even if you modified the code to support this, you wouldn't be able to control access everywhere that piece of data went." I can see two potential solutions: 1. Identifying nodes of type "call" that have a watched variable as an arg, and then adding an if statement to check if it has changed and printing it only if it has. 2. Analyzing AST of ThirdPartyLib.do_stuff(arg1), identify statements that mutate arg1, and logging a change after the call in the original program if arg1 is changed. This way even if the value isn't changed, it's still logged because it was mutated (or at least attempted to), which is probably more desirable than solution 1.

In response to Mock: Aside from Mock, people have told me they prefer the logging library, pdb, IDEs, etc. for debugging. PyScribe isn't meant to be a separate method of debugging, I intended it to supplement my preferred way, which is just using print statements. Might be it's not the most powerful, but its purpose isn't to compete with other methods of debugging.

alixander | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: PyScribe – A Python library to make print debugging more efficient

I wish I could give you pros and cons, but I've never touched pdb or used a python IDE before myself. In my 3 years of programming, I've only used print statements to debug (for Python programs).

I'll be adding more documentation soon, but perhaps this is a more informative use case: Too often in my Python programs, I'll do something like, print("x is: " + str(x)). That's already too much to keep typing, but sometimes I'll want to know the type, or maybe it's a dictionary and printing without separators makes them blend together (say, in a for loop). In that case, I'll do: print("---------\nx is: " + str(x) + "\n")

The library allows this to be simplified to "ps.d(x)". It's rather opinionated towards my own workflow and what I was too lazy to keep doing. Perhaps I'll try pdb one day and find my library useless.

alixander | 11 years ago | on: Show HN: Coredemia – share and discuss research papers

That's very useful advice, thank you. I wonder how I might further facilitate the discussion part of it. List of "unanswered questions" (taking advantage of the fact people like to help others in an intellectual setting, generally speaking) and having a "paper of the day" come to mind, among some other things. On that idea of narrowing user segment, I was initially of thinking for it to be just targeted for the "hacker" community (computer science, math, psychology articles seem pretty popular here), but I figure if that does happen it'll just happen naturally without restrictions/limitations.
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