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chhickman's comments

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: C# Raw String Literal Proposal

I would much rather see something like this:

  string longString =
                    `This
                    `  allows
                    `    differentiation
                    `  of
                    `formatting
                    `  indention
                    `    from
                    `  leading
                    `    string
                    `       spaces
                    `  using
                    `  back-ticks (\`)

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: Blinking Cursor Turns 54

You can still observe a related effect to this in Windows 10. Open up any large(ish) file in NotePad++ or most any other editor and place the cursor in the text and drag to the bottom of the screen so it starts scrolling. If you hold the mouse still at that point it will scroll through a couple dozen every half second or so, but if you wag the mouse side to side it will scroll through hundreds at a time in the same span.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: 10% of households pay more than 80% of taxes on alcohol and cigarettes

Punishment via fines should be entirely replaced with something more generally equitable: time. $60 parking ticket should be replaced with 1 hour of community service, which (mostly) equally "inconveniences" a blue collar worker and CEO alike. Same scheme should apply to corporate crimes as well... when everybody's least favorite mega-bank gets caught defrauding customers, don't fine them, sentence the company to 1000 hours of community service, meaning every employee on the payroll has to do 1000 hours of community service and the company has to pay them their standard wages while doing it. That kind of loss would definitely change some board room attitudes.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs (2012)

Evil plan: Create a network distributed system (kind of like Seti@Home) specifically for doing this. If there was enough participation to make a difference the advertisers would have to invest in countermeasures which could lead to an arms-race that ultimately erodes all profit from it.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international

There's no shortage of very striking counter-examples to what you're saying in recent events. I think it's far more accurate to say that the educated can be led astray by complex ideas that are difficult to prove and the uneducated equally likely to be led astray by ideas that are laughably easy to disprove.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

The original promise of separation of concerns wasn't simply a code organization scheme, it was that we would be able to write composable software where components could be added or replaced with minimal systemic impact. We were going to be able to drop in new UIs without touching the BL or fix a bug in a component in one place and have it fixed everywhere, etc. The problem was that SoC, and the other various concepts from SOLID and design patterns didn't quite accomplish that - inter-dependencies remained and only became more difficult to reason about. Chasing this fantasy led object oriented programming down a path of increasingly complicated frameworks to try to manage and hide these dependencies until one would find themself thinking more about program structure and writing more plumbing code than doing actual work. Worse, now you have all the bits of logic necessary to understand how something works spread across multiple files so you have to have a system-wide understanding of a systems organization and understand the workings and vagaries of the half dozen or so different frameworks that were used to make it all seem magically loose-coupled. I'm sure there's some <insert name>'s Law somewhere that states it better, but it boils down to the fact that for any given set of tasks you can only reduce the complexity so much and anything else is just moving the complexity around, not eliminating it. I think there's something to be said for having all the logic you need to understand an interface in one or two files and focusing on making that as clean as possible, which is exactly what (at least some) of the 4GLs in the past seemed to do well, or at least made possible.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: Beads: Computer language and toolchain

I don't have time to watch the video right now, but after skimming the language reference I get the impression that is is sort of a modern-ish take on the 4GLs from 80s/90s - not the sexiest thing but I feel like there's definitely room for something like this. Of course, the painful lesson of 4GLs was the consequences of vendor lock-in... I didn't see any links here to the sources.

chhickman | 4 years ago | on: The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020)

This is perhaps going to be an unpopular sentiment, but I think far too much breath is wasted on the "don't be clever" edict. No examples even spring to mind of any past experience where I ran into someone's "too clever" code causing me headaches. It has been dealing with the mountains of "not the least bit clever" code that has sucked thousands of hours out of my career. Mundane, "straightforward" code where they've re-used variables for different purposes, or deeply nested conditionals with multiple, multiple booleans in each check (often redundant, if not contradictory) and generally taken 50 lines of code to accomplish what could be done more cleanly in 10 or fewer. I'll take puzzling a few minutes over some too clever code over slogging through spaghetti code any day.

chhickman | 5 years ago | on: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

I think one of the failures in thinking around project cost and outcome is that not enough people realize that the effort around a project scales logarithmically, not linearly. This really means that small projects don't "scale down" as much as you think they do. Some for instances - You are not really going to spend only 1% of the time in meetings for a $10K project compared to a $1M project. There might well be 100X the code but it's neither going to be 100X as complex nor take 100X the the man-hours to write. A couple of the "Challenging" features might be substantially more challenging in the $1M project, but not 100X so, nor will there be 100X as many. Most importantly, is that in the $10K project the expectation isn't that you'll get 1% of the quality... but that's exactly what often gets sacrificed in order to make a $10K project cost ~ $10K.

chhickman | 6 years ago | on: The Unison language

I agree that a Hello World is fairly useless example for anyone already familiar with programming languages. Perhaps something like a Fibonacci function should be the de facto short syntax example, as is common in functional languages. More useful though would be to have an example of how composition data structures work in the language - standard example could be a binary tree.

chhickman | 6 years ago | on: Strava cuts off Relive

> The only reason I have the 'pro' version is the "safety" feature that lets my wife know where I am, approximately.

>Anyone got a good alternative for that?

Take a look at Life360. You don't need the paid version to do what you're asking for.

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