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randuser's comments

randuser | 12 years ago | on: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

> Another thing troubling me is whether to reply yes or no on questions like "didn't you agree?"

Native English speakers often get confused by this one too. You can respond either yes or no in those situations as long as you specify the one you wanted afterwards.

    e.g. "Don't you agree?"

    "Yes, I agree" and "No, I agree" would both be acceptable.

randuser | 12 years ago | on: Kill the Snowden interview, congressman tells SXSW

They should have killed the Snowden interview anyway because of all the stuff going on with Russia and Ukraine right now. Snowden's voluntary exile to Russia looks even worse to the general public and will overshadow anything he actually says during the interview.

randuser | 12 years ago | on: Excel can't save to paths over 218 characters

My favorite experience with it was trying to deal with a zip file of "C:\Documents and Settings\" from an old computer that happened to contain multiple files whose paths were 255 characters long or so. You couldn't unzip it in a subdirectory of "C:\" because one of the resulting paths would be too long and cause the built-in zip program to crash/fail entirely. Using 7zip was the eventual solution.

On a related topic, do you know how difficult it is to search for files whose path are above a certain length on a fresh/default Windows setup? I eventually resorted to installing Python on it just to write a script to do it.

randuser | 12 years ago | on: Python's Hardest Problem (2012)

So restricting yourself to a common subset of Python 2/3 and adding compatibility helpers in your code is the preferred approach now a days?

I'm still not convinced about the whole Python 2 to 3 conversion being worth it (asides from the fact that not porting means your project is seen as not being actively maintained). It has led to added complexity in code so that it works on both versions, increased difficulty in packaging/distribution, having to test/debug on both versions, obsolescencing vast amounts of code that will never be ported, confusion among new users, untold man-hours being spent, ...

I don't mean to be sound so down on Python 3, but it has caused me nothing but additional work and frustration. The supposed benefits of Python 3 are still years away.

randuser | 12 years ago | on: Python's Hardest Problem (2012)

> I can't think of any major project which decided not to port to python 3

Most major projects have not actually switched to Python 3, that just support it using 2to3.

randuser | 13 years ago | on: How zsh is more useful than bash

It's a normal variable, not one set by `setopt`. The following should make commands that take longer than 1 second be reported:

    export REPORTTIME=1

randuser | 13 years ago | on: A non-magical introduction to pip and virtualenv for Python beginners

setuptools/distribute didn't implement `python setup.py uninstall`.

Unix fragmentation of where the bin and lib directories should reside, i.e. /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, ~/bin, ...

Windows doesn't have symlinks and the different packaging tools have tried to implement the functionality in various different ways.

Python doesn't add the path of the "main" executed file to the module lookup path. (edit: actually, I think this is wrong. I meant to say "Python module import lookup is complicated.")

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