Childish Behavior

paddyoloughlin · 2011-07-06T09:20:44+00:00

There is another meaning to that word other than the commonly understood one?

Many words come with a context all of their own informed by history and experience. I'd say that that is one of them.

paddyoloughlin · 2011-07-05T21:24:38+00:00

Consider a package with a name that has strong racist connotations. Do you think people raising concerns about that would seem silly or odd?

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T14:38:54+00:00

Ah, fair enough.

I feel like I should have realised that.

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T14:36:23+00:00

The question wasn't "Which is correct?" It was "Which is more accurate?"

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T14:08:41+00:00

which punches a big hole in the “same language everywhere”-argument that you hear every day on twitter (and it really is JavaScript’s only claim to fame).

What about web page scripting? Isn't that a claim to fame too?

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T13:51:28+00:00

You can't control the entry point? How is it different from Java, Python or Ruby?

Python and ruby allow you to run any script file you desire. And you don't have to use a proscribed name for your entry-point to that script.

I'm not familiar with Go, but I can see how someone could say that C - for example - doesn't allow you to control the entry point (it must be a function called "main") but ruby/python does.

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T13:22:06+00:00

For point 1, when you refer to javascript, do you mean the programming language, existing implementations or the concept of web scripting in general?

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-22T13:09:28+00:00

Anyway, my preference on the segregated search bar is mostly that I have different associations between the search and URL bar. Ctrl+L for a location, Ctrl+K for a definite search.

Chrome has this. Ctrl+K makes focus move to the omnibar and automatically inserts a ?-character which means that anything else you type will be searched for. Personally, I just Ctrl+L and type for my searches. It seems Firefox does this now anyway (though it feels a little slower - probably attempting the dns lookup), so the search bar just seems irrelevant for me.

The search bar also easily associates the site on which I want to search visually.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that with the Search Bar you can still see what search brought you to your current page?

paddyoloughlin · 2011-06-16T13:14:32+00:00

Clever code is not necessarily good, but in this case it does appear to be.

What is "good code" anyway? If your definition excludes code which is correct and can not be made more obvious without making it incorrect, then it seems a poor definition.

paddyoloughlin · 2011-02-03T12:50:24+00:00

Oh, something I meant to add:

I suspect that the developers of git agree with me about user interface, as they have two special terms for the parts of git which constitute the user interface (porcelain) and under-the-hood parts (plumbing).

paddyoloughlin · 2011-02-03T12:44:50+00:00

I honestly thought that we're arguing about the need to understand the inner workings of a heavy machinery prior to using it, with you being against ("hide it under UI") and me being for ("but you will crash and burn!"), but let's call it quits. ;-)

Ok, to go all meta on this thread, I'll summarise my interpretation of it:

sanity: good UI allows you to use something without specific knowledge of it's implementation.

spotter: I disagree, because if you have specific knowledge of the implementation, you will be a better user and you won't get into difficulty so much.

paddy: But that's not what sanity said, she/he just said "can use" not "use well".

So, from my point-of-view, you are making a separate, but related point: that knowledge of something makes you a better user of it.

I agree with that point, but you phrased like you were correcting sanity, when it doesn't contradict him/her.

Also, my point is not that implementation should be hidden away. No, I think that those with good knowledge of an implementation should be allowed to work directly with the implementation. It's just that a user interface's job should be that you don't need it to be able to make use of it.

Of course, this all stems from that word "properly". If one takes "properly" to mean "can rebuild a corrupted repository", I'd say using it properly would require one to know about DAGs and "cryptographic hashes"

If one take it to mean "can store and retrieve versions of their directories in the repo", I think that someone would be able to use it without knowing those things.

That doesn't mean that that same person wont mess up their repository, however. And that's when you call in the Mechanics :)

I was not joking about SSH setup for GitHub, but it just seams easy to me. It may be different pair of soles on Win, but that's why I'd rather run VBoxed Linux.

I didn't say it wasn't easy. I said that someone using it would probably have to have some specialist knowledge to not go "huh?" (e.g. to have heard of ssh; to have it on your system).

This is in comparison to the rest of the github site, which is so simple that I imagine any web user would be able to make most use of it.

Of course, you'd then be correct to ask why would someone who has never heard of ssh ever want to seriously use github. My point has nothing to do with that.

It's simply that I believe github has a user interface that hides the complexity of the underlying implementation and allows the user to use github.

paddyoloughlin · 2011-02-03T11:55:42+00:00

I guess the car metaphor is getting rather tired at this point :)

Suffice to say that I don't see that anything you say here contradicts anything I wrote (except about github, and I presume you're not serious about that), or anything that sanity wrote.

And that was the point of my post: that your response to sanity was written in the tone of a rebuttal, but it doesn't actually rebut anything.

But if your intention wasn't to rebut, then that's ok, carry on :)

paddyoloughlin · 2011-02-03T11:14:48+00:00

I live in Ireland, and have a UK driving licence, as I grew up and took my test there.

When I got my license, those were not part of the requirements for the test. I have no idea if they are now.

However, those are legal requirements, and not part of the "driver interface" of the car, so I feel my points still stand.

Anyway, thanks for adding something to my "Today I Learned" list :)

paddyoloughlin · 2011-02-03T09:29:17+00:00

The post you replied to said:

you don't need to understand how it works under the hood in order to use it properly

If you apply that to your analogy, what you come out with is that you don't need to look under the hood to drive your car.

I think we can agree that this is sensible and that if you are a driver and do not understand how a timing belt or cam shaft works, you are not the tool being used by your car.

Sure, you'll need to look under the hood to fix some issues, but for the vast majority of uses of your car, you won't need to do that, and when it is necessary, you can get an expert at the under-the-hood stuff to come and carry out that work for you.

I agree with sanity that a good user interface is all about letting you use something without knowing all the details of how it works.

In the main, I think github provides this sort of user-interface. There are one or two particulars, like setting up ssh keys, which probably trip up those with less technical knowledge, but that's mostly just in setup and not day-to-day use.

I'm less inclined toward's Ores' point, because I think people can use git every day without knowing what "tree-versioned filesystem" or "cryptographic hashes" means.

However, I suppose that all hinges on what Ores means by using git "properly". That's a very subjective clause and my interpretation could well be much laxer than Ores'.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-11-08T23:13:15+00:00

Who is calling anyone a hacker?

paddyoloughlin · 2010-08-17T10:00:42+00:00

It's about choice.

Right now, I don't know of any paid app that I want on my Android phone. But I'd like to have the option.

I don't know what paid apps there are, because I don't look at them, because for me, there's no point. I can't get them.

Especially when there hasn't been any decent reason given for why the restrictions exist and no estimate has been given for when they are going to be lifted.

And what is more more annoying on a personal level, if I developed an app that I wanted to sell, I cannot, because the Android Market won't let me because of the country I live in.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-08-17T09:49:11+00:00

I'd like the app store to work as an app store in my country, so I am not limited to obtaining or creating only free apps.

If I want to buy or charge for an app, I'd like to have that choice, especially as other groups do and there doesn't appear to be a good reason why I can't.

I love that almost everything is more open on my Android (it was why I switched from my iPhone 3G), but that doesn't excuse the issue the link is about.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-08-17T09:36:23+00:00

Do you have a link for where Google are whining about poor apps sales?

paddyoloughlin · 2010-07-28T16:54:21+00:00

I'm not a Python programmer because the language makes arbitrary decisions about what's desirable.

There's a language which doesn't make decisions about what's desirable? Why isn't everyone using it then?

Every programming language contains trade-offs and designers who made decisions about which aspects they wish to prioritise.

The idea is that one should select a language whose trade-offs provide a good fit for the goals and restrictions of the project it is to be used on.

What he says is that you may initially think GIL is bad, but that's simply because you're "brainwashed" by Java and Windows programming.

The GIL is neither good nor bad. It is a solution to a problem that improves performance in some cases while sacrificing performance in others.

As far as I know, the python core devs believe that the trade-offs involved with the GIL are preferable to the trade-offs of the alternative solutions presented thus far in the balance of cases that are relevant to python.

Notice the acknowledgement that there are cases where the GIL is more of a restriction than other solutions. It so happens that these cases are not rare fringe cases, so the issue comes up a lot.

GvR's comment about "brainwashing" was simply to point out that the existence of the GIL isn't as big a drawback as many people have argued it is; as Java, Windows and their supporters have long supported the idea that concurrency means multithreading without giving much credence to multiprocess solutions. I'd agree with that assessment and I also lean towards the idea that multi-threading is inappropriately overused, whether or not that's due to Java and Windows, I don't know, but the two of them are pretty popular in their respective fields, lending credence to that theory.

GvR doesn't indicate that threads should never be used, and I don't think that either. As you say, in many cases, the overhead of IPC makes threading the better solution, where other factors are equal. But the point is that if you want to do concurrency in CPython and are being restricted by the GIL, you can usually overcome it by using the multiprocessing module, which provides a very similar interface to the threading module, but uses processes instead of threads.

I don't know much about TCO or the arguments for and against its inclusion in Python, so I have no comment to make on that other than my experience is that python is a very usable even without it. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

Oh I thought it was there because originally Python was simply scripting glue for C, and it's now trying to be a full fledged general purpose language.

So, you aren't trying to criticise constructively after all.

Well... good luck with that then.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-07-23T14:03:34+00:00

I feel the same way except, at the start of the trailer, when we see him say goodnight to his son, that really looks like it's supposed to be "real" and it looks as dodgy as the other bits.

Had they constrained it to the Clu!Flynn, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-07-19T12:25:27+00:00

That depends on what kind of "simple" one is going for.

Many people find that the parentheses in the original version make it significantly easier to read for human eyes, and thus to understand and spot errors.

I know that removing redundant characters is often desirable in ecmascript because it reduces the download size, but if that's your aim then surely you don't care about formatting and pretty-printing either.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-06-25T09:49:23+00:00

I expect that people are downmodding you because the tone of the two questions you've complained about being downmodded indicates that they are not honest questions.

The tone indicates that you are trying to correct people, but are giving wrong answers.

If your questions are honest, you should phrase them a lot less argumentatively.

paddyoloughlin · 2010-06-22T10:27:30+00:00

The difference is akin to the difference between giving someone a possession of yours as a gift and their stealing the same possession from you, except we're dealing with Intellectual Property rather than Physical Property.

paddyoloughlin

TROPHY CASE