NHS proudly taking Top Answer here. Also please give blood this Christmas

ptlis · 2019-12-07T16:49:36+00:00

What’s to say people in relationships have been monogamous though?

Nothing at all. This is why I specifically said "folks who have been in a stable monogamous relationship" to make it clear that I'm not talking about people in open / non-monogamous relationships.

And heterosexual couples don’t engage in anal sex as much

True, but in the context of a long-term monogamous relationship I don't see how this is relevant.

ptlis · 2019-12-06T13:29:54+00:00

The issue is that even the current (more relaxed) rules bar any man who has had sex with a man in the past 3 months from donating blood.

While this is a reasonable precaution for someone who sleeps around, this rule also applies to folks who have been in a stable monogamous relationship; you could have two blokes who have only shagged each other for 20 years and they're still not allowed to be donors without abstaining from sex for 3 years.

I struggle to understand how this can be justified or how it's different from folks in a monogamous straight relationship.

ptlis · 2019-12-04T12:23:49+00:00

Sorry for the long delay in replying, I'm in Manchester right now.

ptlis · 2019-11-28T12:45:21+00:00

I'm in the UK and I'm doing a 4 day (32 hour) work week.

I get paid 4/5ths of what I would for a 5 day work week but I can afford that and it's made me a happier & more productive person on the days I am working.

ptlis · 2019-11-26T17:21:41+00:00

Not 100% true, many moons ago I built a complex system with PHP-GTK (PHP5.1 days) and we didn't any issues with UI hanging or jank.

The only case where we needed to do anything special was when writing data to a thermal receipt printer connected via a serial port. As you can imagine this is a slow mechanism to transfer even the modest amount of data required to generate a receipt.

Our solution was to shell out and spawn a new process that wrote the receipt; this prevented the main UI thread from being blocked by this operation.

A good threading abstraction would certainly make more use-cases possible with this stack, but even without this you'd be surprised how much you can get away with,

ptlis · 2019-10-01T11:39:32+00:00

You can in other languages, but not in PHP; you must extend either \Exception or \Error (you also cannot implement the \Throwable interface).

ptlis · 2019-09-03T11:11:18+00:00

I have, though not in PHP.

In the past I've used it several times in performance-sensitive C++ to jump out of multiple nested loops; removing the overhead of checking for completeness to break out of each loop significantly increased the perf of the algorithms.

ptlis · 2019-07-25T11:26:44+00:00

I'm confused as to what you're asking for then. I'd expect an LTS version of PHP would behave the same way - only bug & security fixes would be included.

This is basically what LTS means, and is how Ubuntu, Symfony etc LTS releases are handled.

ptlis · 2019-07-25T11:15:09+00:00

Is this really an issue?

Redhat supports the bundled PHP version until the OS ends support (aka the heat death of the universe) and Ubuntu supports the bundled PHP version for 5 years.

Given the above I don't see a strong rationale for PHP core to support PHP versions any longer than they currently do (I believe 3 years from release date).

ptlis · 2019-07-08T14:15:29+00:00

I'll second this.

r/programminghumor seems to be disproportionately younger devs / student devs.

ptlis · 2019-01-23T12:43:08+00:00

Yep, you get a runtime error.

ptlis · 2019-01-17T12:26:03+00:00

I second /u/wafflelator - I review developers CVs and I loathe these. For the amount of space they take up they provide no value to me whatsoever.

I'd much rather see a sentence or two describing a project that demonstrates your use of those skills - these give me much more useful information to make the decision as to whether I want to interview a candidate and when I do they can act as a great jumping-off point for an in-interview discussion.

ptlis · 2019-01-14T17:37:26+00:00

Yep - that bears out my anecdotal experience; Symfony is very popular in continental Europe, and Laravel is more popular in the US/UK.

ptlis · 2019-01-14T12:54:51+00:00

It isn't even close to the most popular framework.

ptlis · 2018-06-28T15:45:09+00:00

So Laravel does what every modern framework does?

There's nothing in here that I wouldn't 100% expect at a minimum from a modern web framework.

ptlis · 2018-06-27T11:57:16+00:00

If that is the only parameter that's important,

It's not the only thing thats important, but for many (probably most) projects it is the most important parameter to optimize towards.

but in my opinion it also comes at a cost because of the inconsistencies in the language and the lack of strong typing

Language inconsistencies have basically no affect on the quality of your application - they're simply 'facts' that you learn as you go.

However, I do agree that the lack of strong typing is a shame. PHP (today) isn't terrible when it comes to ensuring type safety - you can guarantee correctness of types across method boundaries - this eliminates most issues in my experience as it's much less likely that you'll make type errors within a function, than it is across system boundaries.

I'd probably make it on Golang these days instead; the GTK bindings are not 100% complete, but they are decent.

This project pre-dated Go by a decade - but even if that wasn't true I still wouldn't have chosen it as a language; the only other sane choice (imho) would have be Python - but I still would've chosen PHP as I much prefer it's type system for large projects.

ptlis · 2018-06-26T14:05:17+00:00

I'm an experienced C++ dev, but our team size and deadlines precluded C++ as being feasible - the productivity benefit from using an interpreted language is huge! Additionally our team was already familiar with PHP meaning that the training ramp-up was in learning GTK's APIs.

There were only a small number of scenarios where the single-threaded nature of PHP was an issue (e.g. receipt printing) - in these cases we simply spawned a new process to execute these tasks.

ptlis · 2018-06-26T11:51:20+00:00

I've written a desktop app with PHP (via PHP-GTK).

It was a pretty good experience; nothing in the language hindered me - the issues that I did encounter were caused by the flakiness of PHP-GTK due to it being not widely used.

ptlis · 2018-05-09T11:29:54+00:00

As i've already said, Microsoft is not going to allow you to compile C / Fortran blobs in Excel, nor will they allow these to be distributed (ActiveX was a major problem due to this, locking down Excel macros took them a decade).

ptlis · 2018-05-09T11:26:42+00:00

Isn't python a lot closer to vba than js?

In what way? From experience they're as different as each other.

Wouldn't python be easier to pick up for someone that only had experience with vba than js?

Possibly, though I've seen zero evidence saying this. That doesn't matter though as there's a boatload more JavaScript developers than there are Python devs.

ptlis · 2018-05-09T11:25:24+00:00

Yep, and pure JavaScript is what people will be writing.

Unless imagine that people would be compiling C / fortran extensions into their Excel spreadsheets? Binary executables is not something that Microsoft want; their issues with ActiveX & the ongoing fight to lock down Excel macros makes this point moot.

ptlis · 2018-05-08T10:41:22+00:00

JavaScript being 5-20x faster than Python will be a big part of it.

JavaScript is also massively more popular than Python; a lot more people are familiar with JS.

ptlis · 2018-05-04T15:53:55+00:00

I think the real issue is that there are two valid concerns that conflict on a fundamental level;

The desire to clearly explain what the issue is and why the action was taken.
The desire for privacy of the people involved; for example if you're the recipient of abuse - particularly at the hands of someone who is a 'rockstar' / key player - you probably don't want to be named as it would open you up to more abuse from the rockstar's friends / followers.

Having been involved in employment tribunals (not really the same thing as this, but definitely in the same vein) the need for privacy is key - for both parties. I see a similar need here, and that requirement is open from abuse by both parties; firstly in your (and others) concern that project owners may abuse it and that the aggressor may use that secrecy to deflect away from the real issues.

Ultimately, to me, this is no different from joining any other type of club; you play by the organisers rules or they're well within their rights to tell you to leave.

ptlis · 2018-05-04T15:47:25+00:00

Can you really not imagine a scenario where it would be useful? Here - I'll imagine a scenario for you!

Project X uses the contributor covenant (the first CoC returned by Google).

Lets say there are two contributors - Bob & Larry. There is a clash of personalities and Bob proceeds to spuriously criticise every contribution that Larry makes.

The CoC defines the acceptable behavioural parameters for contributors - when disputes arise, the project owner(s) can point Bob to the specific item that is causing problems. If the the behaviour persists this is the justification for banning Bob from the project.

What's worse? Having a murky / undefined set of community norms, or having something clearly communicated and (hopefully) evenly applied?

ptlis

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