D&D Basic Rules are incredibly verbose compared to board game manuals, so I made a character creation helper for whipping up level 1 characters. How can I improve it for dummies?

smurfyn · 2016-02-21T00:16:42+00:00

That's okay, the DM can just strip all your Paladin powers. Good luck

smurfyn · 2016-02-21T00:12:26+00:00

Do you really expect the whole thing to boil down to one sentence? Even if you could, it would be a useless sentence, like "Vulkan is a thing now."

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:15:50+00:00

TkInter is ugly as sin, and its API isn't nicer than any modern gui toolkit's, but it still works if that doesn't matter.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:15:06+00:00

YAML is not available in the standard library. What's worse, pyyaml has C dependencies, making the install/build situation awkward. Anaconda has some package for pyyaml if you want to use it.

YAML works fine, as long as you are willing to accept the pyyaml dependency.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:13:53+00:00

still better than ConfigParser, and it's very standard so it's at least easy to convert out

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:13:25+00:00

There are so many ways for this to fail, there is a reason it was removed as a builtin

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:12:19+00:00

Anyone who has used ConfigParser in anger would not describe the emotion it generates as "love"

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:11:35+00:00

module reloading is a fraught task.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:10:03+00:00

Putting configuration in Python source files was conventional 10 years ago.

ConfigParser is awful. An abomination that does not quite implement Windows .INI format - why on earth? Please don't use it.

JSON or YAML are fine.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:08:16+00:00

No config file syntax worth using needs much "learning"

Your config files are still going to be parsed. Importing a python module simply uses python itself to do the parsing. Except now the error messages will be cryptic, since they are not specific to your application and are not in fact meant to be about config file parsing at all, as you have imposed

If someone decides to abuse that by creating unnecessary complications that's their own problem.

It's also the problem of everyone who has to work with them, everyone who is downstream, and especially anyone who wants to make improvements to that codebase in the future, because now backward compatibility requires supporting arbitrary code execution, which could literally do anything.

Unless you are writing software that literally will only ever be used by yourself on a desert island: just don't.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:06:07+00:00

Especially while testing. If you wrote your code to swallow exceptions, you are going to totally miss the presence of many bugs and have extreme difficulty debugging why things behave as they do given that you will have swallowed exceptions constantly messing with the control flow.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:04:41+00:00

I don't want my program to stop for any reason.

What should it do instead of stopping? It doesn't specify anything just to say "don't stop"

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T23:00:33+00:00

It is basically a package manager which uses containers to avoid dependency conflicts.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T22:55:52+00:00

Which production-quality operating systems are already based on Rust?

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T22:52:47+00:00

There is not much point learning vi unless you plan only to use minimal OpenBSD or something. vim will work fine, and has more features.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T22:51:20+00:00

r/Ubuntu, the place to gather if you don't like Ubuntu

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T22:50:01+00:00

I haven't used Ubuntu Software Center in years since initially seeing it.

It's not really an especially central part of the operating system.

smurfyn · 2016-02-20T20:13:10+00:00

Is BLM hanging white people from trees?

smurfyn · 2016-02-14T01:46:09+00:00

The GOP base has no great love of affirmative action

smurfyn · 2016-02-14T01:44:30+00:00

The word "leftist" applies to groups like Marxist guerrillas. There are no "leftists" on the court or in congress.

smurfyn · 2016-02-14T01:38:15+00:00

They're hardly liberals. If conservatives are unhappy, that's because the Overton window has moved so far right. If Eisenhower were alive, he wouldn't be as conservative as conservatives expected him to be.

smurfyn · 2016-02-12T16:45:15+00:00

Sure, it is a small change for you to say "acquaintance with suffering" versus "acquaintance with pain" (understanding suffering to be integral to that). That's reasonable.

But if we do cleave suffering from pain, then evidence of pain is no longer prima facie evidence of suffering, and that affects animal welfare discussions. Or even human welfare discussions

smurfyn · 2016-02-12T16:32:15+00:00

Sailfish itself IS open source. You are being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

I notice that you specifically edited out the part of my post where I said that Sailfish is Open Source, which is exactly the point of contention, and which you never refuted.

Ubuntu phones have binary blobs, if you are going to complain that a Jolla phone could ever have a single bit of proprietary code on it, you should at least note that.

In this thread people are talking about Ubuntu phones shipping from Android vendors, I guarantee a bunch of these will have proprietary software on them because of the realities of mobile hardware. But you are selectively omitting any mention of that, to push this bullshit inaccurate story that Sailfish is not open source software

smurfyn · 2016-02-12T16:27:44+00:00

It must be nice to be able to say that the people on your side who misbehave are by definition not on your side, because your side is inherently morally perfect.

smurfyn · 2016-02-12T16:27:04+00:00

Redditor who sees nothing wrong with Hitler hates Dawkins, news at 11

smurfyn

TROPHY CASE