"I'm saddened by some of the comments here. It's true that COBOL is not safe. It's true you shouldn't be using it for large portions of your professional setting. It's true that these sort of libraries appear to be slapping a bandaid on a broken bone... All of those things are true, but you should learn COBOL. And you should learn it well.
I wonder where we will be in as little as 10, 20 years. When the COBOL dinosaurs die and universities stop teaching the basics of computers. Young programmers are being pushed away from the harsh realities of COBOL (not to mention anything below COBOL), who's going to be building the building blocks in the future? Who's is going to keep optimising modern languages like Smalltalk and Simula? That minority is only going to get smaller..."
It would sound ridiculous then and it sounds ridiculous now.
I find I do this sort of thing a surprising amount. You'd think spurious symbols would jump out at you, but actually it turns out that's not how it is. Luckily oulipo.social automatically stops you posting bad sigils.
But you still don't instill that actual individual in minds, and an actual, non-abstract, particular individual is occasionally crucial to a thought. Without that word you would basically go back to that activity in which pairs of folks try to find out a thing without using words. This is a bit of an auto-proof as I can't say its word.
It's not as if you can simply work around and pick similar words for that individual's particular noun, you miss almost all of a thought by dancing around it vs. using a fast shortcut that quickly aligns thoughts with low odds of ambiguity.
You could point to Mr. Musk by using his South African origins, but also with circumlocutions such as:
Zip2 collaborator
X.com collaborator (by and by, part of PayPal, of which a principal and also a primary joint stock-holding guy, and so an original PayPal Mafia "mafioso")
Mars colony instigator, for which aim's promotion also principal of orbital propulsion firm with first major victory involving launching an orbital craft propulsion unit again and again
Popular luxury voltaic-propulsion motorcar firm kingpin
SolarCity capitalist
Scary fast monorailish-but-not vacuum transport plan originator and champion
Philanthropic patron of folks with a major fascination for AI, apologists for both caution and gusto about it
Boring Company instigator with plans to dig subways in L.A.
plus additional stuff (that guy has had a hand in astonishingly many things...)
But for fact that said individual was said prior, and that I am slightly in a similar domain to him, I would not know which (singular) particular individual half of that points to
This is good! I guess a bit of thought can go a long way toward good workarounds. I'd hazard that it is harder if a taboo glyph is in both particular nouns though.
It also pays to realize that when people say something makes them feel "deathly ill", they're probably using it as an expression to signify how shaken they are by something.
I don't understand the mentality expressed in the article, where environmentalism is only observed for tiny pieces of waste that don't matter. These same people (like you mentioned) fly dozens of people on airplanes, which is so much worse. Or they have kids or don't update their home's insulation or drive a gas-guzzler. At the end of the day, there's only so much you as an individual can do (and certainly the CEO of ExxonMobil is way more complicit in climate change than Jane Doe walking down the street), but as far as carbon footprint is concerned, paper invites (which are biodegradable) are barely a blip on the radar.
The same kinds of people who admonish you for taking an elevator because it's bad for the environment, even when your legs are sore from cycling to work.
I guess it's a kind of armchair environmentalism: it's easy to "go green" by switching to canvas bags (which _does_ help, a little), but then not make large, more sacrificial changes that would _actually_ benefit the environment. I don't know. It's tough, though, because to a large extent we're forced into lifestyles that are bad for the environment. You can't just decide to stop using the electricity produced by the coal power plant in your city, for example.
This -- a lot of the environmentalist movement is more about signaling that you care about the environment (turn the lights off, use one sheet of toilet paper) than actually investing the time or energy into figuring out the most cost-effective changes to make (stop flying as much).
This is true about almost all human groups/movements though, and I'm not sure that environmentalists are more guilty than average.
I have a smaller carbon footprint than most, I guess, though usually for selfish reasons. I ride a bicycle because I don't want to spend money on a car - either purchasing or maintaining one. For me it's a luxury item that can wait. Plus it's a time saver to do some cardio and get to work at the same time. Similarly I'm interested in these hippy "sustainable" house building techniques mainly because they're cheap and I want to avoid a mortgage.
But people who drive to work everyday still try and lecture me over nothings like putting a laptop on standby overnight.
Similarly, I drive an old SUV to work that gets terrible gas mileage because the environmental impact of prematurely switching to a new car is so much worse when I take my commute length into account.
I live within 8 miles of the office and subsequently put about 4,000 miles on my vehicle annually. I consume less fuel than 90% of the people in the office with new 'environmentally friendly' cars who live 40 miles away, yet it is I who receives the rash of shit. /rant
Micro-optimizations are often easier to wrap our heads around, so we tend to want to focus on them. They're also often situations where you can get a clear win rather than a much more imperfect improvement. In development, it's sometimes called bikeshedding. You see it often in financial planning where people would rather cut out their morning latte than focus on investing better.
This behavior makes little sense, but it does appear to be a fundamental human tendency and those who are better able to maintain perspective definitely have a huge advantage in life.
I'm going to take the more pessimistic view. It has little to do with what you can wrap your mind around and is much more correlated with the inconvenience of fixing it.
Dropping paper invitations has very little real inconvenience factor, so people do it and tout their environmentalism to receive their karma from their friends that care about that type of signaling.
When it comes to making a real sacrifice (e.g. not inviting people who would fly to the wedding), you will find very few people willing to do that.
It's the reason the prius is so incredibly popular compared to fully electric cars. It comes with the environmentalism bragging rights while still burning plenty of fuel so there is no change in lifestyle. Toyota was even nice enough to build it in a weird shape so people can easily see how forward thinking and smart you are.
It's true. Most of our climate issues don't come from teeny tiny packets of soy sauce. Consumer recycling might make people feel warm and fuzzy, but remember that a few years ago BP spilled 780,000 cubic meters (780 cubic kilometers) into the Gulf of Mexico.
Well-played! I was testing you! Not really; I made a mistake. Still, though, I'm not doubting that packaging in aggregate isn't a problem, but as far as anyone individually is concerned, a few bits of plastic are the least of the planet's concerns.
Well, there's probably a bunch of ingredients most folks will have in their larder/pantry cupboard e.g. salt, pepper, vinegar, one or two jars of spices (say, chilli, paprika), stock cubes... the sort of thing you can easily pick up from a regular supermarket or your local 7-11.
The more "exotic" ingredients would come with the box. For example, I'm kinda rural, so fresh herbs such as coriander and parsley aren't easy to come by. Fernly is suggesting that company's like Blue Apron should recommend always stocking certain long life standard ingredients that are commonly used in their recipes. They could perhaps even have this as an option on your account so that you get a bit of a discount for agreeing to hold these ingredients rather than having them sent out in tiny amounts in wasteful packaging.
No, a test will tell you whether or not that test passes; it says nothing about the correctness of anything else. But at this point, you're doing the job of a typesystem.
> No, a test will tell you whether or not that test passes; it says nothing about the correctness of anything else.
That is a tautology: Of course a failing test shows you that the test failed. However, your test suite is severely flawed if the type system makes it redundant.
There's a whole class of type mismatch bugs, which can show up in one or more code paths of just about any practical program, and which can be eliminated by a type checker (instantly in your text editor if you set it up, or at compile time). If you are writing and maintaining tests for lots of these bugs, you should consider adding a type checker to do it for you. The difference in overhead between annotating a variable and writing a test is huge.
Which, again, proves my point: If your test suite can be reduced to a type checker you are doing it wrong. That being said, it does not mean that a type checker won't catch many of the same bugs tests do - but no more than a subset.
Yes, good tests is the only way to eliminate most bugs. But aside from overhead to add tools to a project (don't underestimate the potential difficulty of this), a type checker can cover its subset for free, and then you can get better test coverage overall.
I think it's also hard because it's not as if crappy hours, tight deadlines, and low pay are directly killing people. Sure, stress is bad for you and you deserve to make enough money to provide for yourself and have healthcare, but I imagine conditions are overall still better than at the beginning of the labor movement, which involved rather dangerous factory work. It's easier for people to tolerate 60+ hour weeks and the like if they're paid well enough or if they hold hostile views towards unions, which I don't think is uncommon in the software field as a whole.
