MikeTaylor

Yes, but no amount of explanation and analogy would enable them to understand what the heck a monad is.

As far as I am concerned, Stroustrup's greatest contributions to programmer are these three quotes, all from thre 2nd Edition of The C++ Programming Language:

"The most important single aspect of software development is to be clear about what you are trying to build."

"There are no 'cookbook' methods that can replace intelligence, experience and good taste in design and programming."

"Design and programming are human activities; forget that and all is lost."

So true, so important, and so universally applicable.

Developers love agile. The thing they hate is Agile. Which is completely different. (Notably, it's not agile.)

Add to the LOOOONG list of "I really liked X but a recent update has screwed it up". It's amazing how often this happens.

This kind of thing was one of the foundational notions of Plan 9, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I often wonder how different our world would be if they'd only had the foresight to release the code freely instead of keeping it proprietary.

He isn't the judge of anything. He's just asking a question.

This is obviously the right thing.

Still, I can't help lamenting it. There was something delightfully baroque about knowing that the kilogram was in a vault in France. I'm going to miss it.

No-one remotely confident would ever fail a candidate for not knowing what "fizzbuzz" means. But any competent interviewer would fail a candidate who, having have "fizzbuzz" explained to them, could not implement it.

Exactly. You want to know, roughly, something like "is this candidate in the top 10%?". You might conclude "She seems to be at about the 85th percentile, give or take 10%", so she might be in the top 10% of might not. But you might conclude "He seems to be at about te 50th percentile, give or take 10%", in which case you're not interested. There is a fundamental asymmetry here.

Obviously interviewing isn't 100% accurate. Almost nothing is. You definitely can't tell in 60 minutes whether someone will be a success at your company.

But you often can tell, with very very nearly 100% confidence if someone will not be a success. And that is the purpose of the interview. To filter out the "definitely not"s — the programmers who can't write fizzbuzz. And yes, I have seen plenty of these.

And interview is not the be-all and end-all of recruiting: of course it isn't. But I'm seeing a pendulum swinging a long way in the other direction now, and a lot of people talking as though interviews are worthless. They're really not.

As a Brit, I find it weird to see an article about economic catastrophe that doesn't even mention Brexit: the world's first self-inflicted economic omnicatastroshambles.

"We'll do a rewrite, simplify everything, get rid of all the edge-cases."

Guess what? It turns out that all those edge-cases were there for a reason. You needed them. And by the time you've added them back, or equivalents, two things have happened. First, you've burned an order of magnitude more time than you budgeted for the rewrite. And second, you have a codebase every bit as gnarly as the one you started with.

First rule of rewrites: don't do it. Second rule of rewrites (for experts only): don't do it yet.

I am an academic, with about 25 scholarly publications, depending on how you count them (see http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/ for a list and for links to download them). I am here to tell you that we DO NOT GET PAID for writing papers (which, much more than books, are the primary medium of research in the sciences). Of the 25 listed papers, I got paid something for one of them, which was not really research but activism -- and I was paid by the acdvocacy group, not by a publisher. For some of the papers on the list, _I_ paid the _publisher_: this is not unusual.

There is literally no downside for an academic author to have his or or her work made freely available to the world: only the considerable upside of greatly increased visibility and influence -- which is the true currency of academia.

There is only one good reason to do a Ph.D, and that is because you really really want to invest 10,000 hours of your life into researching a topic that you love deeply for itself. I have a Ph.D in vertebrate palaeontology, which I got because I loved the work; I know a lot of other palaeo Ph.Ds who did the same. But in my experience, everyone who attempts a Ph.D for any other reason -- for prestige, to improve job prospects, whatever -- either craps out of the course (best case) or endures a miserable five years (or often much longer).

Bottom line: do a Ph.D if and only if you want to do the work. Don't do one in order to get the qualification. Focus on the journey, not the destination.

This title is misleading. The post actually says that the reason "simple" comes first is because without it you can't have "correct" (nor "fast", not that that matters so much). So he's not saying simple is most _important_, just that it comes first chronologically, and has the other two as consequences.

Awk really has been superseded by Perl (and therefore arguably by Python, Ruby, etc.) But sed remains a thing of beauty, all its own, and very well worth learning. Hardly a day goes by that I don't use it in some one-off command like

    for i in *.png; do pngtopnm < $i | cjpeg > `echo $i | sed 's/png$/jpeg/'`; done

This should be Elsevier's corporate motto.

> [`but` is] an infix operator that first clones the object on the left hand side and then mixes in a role provided on the right hand side into the clone.

Yeah, thanks. I always wanted an operator that did that.

I wonder why Perl 6 hasn't caught on?

Thanks for the tip -- I'll try Arrow.

Agreed that Buffy does this, like so much else, just right. It's why I had such high hopes of Angel.

This is dead on target.

It's also why I found the TV series _Angel_ (the _Buffy_ spin-off) so unsatisfying. There is a truly fascinating story to be told about a vampire whose soul has been restored to him, and who is always at war with his own evil nature. But _Angel_ is not it. Instead, the eponymous character is essentially entirely good except when some supernatural agency transforms him back into Angelus, his evil form. All the conflict is externalised.

That's a particularly surprising and disappointing mis-step given _Angel_'s provenance. Joss Whedon is exactly the kind of person who I'd have expected to be interested in exploring the _inherent_ contradictions within the Angel character, and showing how they are analogous to the questions that we all face.

I note with amusement that I had to delete the last three characters from this title to get _Hacker News_ to accept it. We have an identifier too long to be a _Hacker News_ title.

What does the "[flagged]" mean in the title?

From the press-release: "Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License"

Well, that is not exactly true. For those who have forgotten the history, or weren't around at the time, this leaked internal document from Microsoft was the proximate cause of OSI taking off: http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween1.html

TLDR: Microsoft's loud opposition to, and deep fear of, open source software provided a catalyst and a point of unification for those who supported it.

Just in case anyone else runs into this and doesn't know what's going on: we had a problem with Yarn 1.0, because it doesn't recognise repositories that don't end in a trailing slash -- for example, "@folio:registry=https://repository.folio.org/repository/npm-folio" is no good any more, but "@folio:registry=https://repository.folio.org/repository/npm-folio/" is. See https://github.com/folio-org/stripes-demo-platform/commit/f8...

Meanwhile ... I do regret that this doesn't introduce alternative dependencies, like Debian packages have, where your package foo can have dependency on "either bar or baz". Oh well.

My official job title is Software Guy.

If the W3C does this, it will be time -- regrettably -- to turn away from that organisation and make a completely new one that exists to serve users of the Web rather than those seeking to monetise it. That Tim Berners-Lee has lent his name to this hijacking is shameful.

Where is the Watney Triangle?

This is all very nice, but the fact that the article doesn't even _mention_ images or attachments shows how divorced it is from the reality of most people's email experience.

I happily used emacs as my mail-reader from 1989 to about 2009 (first RMAIL mode, then VM). The increasing importance of non-text formats made it cumbersome, and I somewhat reluctantly switched to GMail. It's hard to imagine switching back now.

Definitely, definitely, Kernighan and Plauger's 1976 book _Software Tools_. The code is in RATFOR (a structured dialect of FORTRAN) but all the ideas are language-independent. It remains, four decades on, the best book I have ever read on how to solve the real problems of real program development. Very practical, and covers a vast amount of ground. (As it happens, I am re-reading it right now.)