fforw

Actually, my TV has rabbit ears again -- only they're for DVB-T now.

Oh how I not miss dying all the time because I clicked 2 pixel in the wrong direction.

As I said: in a Java environment, which rules out C/C++.

20 times the speed of JRuby based Less is not shabby though.

edit: Performance was never the top motivation though. Architectural concerns and resilience were. Although based on a decent JavaCC grammar generated parser DSS should be able to eat any CSS and spit it out again as-is. While I certainly wouldn't want to write such dismal CSS, I also don't want to work on some richtext editor CSS just because I want to integrate that with our system.

While we kind of like Less' approach to CSS, we were not thrilled with the performance and also found it not really enough for serious development.

We opensourced our attempt at CSS generation in a java environment.

The website is a little outdated http://dynamic-style-sheets.org/dss-website/index.jsp but might give a rough overview. The SVN is more up-to-date ( http://opensaga.org/svn/opensaga-dynamic-stylesheets/trunk/ )

In addition to rule nesting and mixings, variables, expressions, etc, DSS allows user-defined functions to be written. Some come with it, including a system do imagemagick or so like processing of images in the CSS.

It's a funny little thing that kind of just wanted to be written that way.

Sorry, but an awesome programmer does not only talk about programming, he does it.

Breaking the internet with your javascript sounds a little like the "IP-Tracking in VB-GUI" thing.. wish his blog was a little more stable.

Of course.. because a simple list is of course better than arbitrary nested data structures which are then directly translated into nested object structures.

.. or look at the way men are often presented in chick flicks. Rich, handsome, without any own personality whatsoever apart from magically mirroring what the female character needs at that point.

> and jealous institutions such as the constitutional court.

The Bundesverfassungsgericht (federal constitutional court) is the only organ that reliably keeps doing its job, ensuring that the newly passed laws are in fact constitutional -- a test that was failed so many times in the recent past. Calling that jealous behavior is a very strange position to take.

I've written a "json" command line tool with nodejs that offers transformation of JSON with modern javascript expressions (with support for Array.map, Array.reduce etc).

http://fforw.de/post/scripting-json/

Not to mention that their newest, more standards-compatible browser is not available for their older OSes, ensuring we still have a nice long ride with their old crap browsers.

Cargo cult programming means copy and pasting code from examples and tutorials, often with a false or without deeper understanding of the code copied.

The first remedy against that is to understand the stuff you have been copying. That alone elevates you from cargo cult programmer to a copy and paste programmer. Now you need to understand why copy and pasting is a bad way to program and how to structure your code so it is better.

This is a totally different thing from learning nifty algorithms of people being far cleverer than you are. As someone else already said, you can go a complete programming career with happy coworkers and customers and never really go deep into algorithms. Learning and practicing good software engineering practice will help you more than abstract CS concepts.

isNaN() only exists because the real way to detect NaN is so counter intuitive. Lots of people will see "if (x !== x)" and will try to "optimize".

Of course you also have 3.5 times the population

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

difference only 26%... guess you should move to Qatar or Luxembourg though -- but when you're not rich from oil or moving large sums of bank money around, that high GDP is not actually helping, is it?

And then there is stuff like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_index.

oh teh irony of an article about "less" a being wall of text / tldr.

There's another way to deconstruct jQuery, which is often overlooked by people.

jQuery's design, in large parts mirrors the needs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement. Once you reached enlightenment / chose progressive enhancement as your client development methodology, all javascript code boils down to two phases:

- find the points in the document to enhance - transform those DOM elements into javascript enabled awesomeness

Which is exactly what jQuery does.

Every programmer is an executive in the sense that his code actually ends up doing business decisions -- all in a complexity far above the average managers head. I guess they'd be scared shitless if they'd understand it.

> [Smart people] think the world isn’t complicated, period.

um.. what!?

The world is a complicated mess in just about every aspect except in those axiomatic systems we developed to create simplified models -- but the map is not the territory. The world is by far larger than those specialized areas we're good at.

The puritans had "religious slogan names" like

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon

( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Barbon )

brilliant comment. my new favorite quote -- right after "existence is stateful".

One time, my kernel was crapping out and endlessly printing stuff I couldn't read because it was scrolling WAY to fast and ctrl+s did not work either, so I photographed my screen to be able to read what the kernel was trying to tell me (hardware defect).

I got my first paid programming job without having studied, without any references but a video tape of one my old Amiga demos.

Don't like world hunger? Starve people yourself! Don't like murder? Start killing people!

I have little experience with the others under "can't scale just like MySQL", but putting CouchDB under is more wrong than it is right and unfair in any case.

First of all there's excellent single node scalability, the general architecture is built with based on clusterability with support for node disconnects and reconnects between nodes. And then there's http://tilgovi.github.com/couchdb-lounge/ which provides clustering today.

It's more like Aspect-Oriented Styling, because CSS is seriously lacking programming constructs. No variables, loops, conditions etc.

Spring has support for both container based aspect, which applies to the beans under spring's control and "real" AOP based on AspectJ.

This might be a stupid question, but has anyone ever considered that a higher intelligence or some other attribute might enable a species to just not end up fossilized so much?

"Hey Grok, don't go there, the gods will kill you."