Thanks for restating the same argument everyone always gives. Yes, fragmentation causes problems for Linux, at the same time, it's also what makes it awesome for the people that use it. If I didn't have the choice and power that Linux gives me, I wouldn't be using it.
To be fair, they make it quite clear that you should check that before doing updates - and that it's not a hands-off distro, it's quite clearly stated that Arch is a distro where you will need to get your hands dirty at times - they are proud of that, and it's what the aim is. Also, I don't think I've seen anything that can break your system unless you try and force the upgrade when it fails.
I hate this crap - auto complete tells you that lots of people have searched for that - it doesn't make it fact. The issue here is people seeing auto complete and thinking it means anything other than lots of people have searched for it.
This should be thrown out.
Not everything can be to everyone's taste, unfortunately. Portal is great, and I'd think more people than average will like it, but obviously pleasing everyone is a pipe dream.
Isn't it a little awesome that he has become a (general) idol? I mean, everyone cries out that the current celebrity culture is terrible, and yet here we have a man who is everything everyone should aspire to, despite terrible adversity, and he is in popular TV shows, doing adverts. Isn't that a good thing? I am glad that we are moving on and people who in the past would only be icons for the geeky, or those in the field can become icons for everyone, because it means we are focusing on better things in people.
Definitely - a few of the friends who have tried Portal have fallen at the first hurdle - gamers don't think of character movement as a skill, as it's so heavily ingrained after playing a few games, but I've seen people try to play Portal and have issues running into walls and stuff, just unable to figure out movement with a stick (weirdly, a lot of people I know actually do better with WASD than a controller, which seems counter-intuitive to me). Another thing that really gets people is moving and looking around at the same time, which is vital in many games. The upside is, that if you can get past that, Portal eases you in pretty gently.
As a note, that's not to imply I am advocating evangelising gaming - gaming is great, and if she is (even slightly) interested herself, great. If she has truly no interest, then don't try and force her to get into it. It might just not be her thing.
Not only is Portal a great game, but I have lots of non-gamer friends who enjoyed it, plus there is a sequel with co-op. It's also extremely good at training people to play the game, and teaching it's core mechanics. New gamers often find starting off hard as most games presume so much knowledge of general gaming. Portal lowers that barrier to entry significantly.
I hate how hard this concept appears to be for so many people - it's so damn obvious, why does the fact it's online make a damn bit of difference? Likewise, if I send a communication to someone, the government shouldn't be able to start looking at it. It's true for post, so why do so many governments keep trying to pretend it shouldn't be so for email?
To be honest, I've worked with Git on Windows and it wasn't that painful. Mercurial is great, don't get me wrong - 99% of the work I do is Python stuff, so it's natural to use Mercurial, but I tend to find myself working with Git more - I've never been a fan of the hard line that Mercurial takes on history modification.
To be clear though, I'll happily use either tool - they are both great.
You say that about speed, and while in general, I agree, in some cases it really matters - the StackOverflow guys have talked about how they have reduced load time, and how much it mattered to a site like SO - a few milliseconds can loose you a lot of viewers.
I'm not sure what the intention was of the response - but I'm not saying JavaScript isn't deterministic, it's just not a sane set of rules that define what goes on in cases like this - the length of that answer shows how poorly designed the language is. It shouldn't need such explanation.
Everyone makes mistakes, stuff happens you didn't intend, and a good language will either error straight out, or give reasonable, easy to spot results (null in Java, for example), that indicate an error. JS is full of stuff where if you get something wrong, the language just explodes in crazy. That's not helpful, especially given web stuff is annoying to debug at the best of times.
While it's possible to use JavaScript in a good way, and some of what is there is good, the language itself is a mess of poor design. Something much, much better could give the features that JS gives, without all the horrible design. It's worse than PHP, and that is impressive.
I'm a 3.x user, where zip() functions lazily. As you are correct to point out, in 2.x, you will want to use itertools.izip() to get that functionality.
A lot of people don't get the benefit of it reading like English - it's not in the learning, learning a language that reads a bit like English doesn't really help, as it still doesn't write like English, the benefit is that it produces much more readable, maintainable code in the long run. If I take a ton of Python I can very quickly start updating it or modifying it (or simply checking it). It's easier to understand what is going on quickly and spot bugs. (This all, in turn, also makes it faster to write). This is of huge benefit to everyone. Yes, some programmers will need to get out of habits from other languages, but if you are a competent programmer, that's not really a huge task.
Sorry, yeah, it was meant to be item - that's what I get for tapping out code quickly without running it.
As to itertools, yeah, it's a bit of standard library functionality that often gets overlooked, but is massively useful, it just does a ton of common iterations tasks quickly and efficiently. As to being lazy, it's a really great thing, and in Python (especially since 3.x), lazy iterators are core to the language and, provided you don't intentionally push stuff into lists, it requires no extra thought on the part of the programmer. The I/O cost is actually very low as Python buffers file I/O by default anyway.
with sounds a bit odd when you are not used to it, but it's massively useful when it comes down to it - it allows you to pre-write common code blocks and execute them in a finally block, without a ton of boilerplate. Otherwise, to ensure correct behaviour, every file you open has to be wrapped in a try: finally: with file.close() at the end. As we know we want this behaviour every time, we just put it in a with block and have it run when we leave the scope of that block.
Object orientation is great where you want to think about parts of a system separately - which we almost always want to - that said, Python draws heavily from procedural and functional languages too - hence no need for a class with a main method like Java, and all the lazy stuff and list comprehensions from functional languages. Just as with all things, it can be used in the wrong context, but in the right context, OOP is a great idea.
As to how I know, the with statement just runs the context manager you give it. I know that a file's context manager closes the file - that's in the documentation, no different to knowing that for x in file: will loop over the lines of a text file. There are other useful context managers (and ones I have written myself) to do other stuff. File closing is (by far) the most common usage however.
As to the general distain towards memory-managed languages... they are the future. It's just so much better - so much quicker to develop in, and it makes the final code so much easier to read and so much more maintainable. Memory management is boilerplate code, it's the same stuff I want to do every time, and having the language deal with that is great.
Of course it is possible to write unclear code in Python - preventing that would be impossible while retaining a useful language.
The whole program sits wrongly with me - for one, the user is using io.open() instead of the open builtin - there is no good reason to do that. Next they are opening files and relying on the garbage collector to close them (not using the with statement as would be sensible), then they use string operations on data they have told us is binary data, use a nested loop in a generator expression, which yes, is ugly, instead of using itertools.chain() to flatten the iterable.
So how would I write the same program?
import itertools
with open("even.bin", "rb") as even, open("odd.bin", "rb") as odd, open("interleaved.bin", "wb") as interleaved: for item in itertools.chain(zip(even, odd)): interleaved.write(data)
itertools.chain() is the more efficient and readable way of flattening a 2-layer iterable, instead of the 'horror' you point out. This version also writes bit by bit, rather than joining in-memory, meaning that it doesn't load the entire thing into memory, meaning it will work with extremely large input files (larger than system memory). The use of the with statement means that the files will be closed even if an exception occurs. Plus, the whole thing is more readable.
Python is much more conducive to writing legible code - note neither example involves lots of indices on a list, for example. It's not a miracle worker, but given people who have taken a bit of time to learn the language, it makes writing very readable code very easy. That's a great thing - it's not an instant fix, but trust me when I say I know Java just as well and yet I could never write more readable Java than I could Python for any given task.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat - Give that a watch - it's short and amusing, not some huge rant or dissection (begins on Ruby, moves to JS). Done watching? JS is full of that kind of horrific design that makes code do stuff you don't expect, and it lacks features that everyone needs. It just makes development harder, and that's the reverse of what you want a language to do.
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Thanks for restating the same argument everyone always gives. Yes, fragmentation causes problems for Linux, at the same time, it's also what makes it awesome for the people that use it. If I didn't have the choice and power that Linux gives me, I wouldn't be using it.
To be fair, they make it quite clear that you should check that before doing updates - and that it's not a hands-off distro, it's quite clearly stated that Arch is a distro where you will need to get your hands dirty at times - they are proud of that, and it's what the aim is. Also, I don't think I've seen anything that can break your system unless you try and force the upgrade when it fails.
My reply was aimed at the line "If you want IPv6, you can readily get it." in the parent.
I hate this crap - auto complete tells you that lots of people have searched for that - it doesn't make it fact. The issue here is people seeing auto complete and thinking it means anything other than lots of people have searched for it. This should be thrown out.
I disagree - in some areas, no ISP that offers IPv6 covers the area, and tunnels are hard to set up (for average joe) and relatively slow.
Not everything can be to everyone's taste, unfortunately. Portal is great, and I'd think more people than average will like it, but obviously pleasing everyone is a pipe dream.
Isn't it a little awesome that he has become a (general) idol? I mean, everyone cries out that the current celebrity culture is terrible, and yet here we have a man who is everything everyone should aspire to, despite terrible adversity, and he is in popular TV shows, doing adverts. Isn't that a good thing? I am glad that we are moving on and people who in the past would only be icons for the geeky, or those in the field can become icons for everyone, because it means we are focusing on better things in people.
Sounds like success to me!
Definitely - a few of the friends who have tried Portal have fallen at the first hurdle - gamers don't think of character movement as a skill, as it's so heavily ingrained after playing a few games, but I've seen people try to play Portal and have issues running into walls and stuff, just unable to figure out movement with a stick (weirdly, a lot of people I know actually do better with WASD than a controller, which seems counter-intuitive to me). Another thing that really gets people is moving and looking around at the same time, which is vital in many games. The upside is, that if you can get past that, Portal eases you in pretty gently.
As a note, that's not to imply I am advocating evangelising gaming - gaming is great, and if she is (even slightly) interested herself, great. If she has truly no interest, then don't try and force her to get into it. It might just not be her thing.
Not only is Portal a great game, but I have lots of non-gamer friends who enjoyed it, plus there is a sequel with co-op. It's also extremely good at training people to play the game, and teaching it's core mechanics. New gamers often find starting off hard as most games presume so much knowledge of general gaming. Portal lowers that barrier to entry significantly.
I hate how hard this concept appears to be for so many people - it's so damn obvious, why does the fact it's online make a damn bit of difference? Likewise, if I send a communication to someone, the government shouldn't be able to start looking at it. It's true for post, so why do so many governments keep trying to pretend it shouldn't be so for email?
To be honest, I've worked with Git on Windows and it wasn't that painful. Mercurial is great, don't get me wrong - 99% of the work I do is Python stuff, so it's natural to use Mercurial, but I tend to find myself working with Git more - I've never been a fan of the hard line that Mercurial takes on history modification.
To be clear though, I'll happily use either tool - they are both great.
You say that about speed, and while in general, I agree, in some cases it really matters - the StackOverflow guys have talked about how they have reduced load time, and how much it mattered to a site like SO - a few milliseconds can loose you a lot of viewers.
I'm not sure what the intention was of the response - but I'm not saying JavaScript isn't deterministic, it's just not a sane set of rules that define what goes on in cases like this - the length of that answer shows how poorly designed the language is. It shouldn't need such explanation.
Everyone makes mistakes, stuff happens you didn't intend, and a good language will either error straight out, or give reasonable, easy to spot results (null in Java, for example), that indicate an error. JS is full of stuff where if you get something wrong, the language just explodes in crazy. That's not helpful, especially given web stuff is annoying to debug at the best of times.
While it's possible to use JavaScript in a good way, and some of what is there is good, the language itself is a mess of poor design. Something much, much better could give the features that JS gives, without all the horrible design. It's worse than PHP, and that is impressive.
I'm a 3.x user, where zip() functions lazily. As you are correct to point out, in 2.x, you will want to use itertools.izip() to get that functionality.
You say broken, I say fixed.
A lot of people don't get the benefit of it reading like English - it's not in the learning, learning a language that reads a bit like English doesn't really help, as it still doesn't write like English, the benefit is that it produces much more readable, maintainable code in the long run. If I take a ton of Python I can very quickly start updating it or modifying it (or simply checking it). It's easier to understand what is going on quickly and spot bugs. (This all, in turn, also makes it faster to write). This is of huge benefit to everyone. Yes, some programmers will need to get out of habits from other languages, but if you are a competent programmer, that's not really a huge task.
Sorry, yeah, it was meant to be item - that's what I get for tapping out code quickly without running it.
As to itertools, yeah, it's a bit of standard library functionality that often gets overlooked, but is massively useful, it just does a ton of common iterations tasks quickly and efficiently. As to being lazy, it's a really great thing, and in Python (especially since 3.x), lazy iterators are core to the language and, provided you don't intentionally push stuff into lists, it requires no extra thought on the part of the programmer. The I/O cost is actually very low as Python buffers file I/O by default anyway.
with sounds a bit odd when you are not used to it, but it's massively useful when it comes down to it - it allows you to pre-write common code blocks and execute them in a finally block, without a ton of boilerplate. Otherwise, to ensure correct behaviour, every file you open has to be wrapped in a try: finally: with file.close() at the end. As we know we want this behaviour every time, we just put it in a with block and have it run when we leave the scope of that block.
Object orientation is great where you want to think about parts of a system separately - which we almost always want to - that said, Python draws heavily from procedural and functional languages too - hence no need for a class with a main method like Java, and all the lazy stuff and list comprehensions from functional languages. Just as with all things, it can be used in the wrong context, but in the right context, OOP is a great idea.
As to how I know, the with statement just runs the context manager you give it. I know that a file's context manager closes the file - that's in the documentation, no different to knowing that for x in file: will loop over the lines of a text file. There are other useful context managers (and ones I have written myself) to do other stuff. File closing is (by far) the most common usage however.
As to the general distain towards memory-managed languages... they are the future. It's just so much better - so much quicker to develop in, and it makes the final code so much easier to read and so much more maintainable. Memory management is boilerplate code, it's the same stuff I want to do every time, and having the language deal with that is great.
Ugh, and slashdot ate my formatting, naturally, with indentation there as appropriate.
Of course it is possible to write unclear code in Python - preventing that would be impossible while retaining a useful language.
The whole program sits wrongly with me - for one, the user is using io.open() instead of the open builtin - there is no good reason to do that. Next they are opening files and relying on the garbage collector to close them (not using the with statement as would be sensible), then they use string operations on data they have told us is binary data, use a nested loop in a generator expression, which yes, is ugly, instead of using itertools.chain() to flatten the iterable.
So how would I write the same program?
itertools.chain() is the more efficient and readable way of flattening a 2-layer iterable, instead of the 'horror' you point out. This version also writes bit by bit, rather than joining in-memory, meaning that it doesn't load the entire thing into memory, meaning it will work with extremely large input files (larger than system memory). The use of the with statement means that the files will be closed even if an exception occurs. Plus, the whole thing is more readable.
Python is much more conducive to writing legible code - note neither example involves lots of indices on a list, for example. It's not a miracle worker, but given people who have taken a bit of time to learn the language, it makes writing very readable code very easy. That's a great thing - it's not an instant fix, but trust me when I say I know Java just as well and yet I could never write more readable Java than I could Python for any given task.
I laugh every time without fail - extremely funny.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat - Give that a watch - it's short and amusing, not some huge rant or dissection (begins on Ruby, moves to JS). Done watching? JS is full of that kind of horrific design that makes code do stuff you don't expect, and it lacks features that everyone needs. It just makes development harder, and that's the reverse of what you want a language to do.