3 ms·

At this point, I think the running shtick / inside joke of "Every Developer Should Know ..." headlines is that of course every developer doesn't need to know th

by loeg 3y ago

At this point, I think the running shtick / inside joke of "Every Developer Should Know ..." headlines is that of course every developer doesn't need to know the contents of the article that follows.

bachmeier 3y ago
Not true. Anyone experienced in programming discussions knows that "software development" overlaps exactly with the programming done by the commenter, and everything else is solving toy problems with tools that don't scale.
wongarsu 3y ago
> of course every developer doesn't need to know the contents of the article that follows. Things every developer should know about English, part 1: why word order matters in negation /s Obviously you meant "not every developer needs to know" instead of "every developer doesn't need to know", but I see this switch so often lately that I'm beginning to wonder if it's a dialect thing (similar to double negative implying a positive to some and an emphasis of the negative to others)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- a1369209993 3y ago
  Actually, that seems to be a legitimate precedence ambiguity. The probably more common way to parse/interpret it is: > [Foreach developer D, D] needs to know this. > [Foreach developer D, D] doesn't need to know this. (No developers.) But you could also have: > [The logical conjuction of all developers[0]] needs to know this. > [The logical conjuction of all developers] doesn't need to know this. (Not all developers.) The former convention is clearly better unless I've missed something rather significant, but inherently broken features in a number of programming languages (eg perl 6 'junctive' operators) suggest the latter is well-established as a thing that exists. 0: ie, a linguistic fiction that has only those properties / needs only those things that are common to every developer.
arp242 3y ago
I'm okay if "every" just means "most"; for example Spolsky's old "what every developers needs to know about Unicode" (which is the origin of this, AFAIK) is fine because most (but not all) developers will need to deal with text sooner or later. But in this case it doesn't even mean that: all of this applies to a substantial minority of programmers, but definitely a minority.
LouisSayers 3y ago
There are at most 10 things every developer should know. The first being number base systems.

by loeg 3y ago

At this point, I think the running shtick / inside joke of "Every Developer Should Know ..." headlines is that of course every developer doesn't need to know the contents of the article that follows.

bachmeier 3y ago

Not true. Anyone experienced in programming discussions knows that "software development" overlaps exactly with the programming done by the commenter, and everything else is solving toy problems with tools that don't scale.

wongarsu 3y ago

> of course every developer doesn't need to know the contents of the article that follows. Things every developer should know about English, part 1: why word order matters in negation /s Obviously you meant "not every developer needs to know" instead of "every developer doesn't need to know", but I see this switch so often lately that I'm beginning to wonder if it's a dialect thing (similar to double negative implying a positive to some and an emphasis of the negative to others)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
a1369209993 3y ago
Actually, that seems to be a legitimate precedence ambiguity. The probably more common way to parse/interpret it is: > [Foreach developer D, D] needs to know this. > [Foreach developer D, D] doesn't need to know this. (No developers.) But you could also have: > [The logical conjuction of all developers[0]] needs to know this. > [The logical conjuction of all developers] doesn't need to know this. (Not all developers.) The former convention is clearly better unless I've missed something rather significant, but inherently broken features in a number of programming languages (eg perl 6 'junctive' operators) suggest the latter is well-established as a thing that exists. 0: ie, a linguistic fiction that has only those properties / needs only those things that are common to every developer.

arp242 3y ago

I'm okay if "every" just means "most"; for example Spolsky's old "what every developers needs to know about Unicode" (which is the origin of this, AFAIK) is fine because most (but not all) developers will need to deal with text sooner or later. But in this case it doesn't even mean that: all of this applies to a substantial minority of programmers, but definitely a minority.

LouisSayers 3y ago

There are at most 10 things every developer should know. The first being number base systems.