mjw1007

16 ms·

151.
by mjw1007 4y ago
If a project with half a dozen developers put political messages from those developers in their release notes, I'd think that was fine. But I disapprove of the people writing the release notes for a Rust release putting messages of the
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Note that this is the British Indian Ocean Territory, perhaps best known in these parts for having the .io cctld.
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by mjw1007 4y ago
One reason to support this sort of feature is that it makes it easier to split changes into two reviewable steps: first make a minimal change that introduces some ugly thing like break-with-label, then clean it up with a no-change-of-behavi
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by mjw1007 4y ago
As far as I'm concerned, "the point is" that what we're describing here -- keeping track of the type of each piece of data -- is the best way to think about this class of problems (as opposed to talking about "sanit
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Sure, you need a different type for each different form of escaping you want to track, but that doesn't make the idea unworkable. A type that says (say) "this is a string containing html PCDATA" is a useful thing to have.
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Hashlife. I'm pretty sure that if something of the sort had occurred to me before I came across it, I would have thought "that'll never work" and moved on without taking it seriously.
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by mjw1007 4y ago
My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind. (Similarly, someone elsethread is talking about how their non-developer colleagues neglected to tell
158.
by mjw1007 4y ago
The idea that programmers have a poor theory of mind doesn't stand up at all in my experience. I remember once seeing the inbox of someone working as a sales-ledger clerk. It was full of messages with the subject "accounts query&q
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by mjw1007 4y ago
If the people maintaining a language produce a complete and correct description, then thousands of other people around the world can use it to provide helpful and correct blog posts, Stack Overflow answers, and so on. But those thousands of
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I agree entirely with you that Rust, today, is well-adapted to people who like to learn by the "fuck around and find out" route. But it often feels as if the Rust community doesn't believe that people who prefer to learn by r
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by mjw1007 4y ago
From where I stand, this is just one more example of members of the Rust community working hard to find excuses for not having documentation. To the extent that people are relying on the common cases of the niche optimisation taking place:
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Right: "the testsuites visible to Crater are the de-facto spec" is much closer to the truth than "what rustc currently does is the de-facto spec".
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I don't think people who are asking for an accurate description of Rust are holding it to a higher standard than other languages. Rust's current reference docs, more than seven years after Rust 1.0 was released, are much weaker th
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think it's likely that nobody in this conversation actually disagrees with anyone else about how frequent such dependencies are. But the "law" is not literally true, so to make it useful you have to mentally add some reserv
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I'm sure it is, and if you interpret that page as really saying something like "If you're working at Google around 2020 and you're thinking of changing some undocumented behaviour then you should be aware that it's
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think the lesson there is that "the spec is what the program currently does" doesn't work well for the behaviour around rare errors. (POSIX was a red herring: Linux has never limited itself to POSIX, and anyway POSIX didn&#
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by mjw1007 4y ago
"sufficient number of users" is a bit vague. Is there intended to be an implicit limit of "all the people in the world who might plausibly use this API"? Then I'm sure the law is false. If there isn't intended
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Here's one example of a network effect that happened without actually meeting other people: I certainly wouldn't have considered spending my pocket money as a thirteen year old on a new copy of the Zaks Z80 book, but I stumbled on
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think Wikipedia's current standard in this area is fine. But I also think Wikipedia has historically mixed up discussion of notability and verifiability standards in a way that has been unhelpful to both.
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by mjw1007 4y ago
So Wikipedia should enforce its standards of verifiability strictly, but there's no reason to use the standard of notability as a proxy for that. If Wikipedia ended up often having to say "we're going to delete this content b
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think adding helpful information like that is great. But it's much better if it comes after answering the actual question, not instead of it, because (as you say), SO was intended to be a big reference of answered questions.
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Surely in cases like that you don't want to be having the "why?" conversation: the answerer should put that information in big bold letters at the top of their answer, whether or not it turns out that the person who happened
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by mjw1007 4y ago
But that last reason makes the behaviours described in the question even worse. If I land on a page with the question "What does the blue button on the back of a Mark 3 defrobulator do?" at the top in large friendly letters, I am
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by mjw1007 4y ago
His expectations around producing documentation go only as far as "Think about what documentation or data users need to understand and use your solution." That seems like rather a low bar, compared to items like "I can articu
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think we're seeing the "Mary–marry–merry merger" (specifically the Mary–marry part). [1] claims about three quarters of American English speakers suffer from it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engli
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by mjw1007 4y ago
Did Schopenhauer go on to give any reasons to believe that the things he was claiming there are true?
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think the article's introduction is unhelpful. If it made it clearer early on who the intended audience is, it would do better. (I think the intended audience is something like "people who want to read about things they already
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by mjw1007 4y ago
I think it is, yes. The introduction says: "This manual incorporates the former GNU C Preprocessor Manual, which was among the earliest GNU Manuals. It also uses some text from the earlier GNU C Manual that was written by Trevis Rothwe
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by mjw1007 4y ago
This is one small piece of the work that's going to need doing to get Rust properly described. It's not "useful" in the sense of being something that you'd actually run. This is a start on the lowest layer of the de
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by mjw1007 4y ago
The linked article is describing a randomised trial, which looks like it was set up in a way that's good enough to be sure the causality goes in the former direction.

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