Ordinal vs. cardinal. It’s “first” not “onest”, right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there’s a difference. (In fact, it’s basically a contraction of “foremost”, and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

If we weren’t implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for “second” (and still not “onend” or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.

Why the fuck would you spell it “1st” if it’s not 1?

Edit: Which is not pronounced “onest”. I think people might be missing the point here; I’m actually a fan of zero indexing.

Why? It seems exactly as valid to me, and more valid if you like positional numberings of your physical stuff.

You just count the number of times you departed from an item in order, rather than the times you arrived.

EZ, no password on password manager.

[Points at head]

Yes. That being said, it matters which language you choose. COBOL is always a bad choice, unless writing in COBOL is the whole point. There isn’t really a universal best choice, either. Python is often a good one, but if you’re doing something big it will become this meme.

I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s more like if you have to choose a language before you know what you’re doing, Python is the best choice. For anything large enough it’s multiple places down the list, but you really don’t want to have to learn Rust and possibly reinvent wheels for your quick boilerplate hack.

I mean, of course it wouldn’t be fair to expect everyone to be migrated over yet, but at some point it’s going to be an obsolete language. Memory unsafety is a pretty nasty quirk; just one that was previously unavoidable, as far as I know.

Playground zone signs where I live often read “slow children playing”. It’s supposed to be “slow (children playing)” but I always get a kick out of reading it as “(slow children) playing”.

I’d guess it’s less true for something statically typed, just because that reduces the ways it can be unintuitive.

A lot of people feel that way. If I need to generate a set of numbers or a certain string, though, it’s pretty easy to punch out a one-liner in GHCi, and that’s usually my use case.

Such is life.

I will confess that I get a sense of psychological comfort from strict typing, even though everyone agrees Python is faster for a quick hack. I usually go with Haskell for quick stuff.

See, the thing with Vim is that I don’t actually know which of the endless features I need. I don’t really feel like I’m missing much with the basic text editors.

Maybe you could shine some light on it for me? Right now I’m the sideways-glancing monkey meme every time IDEs come up.

Should they be more or less difficult, though? Really basic coding seems easier to me than remembering an endless soup of hotkeys I’ll rarely need.

TIL. I had tried to understand it a bit, but felt lost pretty fast, and then eventually found out that’s because it’s huge. Is there a good intro to the basic instructions you’re aware of?

By “play act the compiler” I mean a fairly elaborate system of written notes that significantly exceeds the size of the actual program. Like, it’s no wonder they started thinking about building machine compilers at that stage.

I wouldn’t be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.

Well, they’ve got a point for the bigger machine codes. Just the barebones specification for x86 is a doorstopper IIRC.

From what I’ve heard, writing big stuff in assembly comes down to play-acting the compiler yourself on paper, essentially.

I mean, a lot of companies do stuff like that, and yet you still need money to live. Just working there doesn’t necessarily make it your fault; by that logic it would be a sin to work checkout at Walmart, because you’ll have the same blood on your hands as the Waltons.

I don’t really like talking about capitalism as if it’s a well defined concept, but, no ethical consumption under.

I’m not ignoring the other two things listed, I’m realistic.

I didn’t mean you, FYI. I mean someone who does work for a FAANG and is looking for more justification to do nothing for the common good.

Why not? Unlike Schindler you don’t have to worry about how many beatings are necessary to keep up appearances, and you might have a specific role that exposes you to very little evil at all. Meanwhile, you can donate some of that big wage to people like EFF, or volunteer using the flexible schedule.

I was kind of assuming that, since FAANG are American, but I’d guess they probably have foreign employees as well.

Canadians make pretty much the same as Europeans, I think. The Americans have a bunch of monopolies, and are characteristically weird and nationalist about who they share the spoils with. (I know, it’s not all of you guys, but it’s definitely some)

Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.