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Search - "ideal language"
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Greetings @dfox @trogus, et al,
Here is some feedback with aspirations for the backlog.
I think it would be a good addition in the devRant UI if we could paste in code snippets and have that code display with proper fonts and syntax formatting, and even ideally with highlighting by language.
Currently, if we paste in any code or text for that matter it is translated into a sans-serif font (14px Helvetica Regular on webapp) which is fine for the poetic prose from our fine and noble devRant colleagues, but not ideal for shared monospace snippets of lesser and grand design.
Here are two websites that provide conversion of code snippets into formatted syntax, and HTML. http://hilite.me/ and http://markup.su/highlighter/
Both of these sites provide an API so highlighters can be used as a service.
Mockup attached.
Thank you @jaaku for your post, and welcome.
Cheers
devRant for the win
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If you think learning a language / working with a language you don't like is offensive to you and your morals .. Then don't do it.
Money is important to you ? Then you're just prostituting yourself to some higher authority. So DONT COMPLAIN!
You have the right to hate stuff while being paid for it. Understandable.
But don't shit on the shit you think is shit just cause you put yourself in the situation of not having an option !!
You're a worthless. Money hungry whore.
Yes, you hate Java/ x language but have to work on it ?
You're either a whore or have serious problems with standing up for yourself, but on the internet you become this amazing troll saying the language has problems.
Half the people who hate languages hate them cause it's common to hate them. Like being racist in the early American ages cause it was "normal".
Brain deficient motherfucking whores. Manipulated cocksuckers.
Sidenote : if you've honestly gotten shit on by a new version of the language you were using .It's understandable and I'm on your side. Using it without thorough research on the other hand is your mistake. Languages aren't ideal. Just Like most women don't like your dick cause, well it doesn't fit their use case. Deal with it not, troll about it.
I'm not like you. I experiment with whatever I like before using it. I work on my own stuff. I suck my own fucking dick and I get paid.
If you honestly disagree with me, put a couple points down on the language you hate and why you hate it ( considering the fact that you have actually used it and are not just trying to disagree with me )21 -
Primarily IntelliJ IDEs.
I'm using IDEA for Rust & Kotlin, PHPStorm, Datagrip (DB), and sometimes PyCharm CE.
IDEs can feel a bit dirty with how heavy they are, and the lack of customization/control. But at the end of the day there's just nothing that can measure up against IntelliJ's inspections, integrations and project indexing.
My ideal product would be one universal IntelliJ IDE, but combined with the openness of VSCode/Atom, having everything transparently configurable through stylesheets and scripts.
As an editor though.... I use Vim for LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and Haskell code... but not so much for other programming languages.
Vim was my first editor when I moved from C64 to PC development 25 years ago, and while you get used to balancing keybind vimgolfing with being actually productive, i've always found maintaining plugins and profiles too cumbersome -- the reality is that Vim is an awesome TEXT editor, but it's really awful as a CODE editor out of the box.
When you want to try out a new programming language, you don't want to have to mess around with your Vimrc and Vundle and YCM for half a day just so you can comfortably write "Hello World" in Rust or Elixir... you just want to click one install button, press F10 to compile and see if it flies.
Oh, and I use Xed a lot for quickly editing files... because it's the default GUI editor on Mint desktops, and it's quite good at being a basic notepad.1 -
can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.
they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)
the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.
the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.
flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.
it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.
animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.
you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.
oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.
oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.13 -
So c++ isn't really ideal for robotics? I could just not understand c++ correctly. I think it's just my terrible understanding of why a compiler is needed. I am an intermediate Python Dev, so I guess I'd like to download the "language" and go, ya know?5
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If I could, I'd attempt to create an ideal language. I'd aspire that its features would be:
-The easyiness of Python
-The library ecosystem of Javascript
-The readability and cross- platformness of Java
-Functional features of Haskell
-Modularity of Lisp
-Low level features of C/C++
-Powerful with strings and data, like Perl
-Both compiled and interpreted, with REPL
Anything missing from your favorite languages?9 -
First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P
Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.
Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think
Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee
And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output
Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)
Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D
Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude. -
I wonder if anyone has considered building a large language model, trained on consuming and generating token sequences that are themselves the actual weights or matrix values of other large language models?
Run Lora to tune it to find and generate plausible subgraphs for specific tasks (an optimal search for weights that are most likely to be initialized by chance to ideal values, i.e. the winning lottery ticket hypothesis).
The entire thing could even be used to prune existing LLM weights, in a generative-adversarial model.
Shit, theres enough embedding and weight data to train a Meta-LLM from scratch at this point.
The sum total of trillions of parameter in models floating around the internet to be used as training data.
If the models and weights are designed to predict the next token, there shouldn't be anything to prevent another model trained on this sort of distribution, from generating new plausible models.
You could even do task-prompt-to-model-task embeddings by training on the weights for task specific models, do vector searches to mix models, etc, and generate *new* models,
not new new text, not new imagery, but new *models*.
It'd be a model for training/inferring/optimizing/generating other models.4 -
It is very hard to handle AIs, you need leading scientists/artists, not managers.
You can't charm your way around its behavioral problems, you can't effectively bully or pull rank on it, and can't threaten it into unemployment.
So, the entire repertoire of the typical (asshole) manager is toast.
The *only* way to handle AI is to lead by example, give unambiguous, comprehensive and very specific instructions, and be always available to guide it through complex, gray-area situations.
Thus, it is not much different than being an actual leader (to a greenhorn and anxious and overreaching junior), but also a programmer (of a raw and unforgiving language like C or COBOL).
Since your typical company mid-level asshole manager won't do those things for dear life, AI will only leverage their incompetence to heights never seen.
By ignoring feedback and misinterpreting instructions, AI will make mistakes (just like a person).
On the wake of those mistakes, AIs have a bias for falsifying evidences and hiding relevant information (just like a bad coworker), and yet are quite persuasive to the innatentive reader (just like your typical manager).
Thus, without a daft hand, AIs will only perform worse when doing the tasks that would otherwise be done by a human.
But that will take time (more than a couple quarters, at least - probably a bit longer than the average tenure of a CEO).
And in this time, the numbers look great - the over eager "aimployee" works tirelessly day and night, seven days a week, takes no breaks, holidays or vacations, asks for no benefits besides a paycheck, have fewer and fewer sick days (maintenance downtimes), always sucks up to its corporate masters and is always ready to take on even more responsibility for (relatively) little extra pay.
Thus the problem only scales up, compounded by the corporate ideal of screwing up workers for no monetary profit, and reluctance to course-correct after investing so much time and hype into this AI bubble.
Thereby, AI is evolving into the corporate super bug that shall erode the already crumbling, stuck-in-the-past "boss mentality" institutions into oblivion.
I'm making popcorn. -
Opinions
Hello, I’m considering building a web framework.
My ideal features would be:
Customizable authentication system(considering using a jwt lib)
Embedded DB(bolt db)
ORM( writing my own)
REST api to DB (via code generator)
Code generator(generation of models and views via cli)
GUI to db(some admin dashboard)
CORS(web service right?)
Why?
Ease of development
Fast prototyping of small-medium web services.
Fun.
My question is, do i have to many things on my platter? Should i narrow it down into less featured framework? What feature should I focus on? How should i benchmark it? Should i write tests for absolutely everything or just for exported methods? What should i take into consideration when developing ORM API, Auth API...
The language is Go
Thank you for your input10 -
I would have wanted to bring up SICP again, with the great big warning about the evil assignment operator and state and all the troubles that ensue (just think: concurrency).
But in a way, nothing has really come up from this or my attempts to dig deeper into "everything is a file/object" (Unix, smalltalk), neither from formal languages or the Curry-Howard correspondence. - Maybe there's just nothing, no firm bottom ground to discover. Like the physicists going for their world formula, but instead of a grand, beautiful symmetry that explains everything, we face a shattered world of (incompatible) theories, that is ever so more complex and chaotic through our theories applied to it. There may not be a Platonic ideal world of ideas, but rather partial constructs explaining some particular perceptions.
Similarly the one perfect programming language to rule them all, the perfect abstraction, pattern is probably just another prepubertal fantasy to be sunk.
So maybe instead of seeking the perfect epiphany, we should go for something quite different: the nagging, brooding uneasiness that something is wrong there, that there's something to be fixed... that even negative feeling would propel us to search further, not to stay in whatever is touted as the real thing.
Such irritations I found with Pieter Hintjens' writings. For example when he actively engaged in conspiracy theories. And I'm still not sure, if he just went off the cliff or he's even right alluding that these theories are an act of sanity, a self-defence against the hidden evil mights. I just don't know. Anything. -
I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).
T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).
Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).
In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.
I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.
Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.
I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.
I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.3 -
The following piece of advice will be for those aspiring for an IT service desk position:
When companies are looking to hire service desk agents, they're primarily looking for socially skilled people with strong communicative skills, rather than primarily technically skilled people. When I first joined the IT world, I went on different interviews for that position and across all of them there was one truth: all the interviewers were eyeballs-focused on my social and communication skills and a mere thin layer of technical skills was required (depending on how technical the service desk). In fact, I immediately got aggressively dismissed twice for two of those when I filled in a Myers-Briggs personality test according to my Sheldon-type personality (selfish, condescending etc). Conversely, when I applied for a new position and I faked that test into answering everything focused positively on the social aspect, I was an immediate top candidate.
Here's a definition from the ITIL Foundation course, chapter Service Management: Because of how lateral the function of the service desk has become today (not only used to solve technical issues, but also company-wide issues), the most important and valued skills when hiring a service desk agent are fully focused on empathy and soft skills and none of those are technical skills. This is because the service desk has people that are the front window of your company and thus you can't make social mistakes as to protect your company's reputation. That risk has to be minimized and you need the ideal people. The people who in fact solve the technical problems are behind a back-office and they are contacted by the service desk agents.
In the beginning, when I did my first service desk job, I also thought: "Oh, I'm going to have to convince them I'm this technical wizard". In the end I got hired for being able to explain technology in human language and because in the interview I successfully communicated and explained ideas to both the team manager and the CEO, not because I knew what goes on inside a computer. This is a very important distinction.
My friends have also been in service desk positions and ironically they were the most successful when they were empathetic slimeballs (saying: "of course, anything for you" while not meaning it, constantly making jokes), rather than people with integrity (those got fired for telling the customer they were wrong while being unfriendly).
I hope this helps.8 -
i want to create a service that periodically logs in to a 3rd party service to check if anything has changed in their account, then send a message via firebase to notify the user who's account has been changed.
can you recommend any program/hosting/server that would be ideal for this?
i prefer dart (because i built the frontend in flutter, but i'd use most any language).
i'd prefer not to pay for a dedicated server because of price, so if i could just create processes that run every hour or so, that would be ideal.2