> So, please forgive us our gallows humor about this.
Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."
The thing is, I can write a program in any language. The reason for learning a new language would be to learn a new way of thinking, to "get the maximum out of it". If I can't get involved in its community, I can't do that properly.
I, too, feel that perfectly uniform brace positioning is one of the critical technical challenges facing any new language today. There is no longer any excuse to get such an important and fundamental advance wrong.
It may not be a "critical technical challenge" but if you are writing a new language there is really no excuse to not cement things like that down before it is too late.
I see how you would think so, but I lean in the opposite direction. If all programs in X language are written in the same style, you never have to pause to think about how to style something. This also means that you can quickly read other programs without being thrown by differences in style, and it's a great use-case for a tool that does the formatting for you. You can just write a quick example, run the formatting tool, and you won't have to pause next time. If you really can't afford the interruption, you can just skip formatting and run the formatting tool later-- though this is the sort of use-case that only occurs early in your relationship with the language.
Why do you want to force people to whatever style you want to read in?
There is a strong case for having one style: namely that now it becomes easy to understand aspects of a program at a glance (e.g. structure of flow, where you can gloss over for now, and where you have complexity) and also helps identify errors and on right away. Sometimes it's imperfect, but consistency is more important than "looks pretty".
Besides, if we're talking about the hacker mindset:
1) there are other languages
2) you can do amazingly complex and deep things with your brain, but you can't adapt to a style?
3) consistency and correctness is more important than "what I whimsically decide is neat looking today, no matter how many errors it is hiding".
And there would be no "forced" unless the reference implementation were to error when un-standard styles were used. I see absolutely nothing particularly "un-hackerish" about this. We standardize syntax and keywords, why not syntactical style?
You know what does seem hackerish though? Having tools that do mundane tasks (for example, formatting) for you so that you don't have to. Lisp, and lisp pretty-printers, also strike me as pretty hackerish.
>So suddenly you decide what hacking should mean to me?
Did you start this sub-thread saying: "Why do you want to force people to use your style? That's pretty much against the hacker mindset", ie telling us what hacking should mean to us?
To answer your question: no.
I merely restated what hacking means for everybody. Words have meanings built-in, individuals don't get to decide "what it means to them" and have that be accepted by other people (Else why even use the common word in the first place? Invent your own).
So, if hacking means "no standard syntax rules" to you (among other things of course), that doesn't mean squat to the general hacking population. Guido Van Rossum, for example, is as much a hacker as anybody, as are Python users, hacking in a language where indenting is enforced.
"Bike-shedding" is also well known, and is well known that syntax-style, brace wars and such fall under bike-shedding and/or yak shaving in Hacker culture, along with Emacs/Vi etc.
>Sorry, but this thread smells of authoritarian people.
Yes. Either that or people who couldn't give a flying duck for brace/common style wars, and have found by experience that not arguing about such things and having language standards make them more productive.
People that know that your "rebellion" and "creativity" have millions of interesting avenues to be exhibiting in the things you CREATE with your code, instead of in your brace style and such.
It's as if saying "I cannot be creative in this company/school" because they have a dress code. As if wearing some lame t-shirt or whatever makes one more creative.
To be fair, that's a reasonable position for a person who's "not really racist, but holds opinions that they concede certainly sound racist when said out loud".
Interesting, I thought I was being restrained. While certainly angry, I didn't mean to shut off conversation.
Re: reasonable position
If you have an epiphany that you've been operating on stereotypes (which in this case are racist, IMO), and you want to share the wonder of having your eyes opened to something you couldn't see before, the first thing to do is not to stream those now-understood-to-seem-racist misconceptions -- especially with no discussion of them. You could, instead, talk about what you learned, or why you believed those bad ideas.
And I don't mean why, as in, "because some friends had a bad outsourcing experience." I mean, why are you operating on stereotypes and unfair reductions, especially when you already admit they are wrong.
What would you think if someone said,
"Amazing job. I know it's racist, but I always thought blacks were too busy sitting on their porches drinking 40s that they bought with welfare money. I know too many friends who've had bad experiences with black people. It must be really hard to run for President."
Would you think such a person is having a genuine epiphany and sharing true insight into their own misguided worldview? I would think that the author of the comment is doing a bad job of it, at best. At worst, I would think that person learned nothing, but would like to say something anyway.
I agree with you entirely and unreservedly. The scare quotes in my comment were to poke fun at the idea that a person who holds a set of racist opinions is somehow not a racist.
I do maintain that it is, in some sense, a "reasonable" position for a racist to be more offended by incivility than by racism. Not ideal, or even good, but certainly understandable.
I feel like I'm missing something terribly obvious, but...
How does "it is getting harder and slower to move large files over the net" lead to the conclusion "therefore we should store all our large files on the net and retrieve them whenever we want, rather than keep them on local media with negligible latency and huge storage space"?
Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?
I believe that ISO2022 allows for the full set of japanese names (and has some sort of process for introducing new kanji). That's probably a big part of the reason that Ruby's strings are bytes with an encoding attribute, rather than just being unicode.
Ruby was designed as utility goop for Japanese programmers. Inability to parse/output legacy encodings would have rendered it virtually useless for that, even if legacy encodings were strictly dominated by any available Unicode encoding, which many Japanese programmers would hotly contest.
The Ruby thing is probably due to the fact that EUC and Shift-JIS were then (and to some extent still are) the prevalent encodings. It's not so much about character sets, after all Unicode includes every kanji defined in ISO-2022. Please see my other comment in this thread.
Japanese computer systems are often not using Unicode but are based on other encodings like shift-jis.
Even if it wasn't for historical characters that aren't part of Unicode, this will probably stay that way because of the inefficiencies of encoding Asian text in e.g. UTF8.
That's part of the reason the ruby programming language didn't have proper Unicode support for a long time (and now supports arbitrary encodings for its strings, not just Unicode ones)
> Japanese computer systems are often not using Unicode but are based on other encodings like shift-jis.
That's true but doesn't really answer GP's question. Shift-jis is an encoding for one of the JIS X character sets. Unicode includes all the characters defined in JIS.
Though if we enter into details it gets a bit messy due to the complications due to different simplifications occured in (mainland) China and Japan, questions about different glyphs for the "same" character, etc.
Apologies for my pedantry, but dreaming about harming people is actually pretty much the opposite of gallows humour. A more appropriate phrase might be "power fantasy."