And, just to go back to patio11's article[1] "replace OpenSSL for free" is something that Tarsnap could afford to do as a company, and might make business sense, if it were substantially more profitable. </nag>
The one weak point of the landing page is that it didn't indicate who was not affected. I read to the bottom of the announcement and had to think a while on whether I had to update my laptop because, hey, this seems like a serious bug. Granted, I'm nontechnical... but that's kind of the point.
Edit: not sure why this was downvoted, but if it contains an error please add a comment pointing it out. If you just think it should be lower on the page, no worries.
Usually the algorithm is described in another document without several expressions & lines. "Readability" in some of these contexts means verifying that you've correctly typed in the expression.
Did you write qplot? (rhetorical question) A lot of these "quirks" of R are nice for end users when they're implemented well, but are unintuitive to program and, as a consequence, are inconsistently implemented across packages.
> A lot of these "quirks" of R are nice for end users when they're implemented well, but are unintuitive to program
It's not a quirk, it's a core feature. It's used consistently and to great effect. Notice how the "subset" function takes advantage of the same flexibility. I'm about 95% sure neither the subset function nor the other standard library functions that use this "trick" were written by Hadley. The "trick" was expected to make expressions significantly easier to read and easier to write from the very beginning.
It might surprise a few people who come from another language and think they've seen it all, but once they figure out what's going on (which should happen on the first tutorial or 2nd or 3rd copypaste) it'll be a pleasant surprise. Unless they kneejerk and hate on it because it's unusual among languages.
It's used consistently in the core language and in well written packages but very inconsistently across the ecosystem. I certainly don't use it in packages I write for my own use and it's pretty unused in most of the packages I download.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953https://news.yco...