ruakh

103 reputation

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	location	Seattle, WA
	age	28
visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
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	103 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 7 months
13 badges		location	Seattle, WA		seen	yesterday

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Jun 12	comment	Should I use parentheses in logical statements even where not necessary? @dodgethesteamroller: Well, I made the point before you did, so I don't think you can call it your point! :-) (See my comment five above yours.) . . . Re: Pascal: Oops, you're right. I was looking at `or else` vs. `and also`, rather than bare `or` vs. `and`.
Jun 12	comment	Should I use parentheses in logical statements even where not necessary? @dodgethesteamroller: Dude, you can find a language with any property you can think of. In this case -- Pascal, ALGOL 58, FORTRAN 77, and some parts of the POSIX shell. (Note that in the cases of ALGOL and FORTRAN, newer standards fixed this deficiency, and in the case of the POSIX shell, newer parts of the language have chosen to be inconsistent with the deficiency. Pascal is the only language that seems to have really wanted "and" and "or" to have the same precedence.)
Jun 12	awarded	Pundit
Jun 11	comment	Should I use parentheses in logical statements even where not necessary? @CapeCodGunny: I'm sure you didn't. But the problem here is that you had a bad compiler vendor that made a breaking change. I don't see how you learned a lesson to "ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS" work around that problem, even when using better compilers.
Jun 11	comment	Should I use parentheses in logical statements even where not necessary? That seems like a better illustration of why it's important to have a good compiler.
Jun 11	comment	Should I use parentheses in logical statements even where not necessary? Re: "Every language I know treat AND and OR equally": I doubt that's true. If it is true, then you don't know any of the ten most popular languages (C, Java, C++, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C#, Perl, SQL, and Ruby), and are in no position to be commenting on what is "uncommon", let alone "very uncommon".
May 29	comment	Is the development of CLI apps considered “backwards”? @MasonWheeler: I think you're missing jk.'s point. When a GUI becomes complicated, tech-savvy users will often prefer to use a CLI scripting engine even for a one-off task. Which absolutely is "users working with [it] directly".
May 24	comment	Responsive Web Design vs. User-Agent Sniffing If the goal of Responsive Web Design is (as Wikipedia claims) "easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling", then why do you care whether it's a desktop or a mobile? What matters is the device's screen resolution and screen size, not what type of device it is. No?
May 23	comment	Is this a valid example of a dangling pointer? @ott--: True, but then, I'd argue that a variable that has fallen out of scope has been freed: `free` is for freeing heap memory, automatic storage is for freeing stack memory.
May 16	comment	Why is 0 false? @KeithThompson: In Bash (and other shells), "success" and "failure" really are the same as "true" and "false". Consider, for example, the statement `if true ; then ... ; fi`, where `true` is a command that returns zero and this tells `if` to run `...`.
May 15	comment	Is it poor programming practice to pass parameters as Objects? @Kaz: I think everyone can agree that a static type system has some advantages. Not everyone agrees on whether these advantages outweigh the advantages of the opposite approach; but this developer isn't getting the advantages of the opposite approach. (No ducktyping, no implicit typing, no terseness.) He's sacrificing all of the benefits of static typing, while shedding almost none of the costs.
Mar 5	comment	Is imposing the same code format for all developers a good idea? @DanNeely: Are you saying that C# has a "default" that `{` is on its own line? And that Java has the reverse "default"? If so -- can you clarify how you identified those "defaults"?
Mar 5	comment	Are exceptions as control flow considered a serious antipattern? If so, Why? @ErikReppen: I realize that you're just being sarcastic, but . . . I really don't think the fact that we "have dominated client-side web development with JavaScript" has anything to do with the language's features. It has a monopoly in that market, so has been able to get away with a lot of problems that cannot be written off with sarcasm.
Mar 5	comment	Are exceptions as control flow considered a serious antipattern? If so, Why? I believe JavaScript actually does have continuations, starting in version 1.7 (see developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Guide/…); but since no one actually writes JavaScript proper, I'm not sure what that's useful for. :-P
Feb 15	comment	How to write useful Java programs without using mutable variables @thiton: I agree, for the most part, but if you look at the linked article, Uncle Bob really does claim that "if you could peer into the computer’s memory and look at the memory locations used by my program, you’d find that those locations would be initialized as the program first used them, but then they would retain their values, unchanged, throughout the rest of the execution of the program". (Apparently FP doesn't support GC. Who knew?)
Feb 8	comment	Should the variable be named Id or ID? In your third paragraph, your example does not seem to match your text?
Jan 26	comment	Is Ken Thompson's compiler hack still a threat? @ArjunShankar: A non-free proprietary binary-only compiler does not need, and cannot have, this backdoor. This backdoor only applies to compilers that you compile yourself from source-code.
Jan 26	comment	Is node.js a suitable server platform for financial applications? @NathanC.Tresch: My impression is that financial institutions are usually pretty conservative. Node.js is less than four years old, and for much of that time it evolved rather rapidly (though it seems to have stabilized significantly). I doubt that financial institutions have formulated any "general best practice" yet.
Jan 26	comment	Is Ken Thompson's compiler hack still a threat? The first half of your answer has the problem that Kaz describes, but the second half is so good that I'm +1'ing anyway!
Jan 20	comment	Is function overloading in general considered Evil? +1, because this is a well-reasoned, useful, and fairly relevant answer, but I feel compelled to point out that the OP was asking about "method or function overloading", not "operator overloading". The two are related, of course, but they're definitely distinct: some languages, such as Java, support the former but not the latter, and some, such as Perl, support the latter but not the former.