POSIX has multiple Turing complete utilities that can be used in tandem. Its not a very fair competition. Many of the primitives involved are simply not primitives of higher level languages. Write a python script to remove blank lines from standard input. In awk it takes 5 non-whitespace characters (including 'awk'). Use awk to remove blank lines from your python code when you need to paste it into a terminal. Many python developers have a terrible time from the command line because they do not use the shell to help themselves out.
Readit NewsLC_ALL commented on Minimal safe Bash script template betterdev.blog/minimal-sa... · Posted by u/signa11
LC_ALL commented on EU to unveil landmark law curbing power of tech giants dw.com/en/eu-to-unveil-la... · Posted by u/dcgudeman
Does this help big tech or hurt big tech? One way to create a monopoly is to regulate competition out of existence. Lawsuits against big tech are becoming the latest form of semantic satiation.
LC_ALL commented on Apple’s Anti-Tracking Plans for iPhone foundation.mozilla.org/en... · Posted by u/nojito
Say what you want about Apple but they are by far the most privacy focused big company. Their income is from selling physical devices. Typical megacorps in 2020 are leveraging economies of scale to sell their users' attention. Apple has a unique value add in that when their users benefit they benefit.
Sent from my Thinkpad.
LC_ALL commented on I assume I’m below average (2010) sive.rs/below-average... · Posted by u/enigmatic02
We should distinguish having above average mental faculty, and above average skills.
I vastly overestimated the impact of the former until university. Engineering classes kicked everyone's asses. Everyone was equally smart, but some people studied harder than others.
On the other hand, I know I am well above average at certain things because I've been doing them for many years. I have an above average interest in those things, and put an above average effort into learning them.
This is also true for other people. My dad is an average dad, until you ask him about cars or motorbikes. I knew he liked cars, but I didn't get to appreciate the breadth and depth of his knowledge until I started wrenching on vehicles. He spared me the details out of politeness, because I wasn't into cars. Now, he doesn't spare me, and it turns out he's a mechanical grandwizard. It was right under my nose this whole time.
I suspect most people are like that. They are average, except at one or two things. We tend to judge others based on the one or two things we value, and fail to appreciate them for what they're good at.
The term grandwizard is extremely dated. If you do not know what it means its better not to find out.
LC_ALL commented on Why software ends up complex alexgaynor.net/2020/nov/3... · Posted by u/kiyanwang
Building features on top of other features is often zero cost. Code becomes a many layered cake consumed by the end user. In the web development stack the simplest of features like text on a screen is the achievement of decades of technological progress. Text may be localized, shaped with HarfBuzz, run through libicu's BIDI algorithm, encoded with a nontrivial encoding, wrapped in markup language, nested inside of multiple layers of network headers and corresponding metadata, sent over the wire as a series of 0s and 1s, and then painstakingly unpacked in reverse order.
This is clearly complicated and clearly works. Many different actors operating quasi-independently. You can imagine the difficulty when one actor in a time crunch tries to design a similarly complicated cake stitched together with parts homemade, parts open sourced and parts paid for.
LC_ALL commented on If-then-else had to be invented github.com/e-n-f/if-then-... · Posted by u/fanf2
Just one of those things that no one really questions the existence of. It, like the semicolon, always has been and will be.
Good work digging through these historic esoteric languages. Wikipedia states McCarthy of Lisp fame invented it so many of the evangelists here likely know the conclusion here.