vorg (u/vorg) - Readit News

vorg commented on How Sydney destroyed its trams for love of the car theguardian.com/australia... · Posted by u/oska

ekianjo · 7 years ago

Sydney is still being influenced by overseas trends right now as trams become popular again across large western cities. So do they actually make rational decisions or just follow whatever anyone is doing at the time?

vorg · 7 years ago

Looks like Auckland NZ is planning on following this trend by building two tram lines over the next 10 years (CBD down Dominion Rd to Airport, another CBD to West), 60 years after following Sydney's lead of tearing out the trams (first replacing them with electric trolley buses, then removing the overhead lines 20 years later).

I don't see either line making a financial return on the investment, but the NZ government is financing it all by plundering the NZ Super Fund, which was originally intended to provide super payments for NZ's over-65-yr-old retirees. Of course, they're framing it all as "the Fund is making a long-term investment in the country's transport infrastructure", making the eventual huge losses some other goverment's problem.

vorg commented on Ask HN: Which programming language do you enjoy writing the most? · Posted by u/farleykr

fastbmk · 7 years ago

You are wrong. Groovy had lambdas even before Java 8. Netflix used Groovy only because of that exact feature.

vorg · 7 years ago

No, I am right, because I didn't say Apache Groovy didn't have lambdas, I said it still didn't have the Java 8 lambda syntax in response to the comment that Groovy was so "ruthlessly" Java-syntax compatible. So you are wrong about me being wrong.

> Netflix used Groovy

Does Netflix still use Groovy? You make it sound like they no longer use it for new coding projects. If they do, you should have written "Netflix uses Groovy" and said what they still use it for.

vorg commented on Escape the scripter mentality if reliability matters (2011) rachelbythebay.com/w/2011... · Posted by u/m1245

oweiler · 7 years ago

I only use Bash for the simplest tasks. For anything more elaborate I use Groovy scripts. At some point I switch to full Groovy projects, switching on static compilation, adding unit and integration tests and so forth.

vorg · 7 years ago

> At some point I switch to full Groovy projects, switching on static compilation

If you let your Apache Groovy scripts get too large before switching on static compilation, you often have to modify the types and logic in your programs before they'll even compile. This problem occurs because static compilation was only bolted onto Groovy for version 2.0 and there's an impedance mismatch between what's required for its dynamic and static modes.

vorg commented on What If Consciousness Comes First? psychologytoday.com/us/bl... · Posted by u/devilcius

jonny_eh · 7 years ago

Good job proving the parent's point. This line of reasoning is such a waste of everyone's time.

Just because it's hard to define the lines between inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life, it doesn't mean there's no distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

vorg · 7 years ago

> inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life

... and prescient life. Don't forget the next stage on from sentience. The line between sentience and prescience also seems blurred, given how many humans nowadays report having flashes of the future.

vorg commented on What's Deoxyribonucleotide in Sign Language? bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-... · Posted by u/benryon

frenchyatwork · 7 years ago

Ah, I see your point. I suspect that Swahili's "asidi deoxyribonucleic" is probably an English loan-word, but you're right that I don't know, since I haven't done any real research.

vorg · 7 years ago

Although Mandarin isn't "influenced" by Latin, it is also influenced by English. In China most everyday writing would just insert the letters "DNA" into the text.

But even for scientific writing, my dictionary translates DNA as 脱氧核糖核酸, where 脱 means peel off, 氧 means oxygen, and 核糖核酸 means RNA, so DNA = de-oxy-RNA. As for RNA, 核糖 means ribose and 核酸 means nucleic acid. And in 核酸, 核 means nucleus/core/pip and 酸 means sour/acid, so again the meaning of the characters joined together are simply the sum of their parts. That's always been the case in my limited experience with medical words in Mandarin.

vorg commented on Ask HN: Which programming language do you enjoy writing the most? · Posted by u/farleykr

zmmmmm · 7 years ago

I enjoy Groovy.

It's a passport to the JVM that has all the advantages of Python and few of its downsides. The philosophy is a unique combination of being incredibly developer friendly (kitchen sink APIs etc, every syntactical convenience you can imagine thrown in), but in every other aspect being ruthlessly Java-syntax compatible. You get both dynamic and static typing rolled in, super powerful AST transforms that give you static-compile-time metaprogramming capabilities other languages struggle to achieve. Yet it competes with Bash for single-line utility scripts.

vorg · 7 years ago

Apache Groovy's apparent rise from #81 to #15 on Tiobe's index [1] over the past 12 month is disturbing, though. If it doesn't have the downsides of Python, then why would someone fabricate its popularity in a search engine?

And if Groovy is so "ruthlessly" Java-syntax compatible, why doesn't it have lambda syntax over 5 yrs after they were added to Java?

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

vorg commented on Skills Poor Programmers Lack justinmeiners.github.io/t... · Posted by u/rspivak

apo · 7 years ago

The skills cited in the article are:

1. Understanding how the language works. Additionally understanding how the language infrastructure interfaces with the computer.

2. Anticipating problems. Prefer solid foundations over veneers that appear to get the job done.

3. Organizing and designing systems. Essentially, SOLID.

Two things on this:

First, bad code often results from conflicting goals. Moving goalposts and on time shipping, for example. The result appears to have been written by a poor programmer, when this may not be the case.

Second, the most valuable skill a programmer can have isn't technical, but rater social: empathy. The best programmers I've seen have it and the worst completely lack it.

Lack of empathy leads to poor communication. If programmer can't anticipate or read his/her audience's perspective, there's no way s/he can communicate a complex concept to them. The temptation will be to blame the audience when in fact the failure lies squarely with the programmer doing the speaking or writing.

Lack of empathy also leads to disregard for the needs of users and future maintainers. Systems get built that don't need building, and systems that should be built aren't. Should the two happen to coincide, the system is a nightmare to maintain because the programmer simply didn't care about the people who would need to maintain the contraption.

A lot of the 10x programmer discussion focussed on people who lack empathy. For some reason, it's easy to conflate lack of empathy with technical skill.

vorg · 7 years ago

> the most valuable skill a programmer can have isn't technical, but rather social: empathy

You should say "a programmer needs social skill as well as technical skills to be valuable". If a programmer doesn't have a basic aptitude for programming-like tasks, they won't be able to understand how the language works, anticipate technical problems, or organize and design systems. Until you've worked in a group that's filled with "programmers" who don't have the aptitude for coding, you won't really understand this. The social skill must complement the technical aptitude and skills, but is not more important than them. In fact, I'm even suspicious of people who say "the most valuable skill a programmer can have isn't technical, but rather social" because they often turn out to be aptitudinally-challenged programmers themselves.

vorg commented on I was a 10x engineer and I’m sorry networkingnerd.net/2019/0... · Posted by u/zdw

RickJWagner · 7 years ago

Linus brought us Linux and Git. To me, he's probably the greatest programmer of our time.

James Strachan brought us Camel and Groovy. That's pretty good.

Gavin King had Hibernate and Seam. Not too shabby, either.

There are definitely people who are very good. To me, having more than one runaway hit is a good indicator.

But there are a very few of them.

vorg · 7 years ago

Having a runaway hit isn't just about creating it, but also successfully maintaining it. Strachan abandoned Apache Groovy only 2 years after creating it so he doesn't really count. Unfortunately he let in someone without any programming aptitude into the Codehaus despotry, and was eventually eased out with stirred up conflicts like the one over builder syntax in Dec 2005. He even had his commit privileges stripped from him afterwards.

vorg commented on What's Coming in Python 3.8 lwn.net/SubscriberLink/79... · Posted by u/superwayne

riffraff · 7 years ago

I believe groovy made this popular rather than arc, and it's likely where kotlin's come from, due to being in the java ecosystem.

vorg · 7 years ago

Too bad Apache Groovy itself didn't remain popular after popularizing the name "it" for the much older idea of contextually-defined pronouns in programming languages. Using the names of pronouns in English (like "this" and "it") is easier for an English-speaking programmer to understand than symbols like "$1" or "_". But because of Groovy's bad project management, another programming language (Kotlin) is becoming widely known for introducing the "it" name.

vorg commented on Why Lisp Failed (2010) locklessinc.com/articles/... · Posted by u/tosh

zmmmmm · 7 years ago

> Groovy has risen from #81 in July 2018 to #15 today

The rise to 15 is probably not correct but 81 is probably as inaccurate the other way as 15 is today. Given how ubiquitous gradle has become and groovy being the basis of that. Especially when you consider the nature of tiobe, it is about search results, so even people migrating away from groovy will generate "groovy" traffic as they try to figure out how to do equivalent things in, say, kotlin.

vorg · 7 years ago

> 81 is probably as inaccurate the other way as 15 is today

I can understand both how and why someone would push Apache Groovy's ranking higher up the Tiobe results, but I wouldn't know how you could push it down, let alone why anyone would. #81 is probably as accurate nowadays as the mid-40's has been for most of Groovy's life on Tiobe since 2006. Groovy's seen a significant drop in use (outside Gradle) over the past few years.