holy mother of god! how did i never know of this:

I have seen some issues with the data type in jQuery.ajax() be resolved by making sure the server sets the content type to application/json.

Kids these days don't even know how to wire up a vacuum tube. They'll never make it far without the basic skills.

This is how I felt listening to good2cu and The Usher discuss a hand of poker one time in a live SNG we were all playing in. I followed for a while then had no idea what they were talking about for the last half of it.

Oh my god, you guys.

Try searching these forums for posts containing: @property

Common argument, not just in programming, but in a lot of walks of life:

"I'm doing X the tough way because I'm smart."

"If there is an easier way to do X, a smart person has better things to do than doing it the tougher way."

All my formal training in CS was in C. Not C++, C. I've never felt the desire to learn C++ in part because just about everything I see in C++ that I can't get in C looks like the kind of stuff I'd use a higher-level language for, but not as good (also, from a beginner perspective specifically, C++ has all kinds of kludges and redundancies that could throw you off, while if you came from C you could think of it as "stuff that changed from C" and have an easier time remembering what was what). I linked someone else's mega-rant earlier in this very thread but of course welcome dissenting opinions from the 3 or 4 C++ people that post here.

Now, having said all that, Python does have a reputation for slowness that AFAICT is well-deserved. And learning C can actually help you keep from writing Python code that's slower than it has to be. For instance, if you know how to implement a string in C, you know why "+" on strings in Python is generally bad. This is both due to general computing principles and because the canonical Python implementation is written in C (so if you know enough about data structures you can often roughly guess how Python stuff is implemented)

This got me thinking about something I read recently. The author was talking about Python classes, and advanced an interesting hypothesis why you might see someone write a class like this:

His guess is that you see this because many people learn OOP in languages like Java and C++, which don't have first-class functions. In such a language, he argued, you'd need a class if you wanted the above thing in some contexts like passing it as a function argument, but in Python, you could just make it a function and pass the function itself. So a Java programmer "learns" Python, but not well enough to realize the full implications of it and writes things like the above as a result.

Based on what I know about C and Lisp, it seems to make sense. I can sympathize with Guido's desire to remove lambda from Python 3 because so many uses of it appear to be FPS*. C converts often don't take full advantage of ways to iterate, like, say:

if they know Python for at all. OOP people sometimes advocate getters and setters for everything without any apparent knowledge of the existence of __ mangling or the @property decorator. I actually read somewhere that the Python ternary is different from most languages in part to keep converts from overusing it. Whether that's true or not, this is a thing:

I'm not sure about the implications of all of the above, or if I'm just babbling. But it seems like an argument for learning several languages if for no other reason than to feel out the difference between things you need to do and things you're used to doing.


*I talked about "fancy for the sake of fancy" some time back; I've now decided I'm calling it "Fancy Pants Syndrome" because it's caused by the same attitude as "Fancy Play Syndrome" and I get to keep the acronym

A couple things I've noticed since posting this:

-@foo returns that db error message for some things, but @title gives the actual search page

-These "@" searches appear not to be subject to the normal time limit

If it's a reasonable guess that some field named "title" exists, then the two above combined would suggest a possible dictionary attack to find out what the rest of the fields are, I think? I know nothing about dbs but this seems bad. I may report my own post to the moderators, lol.

Interesting post, Xhad. I was actually thinking about starting a thread (or writing a ranty blog post) on a similar topic.

One thing I've noticed on SO is that people come to Clojure from either Java or Ruby and they cannot conceive of a world functioning without everything being an object. It's not even general confusion, it is pure unwillingness to even try to write a program without an object. Even the simplest things have to devolve into using (get-class) or (atoms) to even write a simple iterator. Just amazing how confused people become when they are faced with something they aren't used to. I would have thought there'd be an open-mindedness, but it appears that the polar opposite happens, where the mind snaps off anything that challenges their notion of what a program is.

It's not even a thing where functional programming and OOP is so different that they don't equate. Sure, I'm not an OO master by any stretch, but I am perfectly capable of writing simple OO programs and the concepts aren't beyond my head. I really wonder how people get so set in their ways like this.

Yeah, lambda really shouldn't exist in Python, and hopefully that "future feature {}" never comes to fruition. People are way too emotional about their petty garbage.

Ruby supports functional programming, functions are first-class objects, and functions can exist on their own apart from any other object. It's inaccurate to lump it in with Java as an example of a language which is overly zealous about objects.

I shouldn't have mentioned any particular languages. It wasn't meant to be a slight towards Ruby or Java. I just picked the two most common backgrounds.

I was going through that website I build back in Nov / Oct. I wish I had a time machine to slap my old self upside the head really hard. Well... what it lacks in elegance, it makes up for in determination and heart.

Every piece of code I've ever written, when viewed 4 months later, looks like total dog ****.

lol, +1 to that.

I think a pretty good nerd t-shirt would be:

I use shell vi mode, but I get slightly irritated about how if you move the cursor to the left at all then you can't move it to the end of the line anymore unless you enter command mode and use the A command. Also is there a way to use custom vi bindings? I just want to bind ;; = <esc>. I've googled both of these several times but no luck.

fwiw i love vi and hate set -o vi (as does everyone i've ever worked with except a few dudes at one company).

and to think, i used to respect you so much....

set -o vi changed my life.

agree, that would be a nice feature

I just use PCKeyboardHack to make the key labeled Caps Lock be my Escape key.

Any book recommendations for a relative noob? My experience consists almost solely of 6.00x and I'm looking to teach myself as much as possible before transferring to a 4-year CS program next year (they teach mostly in Java). Already saw those OOP programming books from earlier.

Try that import in a python shell sometime.

ballin,

not sure if it's possible to map ";;" to esc, but turns out it's possible to map a single key or a key combo. i did:

And you can ofc put in .bashrc or .inputrc to apply it to all terminals.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrica...s-spring-2005/

Watch the 1985 videos, read the book, do as many of the book exercises as you can muster.