I just had the following abridged IM conversation with a coworker.

Coworker has been there for a while and while not in our office, works with us and person X on many things.

Person X is a man, with a man's name.

Not sure what to make of this.

Why did you reply "she" if Person X is a man with a man's name?

Wanted to see what happened, mostly.

My entire day is spent trying to stamp out confusion. If I helped create more confusion I'd have to work weekends.

I love that gif.

Very few people enjoy being ****ed with at work, some respond in a hostile manner.

C/C++ is never going to go away. You are either going to see it in your upper division class or in real work. Chances are, down the road you will run into a useful library that is written in C/C++ that you will need to port over. So it's coming back! Don't forget!

Also what happened to Anais?

Oh, pah! No one needs C++ in this mobile-first responsive JS-lib boilerplate world. Why are schools even teaching these crufty old languages anyways? Don't schools care about students getting jobs?

C++ is dead™

Interesting the emphasis on what seem to me to be super trivial performance gains. Probably reflects the different use cases of C++. Readability virtually always trumps performance for me, in server-side code at least.

Without meaning to incite a language war, C++'s tolerance of implicit casting seems odd to me. I think I might have mentioned that before. Seems like the source of a lot of problems with not a lot of benefit.

The standard on readability is what exactly? It is pretty much subjective in my view. Since C++ is often implemented for problem domains where execution speed does matter it is a relevant issue but I wouldn't characterize that as the main emphasis of the article though. Explicit casting is not a desirable programming practice.

Readability is obviously subjective, that doesnt make it not a thing that matters.

As i said, my disagreement is with stuff like "auto x = get_gadget()". Yeah ok if you change the return type the code doesnt need to be updated, but i prefer clarity to anyone reading the code, which means I specify the type and if I change the code I update it. Code gets refactored a handful of times and read a billion times.

Not sure what "explicit casting is not desirable" means. Type safety is always a tradeoff but if I choose a static language I dont want to be on my guard against various arcane exceptions to the rule. What benefit does implicit casting provide aside from the luxury of not typing "(int)" occasionally?

This is something that's worth thinking about. I think "subjective" gets thrown around too easily to describe anything where there isn't 100% consensus or where personal taste plays some role. It seems so obviously true, in a way. Is that painting, that novel, that movie good? Well, it's subjective....

It avoids arguments and makes everyone feel validated. The problem is, it's not true in a meaningful sense. At least, not in the same sense that it's "subjective" to think tomatoes taste good or bad.

Whether is a piece of writing (or snippet of code) is clear and readable is not subjective that in way. Human cognition works according to rules (rules that are more slippery and flexible than the kind we program, but rules nonetheless). When something seems readable to you, it's not merely your idiosyncratic coder taste buds that are at play.

More to the point, the question can be studied empirically. You can poll programmers and ask them to compare two pieces of code. You can restrict your subjects to only programmers with 10+ years of experience, or to only novices. You can use all sorts of other metrics -- eye-tracking, time it takes to find the source of some bug, etc. Unless you believe that such experiments would rarely result in majority consensus, you shouldn't dismiss readability as "subjective."

If you do, you'll never look for the patterns and rules that govern your reaction, or the reactions of others. You'll never try to separate essential complexity from cosmetic. Maybe you'll put things like 5 level deep nesting into the same bucket as "snake case vs camel case" -- all nothing more than "subjective" decisions of style.

Who said it was?

Don't intend to do upper division, at least for now.

And the whole point of moving to Java was so that I wouldn't have to work with c++ as much.

Arbitrary, symmetrical numbers amuse me.

Your approach to your own education seems bizarre to me

You don't take stock of the quality of education you are receiving and adjust accordingly?

A girl I work with got her phone number hijacked by some scammer and got like 700 calls and 1100 texts from random numbers one day.

Of course as it is happening I signed her up to cat facts.

Yeah, there's broad agreement on what readability is, and just because people disagree sometimes it doesn't invalidate it as a concept. This is an argument technique that derails a lot of internet arguments (not that I'm accusing adios of this). In logic it's an informal fallacy called Loki's Wager.

just finished season one of silicon valley last night

i dont remember the last time i laughed as hard as I did at a TV show during the dick sucking conversation

also, OMG MY HANDS

water spilled on my mechanical keyboard yesterday and it's drying out, so using old membrane ergo keyboard atm. IT'S SO AWFUL! How did I ever love this?

cool, didn't know about that term

Me neither. I like it.

Although I'm not sure why the dwarves didn't agree to cede some of Loki's head and just cut off the obviously head section.

Silly dwarves.

that's actually a great demonstration of the logic fallacy involved.

Exactly what I was thinking. Take the top half of the head.

Similar to the Merchant of Venice where you get pound of flesh but no blood. Except in that case there's no easy way to still do damage w/o drawing blood.