blinks

Imagine making this same point about books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_pe...

It's more important to make code readable than clever, and more important to be simple than fast.

It tends to be pretty easy to speed up readable+simple code when you need to do so, but fixing broken fast+clever code is much more difficult.

It does include a lot of arcana about how web application stacks work, the network and gateway protocols they use,...

This was my second phone screen at Google, for what it's worth.

I highly recommend looking into Inform7, effectively a text adventure IDE (though the community tends to call it "interactive fiction").

The language is a bit odd, and attempts to "read like English", but it provides so much scaffolding I feel like it's worth it.

If the system was namespaced, it'd be even better -- essentially make Meshtag just the translation layer (drawing to id), and then pass that identifier into any backend you like.

There are tens of thousands of employees at Google. Most of them interview. People are different.

http://bazel.io/docs/skylark/concepts.html

You can [at least internally] define custom rules to handle pretty much anything, in almost-but-not-quite-python.

For more concrete syntax, consider the following Python:

  >>> import re
  >>> route = re.compile(r'(?P<fb>^/foo/bar$)|(?P<fbd>^/foo/bar/\d+$)')
  >>> route.match('/foo/bar').groupdict()
  {'fb': '/foo/bar', 'fbd': None}
  >>> route.match('/foo/bar/1').groupdict()
  {'fb': None, 'fbd': '/foo/bar/1'}

understanding why it is done in this particular way is another

Isn't that the reason for comments in the first place?

Either way, when you’re reading a linked page, you may still be “at” awesomestuff.com, as clicking the back button on your browser can instantly confirm. Effectively, awesomestuff.com has stolen content from newyorker.com, just as the compiler of “Most Thoughtful Essays” stole content from me.

"At" is the wrong word. The browser is requesting content. If it's requesting content from awesomestuff.com that only newyorker.com has permission to copy, that's a copyright problem.

This is a very odd metaphor for a journalist to mistake. It's as if any reference they make in a piece is violating the copyright of the referenced item. Is reference that difficult of a concept to grasp?

Grep the article for "If someone had changed the calendar, wouldn't anyone else – say the Muslims? – have noticed?" -- a paragraph which ends with:

"All these areas would require an enormous amount of research either to validate or refute the theory, research that is unlikely to be undertaken by anyone not interested in rewriting the timeline."

Specifically:

* Merchants selling digital goods may transition to Google Wallet for digital goods

* Merchants selling through Google-hosted marketplaces (e.g. Google Play) will be unaffected

* Merchants selling physical goods will need to switch to third-party alternatives (see below)

-- https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449

I would ask if you had ever worked in IT.

There is a reason such jobs turn people into curmudgeons. It's not like they all started that way. You attempt to give a simple explanation as to what you're doing, but as soon as you say anything about their computer, they assume it's technical and tune out.

There are definitely people that would come into the office and learn how you fixed things, and those people were wonderful. Few and far between, though.

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/RequestAutocomplete ?

What's the point of Facebook? Twitter?

> I don't know why, but psychologically I would feel like this is somehow less private than, say, a mailing list. I'm probably becoming old :)

I think that's a really interesting comment! Perhaps it's because the UX is more social network-y (FB/Twitter), which are historically public, and less email-y+historically private?

Your comment would carry more weight if I knew what projects you recently contributed to.

Doesn't seem like an amazing rationale; personally, I like periods -- they let me know the writer finished their thought.

I _think_ the complaint is the following:

if x == nil { x.doSomethingCrazy(); // Runtime error? } else { ... }

"Boolean blindness" (bah) is that either the type system should catch this at compile time (because we know x is nil), or the language should make it impossible to phrase (pattern matching to pull the information out, such as with the Maybe type).

Go has many type system oddities (reflection instead of generics, for instance), but the things they _have_ done (auto-implementation of interfaces, for example) are pretty cool.

> Complaining that every attendee's attention is not > permanently fixed upon you strikes me as particularly vain.

I read this differently: an audience can get the most out of a presentation by paying attention.

If you're consciously communicating while attending a presentation, you're probably not getting anything out of what's being immediately said. In an information-dense presentation, that means you're not getting the most out of the presentation: unfortunate at best, and making the rest of the presentation hard to understand at worst.

Perhaps it's more useful read as an "attendee tip" than a "presenter request?"

> Prototypes are simply more complicated than classes.

[citation needed]

I'd argue the opposite: "Prototypes are simply more _intuitive_ than classes."

OO-design says that X is-a Y is-a Z, with inheritance providing the main form of structure.

Prototypical-design says that X is-like-a Y, but with these differences. This NPC (specific, X) is like any other NPC (general, perhaps the original NPC prototype), but with the name Fred and this custom AI code.

They're different ways of thinking, but prototypes are certainly not more complicated than classes in the general case.

----

As for the syntax, though, I totally agree with you.

The language is interesting, at the very least -- concurrency primitives are nice, and the interface-based type system works for most cases (generic containers notwithstanding).

The major speed problem right now is GC, but that should be improving quickly.

Does http://www.corsofamily.net/jcorso/vi/ not work for you?

You can even go farther than that -- return true on success, and anything else on failure, and you get the semantics this person wants. If the results should be saved, that should generally be done outside the if condition anyway.

Actually, they're _not_ both equal to infinity, in the mathematical sense (which I believe you're discussing) -- X / 0 is undefined.

What's equal to infinity is the limit of 1 / x as x approaches 0, and that's only from the positive side. From the negative side, it's -infinity.

Caste system? I'm an SRE-SWE myself, but I couldn't tell you what side of the fence each of my team members are. (I might have an educated guess, though, based on the projects they choose to work on...)

That doesn't seem to fix the underlying problem -- they understood/read the plain english version, just not the terms.

Honestly (and I'm guilty of this as much as anyone), I doubt they even read the terms. Here we have this huge thread about contract language being hard to understand, but if one doesn't take the time to read through, understand, and _remember_ all the terms of the agreement, how can one act on that information?

Complex, perhaps, but it's a complex subject.

> You check the ones that you expect.

You expect buffer overflows? Out-of-bounds arguments? These are the things the GP is referring to, I figure.

Skaters are actually pretty cool guys, in general. First skate video I found on YT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAvGzCPa0TU

Sample comments:

Asking for advice: > when you tre flip over something (gap, stairs or anything) does anyone else dangle their foot like this guy?

Generic compliment: > damn, nice

Complimenting form: > you land well clean kickflips

Observation of differences: > it realy is true how europe has alot more amazing skate spots n obstacles than america,

One troll: > u blow

The forum manager (Matt) on that thread is being very cool about the whole thing; bravo, Motorola.