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concede_pluto

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If writing code paid no better than flipping burgers, I would still do it, because I enjoy efficiently solving challenging algorithm problems. I don't enjoy failing to solve them because I'm continually being prevented from remembering something clever I just thought of. If I only get to spend a couple of hours in the zone where I belong, either I'm in the wrong role or the wrong industry.

The thing is, one can write memory safe code in C.

One can generate safe C code. We have ample evidence that a human being can't sit down and write it.

For every car I ever owned before this year, they recommended an oil change every 3,000 miles (a little more than two months for me) or at most three months. I don't know if they got that much better or the recommendations were loosened to match observed problems.

I have asked every person who has turned me down what I could do better.

I wouldn't say anything either. There's no upside. Why risk giving any kind of ammo to someone with a grievance they want to justify?

She says she's a frontend developer and a nerd, so why is she pigeonholing herself in these "digital content coordinator/content marketer" fad jobs instead of moving up from PHP?

There's an alarming list of behavior MySQL got negligently wrong at some point. That code is mostly still present (you can't prevent a client from enabling it!) and I have to assume some of the maintainers who thought it was reasonable are still involved.

And not everything on the list has a fix available. Off the top of my head, there are still broken storage engines that can't rollback, not all of them can be disabled, and STRICT_ALL_TABLES won't stop you from writing to them. Some foreign key constraints are supported while others are parsed and then silently ignored.

This. You don't want to reimplement all your validation in each of your applications (plural!), and you're in for a nasty surprise if you think your entire organization has only one application using your database now and forever.

who would pass up a private car ride from San Francisco to Palo Alto for $45 when a taxi would cost $125?

A SF taxi charges double the meter for a ride to Palo Alto because without a Palo Alto taxi permit they have to drive all the way back to SF (or at least SFO) without a paying passenger.

Unfortunately this means you wrote several copies of essentially the same code but with minor differences, and if you find and fix a bug in one the others are still wrong.

If your monitoring can't handle your what system is doing, aggregate locally until it can. Having systematically incorrect stats (because loss is correlated with load) is worse than having none.

Eich wasn't ignorant of history, he just had marching orders to deliver something that resembled Java for marketing reasons, and only a week to finish or be displaced by something worse. The trouble is nobody ever got to fix it until ECMA.

If you're building in cement, you need to know the cement is strong enough. If you're building in tofu, choosing extra firm over silken isn't really going to help.

It's just like Fortran, where everything including a constant is passed by reference, so if you assign to your arguments you might corrupt your program's only copy of 7 unless the linker put it in a read-only page.

In Java, an exception outside a catch block automatically stops the method and raises the exception to the caller, and then their caller, and so on. In Go you have to write this after every function call (except the tiny minority that can only panic).

In Go, if you call three functions you need to repeat the

  x, err := do_something()
  if err != nil {
          return nil, err
  }
ceremony three times. In Java it happens by default, because the language designers agreed this is by far the most common case.

Ignoring an error is almost always a serious mistake, so the fact that Go makes it easy and not blatant is not a good thing.

the tech scene was supposed to be progressive and enlightened

Why? Tech was a haven for nerdy outcasts who want a world that makes sense because the smartest minds are in charge. If anything it was libertarian since the cypherpunk days. Now we have censorious normies playing at identity politics who lack the obsession yet want the paychecks.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Downey_Jr.#2001.E2.80.9... :

Downey was able to return to the big screen only after Mel Gibson [...] paid Downey's insurance bond

[...] for which producer Joel Silver withheld 40 percent of his salary until after production wrapped as insurance against his addictive behavior. Similar clauses have become standard in his contracts since then.

He's going to carry this stigma for a looong time. If he were only a supporting actor without influential friends he wouldn't be worth the risk; he'd have been fucked.

hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth

I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.

experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes

Please don't abuse your peers' goodwill this way. Write down your questions as you go, meet about stuff too abstruse to straighten out over email, and add what you learn to the docs so the next newbie will be less of a burden.