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Tram Trains 12 months ago

It doesn't because it doesn't use any mainline rail track. Imagine if the T-Third went onto the Caltrain tracks at Bayshore and continued down the peninsula instead of terminating at Sunnydale; that would be a tram-train.

It would also be more or less impossible under current US regulations, but there's always hoping that that could be fixed.

I love this footnote so much:

This feature does enable a neat quine: the Perl program “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.”, when saved in the appropriate location, outputs “Illegal division by zero at /tmp/quine.pl line 1.” The reason for this behavior is left as an exercise for the reader.

Babel 6.0 Released 11 years ago

When I read

This means when you install Babel it will no longer transpile your ES2015 code by default.

what I really see is "This means that Babel no longer works out of the box and is now harder to use."

Was any thought given to how much additional complexity this adds to what was previously (https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/#babel_cli) a very simple way to get started?

OnHub 11 years ago

Comcast does this under the "xfinitywifi" network name as a default setup for anybody who uses the standard cable modem/router-in-one box, with thousands and thousands of access points: http://wifi.xfinity.com/

This is so telling: GitHub had a blog post yesterday[1] about pull requests and now Atlassian does today with a very similar title. The one from GitHub was about social dynamics and how to work together better, while the one from Atlassian is about technical minutiae.

Having used both GitHub and Stash, the difference in focus between the two companies comes across plainly, and these two blog posts only back it up.

[1] https://github.com/blog/1943-how-to-write-the-perfect-pull-r...

I've been coding full-time in Swift for the last three months and at this point our source base is about 10K lines of code. Given this experience, if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably choose Swift again.

The good:

- Swift is a far better language than Objective-C. It's much safer, the type system is great, and the functional features are a joy to use.

- Everything largely works as advertised; even for a super new language, the amount of total brokenness is minimal.

The bad:

- The current compiler's error messages are frequently bad to the point of being useless. Try to mutate an immutable dictionary? You get a type mismatch when you could get an error about immutability.

- The compiler is a lot slower than I think they mean for it to be.

- The debugger takes several seconds to evaluate an expression compared to almost instantaneous evaluation in Objective-C.

- 8 MB of standard library in your app binary.

The ugly:

- "SourceKitService crashed" messages in Xcode flashing on the screen at 30 hertz.

But at the end of the day, if you're hiring an outside company to do this, why does it matter to you what language it's written in? Shouldn't they be able to use their best tools?

Same place we were five years ago: nobody cares what API you're programming to as long as your apps are good.

No, seriously. The iPhone SDK came out in 2008. Google Maps came out in 2005, ushering in the modern era of web apps. Mac OS X came out in 2001 and .NET came out in 2002, representing the major desktop platforms we know today.

The web as a platform is no different than any other platform in that it's just another platform with its own strengths and weaknesses. It just moves a whole lot slower than the rest, which is why we're still asking this question after this many years.

APIs and platforms come and go. Developers always have had and always will have choices about which ones to pick for developing their apps against. These choices have some impact on how easy it is to build various types of apps, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how well your app serves the needs of those using it.

I bought a car a couple months ago, and as soon as the sales manager saw a TrueCar page open on my phone, the negotiation ended and I paid the price on the phone. Pretty amazing how easy it was.

Vim After 11 Years 13 years ago

Why do people keep suggesting iTerm2? The built-in terminal app on the Mac does Unicode and 256 colors just fine.

Why must the standard of discourse always be "I'm right and you're wrong?" It seems to me that more often than not in this technological day and age, the situation is much closer to "I'm right and you're also right, and between our two positions there's probably something for both of us to learn."