but fisher-yates is random, that function is a deterministic random shuffle

whatever that could possibly be used for

when reading code, does anyone actually pay attention to punctuation? I thought everyone just looked at the indentation and not the braces

I use punctuation in my variable names

I frequently don't trust indentation, and my IDE highlights the matching brace if I put the cursor next to it

@ffao If I'm going over code I wrote recently, I probably don't need to read the punctuation because I know the code. But if it's someone else's, or if I wrote it years ago, I would need to pay attention to the punctuation. The braces, anyway.

yeah, Braces, Commas, and Parens are the most important

I tend to use ctrl+([ or ]) (I forget which one it is). In VS it jumps to the matching brace.

huh, did not know that

Coworker told me that one

Anyone coded in Lisp? I sometimes have to try to understand what other people have written, in Scheme (which is based on Lisp). There, the convention seems to be to write each ')' right next to the previous token. So you'd get a line ending in )))))) and I'd think -- now exactly what constructs did that close, and which construct are we still in??

That happens in some of my LINQ sometimes

I have that issue when I'm reading a C language, those braces get me. That's why I prefer VB's words over C#'s braces

and is why the highlighting is the best

@dcfyj Whether it's END or } don't you still have essentially the same issue, of working out which matches which?

@dcfyj ctrl-]

@RosieF No unless they're all the same structure. The only time I'd have that issue is if I have multiple embedded ifs/fors/while/etc since each structure has it's own end word(s)

@dcfyj I tell you another thing I like about Visual Studio (there are some things I'm not keen on but I like this one) Block-collapsing. Click on the littke [-] box between the line-numbers and the code, and the block collapses. I liked it so much, I sometimes even format a text file like that, if it's in sections.

You can do the same (most of the time) in Notepad++

@dcfyj Ah, I see. That's useful. I tend to put // and some end-of-line comment after a }, reminding me of what controls the block, if it's a huge one. Like for(j=a; ............... } // j

Yeah, the person who's code I'm working on does that too. I have a horrible habit of not commenting at all (I know I really need to), on occasion I remember to go back and comment stuff.

var topPriorities = issues.GroupBy(x=>x.department).SelectMany(y=>y.OrderBy(x=>x.priority).Take(1));

^that can easily get much worse

That looks pretty normal to me

Looks OK to me. x and y are short and neat.

Although not super descriptive

Unless I'm doing coordinates I avoid using non-descriptive variables so that someone can have an idea of what I'm doing. Or if I'm testing for that I use bob, no idea why...

but you can see how that can turn into a parenthesis mess

Which is why you split it multiline

Oh, I usually do too, but those are temporarily variables that don't exist at all after that line

I know

topPriorities and issues are real there, the others are just lambda expressions

I use LINQ pretty regularly

oh

right, you told me that, oops

I still say what they are so that someone who isn't as familiar with LINQ can have some grasp of what's going on though.

At the very least in a comment (however rare that may be)

so you'd probably call x "issue" and y "queue" or something?

@Sconibulus If only there were a single letter which would suggest "queue".

lol

@RosieF We should make on, it could maybe be something squiggly, so as to suggest a queue winding around pylons with ropes between

maybe something like... Տ

Pretty sure this is a real puzzle:

Yeah, it was absolutely a puzzle

@RosieF if...fi and do...od work OK, but other longer keywords don't fare so well. for...rof? while...elihw? One of Knuth's papers mentions a student who, having had to write a case statement (like "switch" in C) in a language of this time, wrote "esac ; comment bletch tnemmoc".