@cerberus yes, they are good docs

@rumtscho I'm doing well.

I'm still getting used to the new place. It's a different job altogether.

There's a lot of good things. Hiking and playing in the snow doesn't really happen in Texas.

There are things I miss. I worked at the last job for 10 years and needed to move.

Made a huge profit on our house in the country and the new job pays a lot more so financially things are good.

Ah, Sobachatina my old friend

:D

@rumtscho Happy birthday, btw. I know I missed it last month.

rich, you say?

;)

lol

Everything is relative.

I'm almost certain you're rich relative to me :D

My wife and I went to a Regency themed ball this weekend. I spent the whole evening in a frock coat.

The thought of how ridiculous you would have found it crossed my mind a couple times.

As the British person I interact with, you are the beneficiary of such thoughts.

Rich relatives are highly overrated.

@Sobachatina Did you rent an outfit or buy one? Or just pull it out of your closet?

My wife made it. A very nice job for her first try.

Oooh, exciting. Does she sew a lot?

thank you @Sobachatina, it was a nice birthday. I'm glad to hear you're doing well. And the ball must have been fun

She should sign up for the Arts and Crafts proposal. :D

@sobachatina gosh, I'm flattered to be the representative of 65,000,000 people

I think the ball would be awesome... particularly if they had people teaching a few simple pattern dances to go along with it. In books/films from that era, it always seems like dancing is really important to the era.

@Catija She has started recently but I think she does well.

@Catija It was done by a dance company that we've been participating with so there was a dinner and then dancing until midnight.

She calls out the instructions for the dances as they go. It's funner than I expected it to be.

I like going to the Renn fests around... There's three pretty decent ones in Texas... finally got my husband a kilt to wear.

@Sobachatina Oooh, that sounds amazing.

It has been a while since I saw you, your children must have grown. How are they doing?

Her dress was rented this time.

@Sobachatina way to blink dude

@Sobachatina That looks so awesome!

@ElendilTheTall Yeah yeah. Heavy lidded and all that.

her attire is lovely

I trust you indulged in witty repartee?

@rumtscho The younger boys are thrilled to play in the snow. My daughter misses Texas.

I feel like yellow is very popular from that era.

"So I said, 'I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry sherry'"

@ElendilTheTall Only in as much as I can quote Oscar Wilde.

"Oh, Mr Sobachatina, I declare it the most whimsical joke of the season!"

Those button-flap pants! That's awesome.

There is a steampunk convention in Salt Lake in June. Not surprisingly, a lot of these people are big into that as well.

Do you have a huge yard again, with goats and trees and an anvil?

bed time - g'night all

@rumtscho Nope. Little yard a mile from work. About the opposite.

Loving not having a commute though.

and what is the new kind of work you're doing?

good night Elendil!

@ElendilTheTall Goodnight.

@rumtscho The company makes IT certification training courses.

I am writing web based simulators that go along with the courses.

so, very far from the iron this time

Very. Painfully so.

I have some side projects going on that will hopefully make money someday. At least they will keep lower-level software on my resume.

you miss embedded?

@ElendilTheTall Night!

@rumtscho It's strict and frustrating but it's also very rewarding.

I have never been exposed to it enough to get to like it

This web based stuff is... different.

I guess it has its upsides.

Web is more chaotic, I think

Javascript is truly horrible for real work.

@Jefromi Hah. The first ten Google hits are correct, though the image results are not...

That's all the complaining I'm going to do.

Javascript bashing is so normal, it doesn't even register as a complaint :)

Regardless of the work, the new company is awesome. Lots of perks and a very easy-going atmosphere.

Yes, I find the atmosphere so important! If you're cooped up with these people 8 hours a day, the best pay can't make up for being treated badly by colleagues.

What's so bad about Javascript, in layman's terms?

@Catija Nice kilts are expensive. I've wanted one.

@Sobachatina Full kilts, (Great Highland Kilts) made from yards of wool fabric are very expensive... he's got a sewn one from SportKilt, which looks good and wasn't overly pricy.

But the GHK is much more complicated to learn how to put on... but they're very versatile.

@Cerberus It isn't strict enough. Variables can be used at any time with any type of data. This means that it is difficult at edit time to figure out what properties an object has- they could be added at runTime. IDEs, struggle to give advanced features like code completion because there is no way for them to know until runtime. The language enforces very few relationships between objects.

Browsers implement features very differently. It's hard to get access at a low enough level to fix performance issues.

Wow... Didn't need that.

@Jolenealaska Well, that's a new version of the "mini kilt"...

sportkilt.com/product/3431/Firefighter-Works-Kilt.html

That's the one my husband has. And they made it long for him since he's 6'5".

That's not bad.

@Sobachatina Hmm, I see. I can understand most of what you're saying. Isn't there some way to check the data type at run time before handling the content of a variable? Or is the problem mostly in editing?

Ill have to think about it.

No, and the logo's sewn on, so you can remove it if you don't want it.

@Cerberus You can check at runtime- often you have to to be safe. It's the editing that is painful compared to other languages. The next version of ECMAScript is purported to try and fix some of these problems but it takes years for browsers to support new versions.

Really, even their great kilts aren't that bad... $175. And their video for how to wear them is really nice.

@Sobachatina OK I understand.

That is cool. We went to the ren fair on the way to SA a couple times.

We went to a Steampunk festival in Austin but it was small and a one-time thing.

Can't you just give your variables names based on expected data type? Or do you fail that isn't "safe" enough in case you make a mistake, or in case you have to edit someone else's code?

@Sobachatina South of Austin? I don't know of one down there... There's two between Austin and Houston (Texas Renn Faire and Sherwood Forest) and one just a bit south of Dallas (Scarborough).

@Cerberus the name is not checked by the compiler

@Cerberus You can. Every codebase has its own rules for how to make it more strict- but the problem is that the language doesn't enforce them. Typos can take hours to find.

@rumtscho No, but it can perhaps make editing easier...

@Catija I misspoke. It was the one on the way to Houston.

@Sobachatina OK I see.

so in the worst case, you stare at strWhatISaid and don't see a bug, and don't realize that the last function wrote a number into it

while with a variable called whatISaid, you're a bit more likely to wonder "and what type of data does it hold" and check

I've actually met people who like writing JavaScript

@Sobachatina Ah, Sherwood? It's in McDade, which is about an hour outside Austin, just past Sausageville :P

Elgin.

you can write nice, sane code with it

I used to like it until I started doing it for work.

the problem is, it's also exceedingly easy to write bad code with it

and a real pro knows how not to do it, but when you start with it, it's all a blur

you try the first method that works, are happy, and move on to the next thing

and when you have to revisit it months later, all the ugly side effects rear their heads

The problems I run into most often is that it is ridiculously verbose so requires a lot of typing, and the best IDEs still can't deliver advanced features like code completion very well.

The browser issues are abstracted away. Typing issues bite me all the time but not any worse than other loosely typed languages.

@Sobachatina you are a pro. I have never been in a situation where typing was even close to limit my work speed.

I usually have to think a good time about each line

Funny. I used "Typing" ambiguously. The first line is about typing on a keyboard. The second was variable types.

I got it, but it may take programming knowledge to understand

The last feature I worked on was simulating a Linux command-line.

Complete with mounting/unmounting drives and setting GRUB boot menu options.

It is a bizarre thing to have written.

Creating users, formatting filesystems, configuring dual boot into windows.

It also records the user actions and the system state to use for course evaluations later.

They can be graded on whether they correctly solved the problem or how they went about getting there depending on the course.

wow, that's awesome and weird at the same time

@rumtscho I understand your point.

Have you been thinking about that this whole time?!