Wolfram Mathematica

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11:16 AM

@WolframBlog I was quite enjoying this blog post until I got to the last two sections, at which point I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. My morale with respect to WL is at an all-time low at the moment... for the first time I'm having trouble convincing myself to renew my premier service and keep Mma on my main machine. The blog post hasn't helped.

halirutan

11:38 AM

@WReach I read it yesterday and I forced myself to not comment on this.

WReach

@halirutan That was my initial reaction too, but I finally couldn't contain myself.

halirutan

@WReach Only the day before yesterday I ranted about another issue where they simply change an existing API and I quote from one of my favorit Java books

yesterday, by halirutan

> By making it package-private, you make it part of the implementation rather than the
exported API, and you can modify it, replace it, or eliminate it in a subsequent
release without fear of harming existing clients. If you make it public, you are
obligated to support it forever to maintain compatibility.

WReach

@halirutan Now it's my turn to say I forcibly restrained myself from ranting on that topic. Suffice to say that I agree it is a very bad thing from them to do.

halirutan

@WReach And now SW blogs officially and says things that clearly indicate they have never heard of something like feature branches in a versioning system, etc..

It almost sounds like "oh, I hacked a test-thingy in the main code base and we simply forgot about it"..

WReach

@halirutan And someone in 2010 needed version control and chose... RCS?!

kirma

12:26 PM

Bisecting regressions may indeed be hard if not using a version control system...

I must wonder what was the basis for that RCS decision. Then again, doesn't sound like it would have been considered a particularly central part of the design.

There's a reflection of something particularly 1980ish about software development on that blog post, but I'm not entirely certain if I can actually pinpoint details which are relevant in this regard.

The smell of things in regard of features whose obvious regressions have gone to released versions would also point towards a direction of under-appreciation of automated testing, which is also a sign of similar mindset. In my opinion that is strange considering the kernel wouldn't be that hard to test automatically, and with good coverage.

Rolf Mertig

12:53 PM

The good thing is if SW plays beta tester the bugs get (and got) fixed with high priority ...

Murta

@WReach, RCS is some kind of very old GITHUB? (I'm new to GIT, started to use last year, and I'm in love with it:)

halirutan

@Murta RCS is somewhat the antecessor of CVS which itself is outdated and IMO should not be used any more.

GitHub is only a public service that lets you create and maintain git repositories online.

There are quite some version control system out there but I guess git and mercurial are two very popular one. And everyone who worked with something like CVS or SVN and switched to git will never look back.

WReach

1:22 PM

I can just imagine someone selecting RCS, say, on the basis of a good embedding story. But it does nothing to dispel the impression of informal and/or archaic practices. Neither do core-case bugs like this or this or this which one might think would be caught by the build tests.

Murta

@halirutan tks for the explanation.

Meta

1:45 PM

Q: User profile does not show the link to careers

I looked over the new user profile layout today and one thing that caught my attention was at the end of the Edit Profile & Settings tab. There you find a box that should link to your SO careers profile which it does not for me When I click on the link to the right, then I'm instantly take...

support

halirutan

@rm-rf @Mr.Wiz Can you as mods comment on what to do with posts like the IDEA plugin to keep them up to date? I don't want to describe every detail/feature in several places of the net. Additionally, I'm not sure how useful the current answer (which describes more the very beginning) is nowadays. Do you have a recommendation? Should I clean it up and make a short answer that gives some screenshots and points to the webpage and the repository?

SquareOne

@Mr.Wizard In v10.1.0 documentation, if i type "10.0.3" in the search field, it gives a list of 4 functions (GaborMatrix, ImageFeatureTrack, FindSequenceFunction, RGBColor) which have been "updated in 10.0.3" (as can be read at the bottom of each corresponding doc. page) ... It seems they really planed this upgrade but moved directly to 10.1.0 ... It might also explain why they are some problems with the doc like for MovingMap (they probably warned for the change but in the 10.0.3 doc ?!)

3 hours later…

kirma

4:57 PM

@SquareOne Heh!

2 hours later…