The Whiteboard

gnat

8:38 AM

job-market: last straw. Any 10Ker to cast a 5th vote to end the whole tag?

MetaFight

9:20 AM

programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/322922/…

Why is it I feel bad every time I talk someone into deleting their off-topic question?

Duga

12:13 PM

The first question is if you want to do this using Excel functions or if you wish to accomplish this using Excel VBA. If you are leaning towards the latter you might want to change the tags on your post and add [Excel-VBA], so you are getting the appropriate attention. Furthermore, you are right and this website is not a free code writing service. Yet, we are eager to help fellow programmers (and aspirants) with their code. So, just to get you started and give you ideas: homeandlearn.org/open_a_text_file_in_vba.html — Ralph 39 secs ago

Telastyn

1:27 PM

are we going to burn this goalpost moving trash?

12

Q: Where is the line between unit testing application logic and distrusting language constructs?

Consider a function like this: function savePeople(dataStore, people) { people.forEach(person => dataStore.savePerson(person)); } It might be used like this: myDataStore = new Store('some connection string', 'password'); myPeople = ['Joe', 'Maggie', 'John']; savePeople(myDataStore, myPeop...

gnat

1:50 PM

@Telastyn no need, I simply edited out new questions added in last revision and referred canonical "chameleon" guidance in edit summary. If asker won't get the message and will persist in editing new questions in, we can flag to moderator to handle this (it's a routine thing, mods know how to take care of chameleons)

371

Q: Exit strategies for "chameleon questions"

I'm not sure if there's already an existing term for this, so I'm inventing my own. (tl;dr: I call them "chameleon questions" because they change every time you submit or edit an answer. If you're already intimately familiar with the phenomenon, please skip past the first set of bullet points t...

discussion questions

Telastyn

good enough

Aaron Hall

2:18 PM

I wonder what percentage of StackOverFlowers use their real name, and what percentage are truly anonymous.

ratchet freak

2:29 PM

@AaronHall depends on how they were raised around the internet

I was raised with the behavior of "never reveal your identity to others online"

so I use a nickname

Thomas Owens

Then how do you build mad reputation?

Besides being awesome at something.

ratchet freak

I don't really care about my offline rep

Thomas Owens

I don't care that much. But it's nice to be able to say "that's me" and not make it hard to prove.

ratchet freak

though should I ever go to a event related to something I did online I would probably introduce myself with my online handle

it's close enough to a real name

Thomas Owens

You would probably be OK with that. What if your online handle was xxxawesomerockstarefferxxx?

Or something else as obnoxious?

ratchet freak

2:35 PM

that's not something I would have chosen though

Thomas Owens

That's true. I do have anonymous accounts in different places, though.

And on some sites (like Reddit), multiple accounts.

ratchet freak

where multi accounts is allowed?

Thomas Owens

2:47 PM

Yeah. It depends on the purpose that I'm using the site or service.

Aaron Hall

Some use a pseudonym but link to their real-life LinkedIn account.

Aaron Hall

3:35 PM

@ratchetfreak When my parents said that, I asked, "why?" and they didn't have a decent answer. Our names, number, and address were in the phone-book. My name was published in community stuff all over. My dad was/is a real-estate agent with his name and face on placards all over town. (Mom is now too.)

Robert Harvey

4:08 PM

28

Q: Can Wolverine get cavities?

Just got out of a dental appointment and I was wondering this about Wolverine: Can he get cavities? Does his teeth regenerate? If they're part of his skeletal system, why aren't they covered in Adamantium?

marvel-comics wolverine

Aaron Hall

4:40 PM

Well, teeth aren't bone, for one thing.

For another, adamantium is a fictional mineral and Wolverine is a comic book character.

So that means it depends on which artist is drawing him.

Robert Harvey

5:59 PM

@AaronHall I posted it here as further evidence that the SFF folks have too much time on their hands. Also, title is awesome.

Because, when I go to the dentist, the first thing I think about afterwards is Wolverine.

Aaron Hall

Interesting.

Hey, to change the subject, Tableau is finally working on our Linux batch jobs.

I mean their SDK which creates files of their proprietary format and then pushes them to their server.

So now I've got to do performance testing.

I'm probably going to wind up converting the threaded code I wrote to single-threaded.

Any suggestions for the performance testing?

Blind

Hello

@AaronHall are you there? can you help me?

Aaron Hall

That depends on what you need help with.

Please state the nature of the medical emergency.

Blind

Just curiosity

Aaron Hall

ok, my best advice is to remember that curiousity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

Blind

6:11 PM

ok lol

anyway, where I can found js engine original or browser source?

With the exception of Math.*, those are all part of the window and document objects, which the browser exposes to the JS engine as an API. If you want to look at documentation or source code for these, you'll want to look at the browser's source code/documentation. — neilsimp1 12 mins ago

i'd ask here but they had close it.

You may be able to get help in The Whiteboard, our chat room."

I readed it

Aaron Hall

I don't know off the top of my head, but if you google for Node's js engine you'll find the name, and then if you google for the name and "source code" you'll probably luck out.

Give a man a google and you feed him for a day, teach a man to google and he can waste the rest of his life on the Internet on his own.

Blind

where you founded this cite? lol

anyway, I think that is better use chat rather google

Aaron Hall

that's just me trying to be witty. It may or may not be working. The trick is in not caring.

Blind

ok

Anyway, Do you think that javascript && python > c && c++? (Idk how to say in english lol)

Aaron Hall

javascript has an firm spot in web dev, but it's not a great systems programming language (in spite of whatever Node may have done). Python is a killer systems programming languauge, but it's not as fast as C. Fortunately you can rewrite your Python's bottlenecks in C (or C++, or really any language). Thus all of them are important.

My next tip is that if you're learning Python, bookmark my list of answers on StackOverflow and read through them as you have the time: stackoverflow.com/users/541136/aaron-hall?tab=answers

Jörg W Mittag

6:32 PM

7

Q: About compilers, coding, large code bases, and some other stuff too

This is not purely a programming question. I work in a large company. We have lots of code written in C++ language: Multiple simultaneous projects in progress and implementations that have to be supported. Multiple code paths due to first reason. Some are ~10 years old. Multiple target platfo...

programming-languages programming-practices project

Just stumbled across this. The title is a real gem of razor-sharp focus.

Aaron Hall

6:46 PM

lol

Robert Harvey

@LordScree: Joel's generalization would be a better one if he had said "Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who's never surfed trying to run a surfing company." If you've never surfed, you have no idea what your surfing customers want, but running a business requires a totally different skill set. — Robert Harvey 32 secs ago

@AaronHall It's hard to imagine Python as a "systems language," if by that you mean writing stuff for operating systems. It's more of an application language.

gnat

7:03 PM

@JörgWMittag this funny title could probably be improved if we add a little banner under it: "This question already has an answer here: How can I convince management to deal with technical debt?"

Robert Harvey

7:42 PM

Discussion between Robert Harvey and kai

Imported from a comment discussion on programmers.stackexchang...

Aaron Hall

Here's what I'm thinking of when I think of Python as a systems language: "So there was a need for a language that would “bridge the gap between C and the shell.” For a long time, this was Python’s main catchphrase." python-history.blogspot.com/2009/01/…

Robert Harvey

C# would fit that description. So would Delphi, Mason Wheeler's favorite programming platform.

And Java, for that matter, though I suspect that Java programmers have overtaken the plumbing.

C# has the unique distinction of having some low-level C constructs built-in (in the form of unsafe code).

Duga

Would this question be more appropriate for Programmers StackExhcange ? Otherwise, a good question :) — Roman 38 secs ago

MetaFight

8:03 PM

@RobertHarvey C# makes me feel all warm inside.

Unfortunately, my experience with other languages is nowhere near as extensive... so I don't know if I'm in love with C#, or if I just kinda like programming.

#firstLanguageProblems

(though C++ was really my first language)

Jörg W Mittag

8:15 PM

@RobertHarvey There was an Operating System written in Python. The entire core was written in Python, including device drivers and large parts of the kernel. There were some small bits and pieces of C and assembly, mostly to implement functions to give Python direct hardware access. Some code was ported from other OSs (e.g. network drivers), and thus naturally in C (though it didn't have to be).

MetaFight

@JörgWMittag hacked and proud of it for over 3 years.

from that link "Posted by in Uncategorized on March 31st, 2013

This is a project whose homepage has been hacked with the SourceForge backdoor by a 1337 hacker! It is extremely lucky because this message is the only change I did ;) After I found this backdoor, I, being nice, added this message to some SourceForge-hosted sites to warn them, instead of maliciously dropping their tables. Whom does this exploit affect?"

Jörg W Mittag

8:32 PM

I'm pretty sure the two of us have now visited that page more often than the author has in the last 5 years :-D

MetaFight

:)

Robert Harvey

8:55 PM

@JörgWMittag How did they manage to get adequate performance? Did they use Cython?

Duga

9:35 PM

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it's about project management. Try Project Management or Programmers instead. — Juhana 9 secs ago

Jörg W Mittag

10:05 PM

@RobertHarvey Define "adequate performance" ;-) I'm not sure, really. I'm pretty sure that they were not using Cython, because they explicitly say they are using the Python language, and the Cython language is not the Python language. Plus, the first release of Cython was in 2007, and Ununumium is older than that. But really, it's research OS, it didn't have performance. In fact, if you manage to actually retrieve some relevant information from the abandoned website, you'll find that the project …

… the author worked on before was written purely in assembly with the goal of getting a high-performance OS kernel, and he explicitly states that by writing the new system in Python, he made the deliberate choice of giving up on performance. But note that there's no theoretical reason that Python couldn't be just as fast as C. Language performance is a question of brainpower and money, not static typing, garbage collection or whatever else. There was a time when Smalltalk was faster than C++, …

… then the Smalltalk community shrank and the C++ community grew and the companies which had been paying for super-fast Smalltalk started paying for super-fast C++, and the situation reversed.

Having an OS written in a pointer-safe, memory-safe, type-safe very high-level language also eliminates a lot of crutches that are only required to paper over C's lack of safety, and actually have a significant negative impact on performance: virtual memory, for instance. You could basically just rip out the entire MMU from the chip. You don't need it. Everything the MMU protects against is already guaranteed by the language semantics anyway.

You can have everything running in ring0 in a single address space with no hardware memory protection at all. And you don't need virtual memory to give each app the illusion of being alone in memory, because they can't play around with memory anyway, they always have to go through the garbage-collector or rather the object space manager.

And then, if you have a clever JIT, it can even view the whole running system at once (assuming apps are also written in Python), and do stuff like whole-program optimization on the entire conglomerate kernel+drivers+libraries+programs, it can inline kernel code into user code or vice-versa, and so on.

There are ways of recovering performance, once you get the system to work.

Robert Harvey

Apps wouldn't have to be written in python, if the python compiler emitted IL for the JIT. You could have other compilers for other languages that emitted the same IL.

Python seems like a terrible language to execute directly on a JIT. Though folks have tried that with Java, presumably with some success.

Actually, I think they wrote their own Java byte code interpreter.

Jörg W Mittag

10:21 PM

Yes, of course, some language-neutral intermediate code à la JVML / CIL / LLVM IR. Microsoft's Singularity OS used a derivative of CIL, extended with proof-manifests. That would work.

Robert Harvey

Did anything ever come out of the Singularity project?

Jörg W Mittag

Python is a language designed to be easily read by humans, not compilers.

Hard to say, isn't it, just like any research project? Nothing tangible, obviously, but who's to say whether or not some of the automated proof techniques weren't used to, say, prove the correctness of the rendering engine in Edge? Or parts of the Windows kernel? There was also Midori, another OS based on some of the concepts of Singularity, which is rumored to have had some impact on how Windows Store Apps are isolated from each other.

There's also the possibility that some of the language features for safe, managed systems programming may end up in a future version of C♯, reducing the need for unsafe and P/Invoke.

Discussion between Robert Harvey and kai

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