When people comment dumb things on the live streams, e.g. "I really wish Mathematica could have keyword arguments like python does", I wonder if it is their fault for not reading the documentation before complaining or if it's WRI's fault for not making the design of the language more obvious in their tutorials and documentation...

@b3m2a1 I've been using the language for nearly two years and I still don't know how to add options to my functions

@CarlLange ;_; then I blame WRI

Too many scattershot docs

Too little focus on consistency and dev work

To be fair I just haven't needed to 😅

@CarlLange 😅I still blame WRI

But that's just because of long-standing issues

Maybe if I used it at work it would have come up more, but just as a hobbyist not creating anything of value or code for anybody else to consume, it's never been a thing I needed to do

@CarlLange That mostly describes me too, but at some point I get frustrated with specifying args by position and want to do them by name

@b3m2a1 I guess I don't write big functions that often 😅

@CarlLange 😅

😅😅😅😅😅😅

I think once you get used to the pattern it's natural, too

I wrote a thing to generate a color scheme picker interface thing earlier today and ended up specifying a lot of things as Options because I was gonna forget my argument ordering, I knew, even though there were only four args

I guess I very rarely set out to write a comprehensive batch of code that will do a job. Normally I set out to learn something about something, or I have a goal in mind (can I find where this image was taken?). None of it's ever meant to reusable

(To be clear, in WL only. To any prospective employers reading, I am a good boy in other languages)

WL is all about non-reuse ;_;

That is its core use case

Speaking of other languages, it's Monday, time to do some work 😢

;____; I have a glorious 9 hours until I need to do that

Hi guys I'm completely stuck

I'm getting a "non-atomic expression" error (select::normal)

I'm not asking for a solution of the specific problem, but what the hell do I do when I'm getting this kind of error?

There is nothing on the web that gives a systemic overview of what the next step is. I've been printing various variables but everything is giving the expected result and the required input for my function

Initial research appears to suggest it's an evaluation control thing

But I am not getting any further

@1010011010 First step for me is normally to hope that there is a usable stack-trace attached to the message (click on the ... button). That, together with the documentation page (again, if there is one) usually gives you a pretty good idea of what and where the problem is. In your case, try to identify the Select command issuing the message and look at the second argument.

@LukasLang Or more likely the first argument if it's complaining about something being non-atomic.

@b3m2a1 Yes, that's what I meant to say, thanks! - I somehow seem to always think about the operator forms (as in Select[crit][expr]), which severely messes up my ability to count arguments...

Something kind of fun, if you do a mild edit to FrontEnd`Private`SwitchContextB you can make the FE's context-switching mechanism give you and $ContextPath you desire.

To prototype this I made things like: "ab`\[Bullet]ba`\[Bullet]ba`b`"; turn into {"ab`", "ba`", "ba`b`"}

Obviously anything could work in the place of \[Bullet]

And it did exactly what I'd wanted:

CurrentValue[EvaluationNotebook[], CellContext] =
  "ab`\[Bullet]ba`\[Bullet]ba`b`";

$ContextPath

{"ab`", "ba`", "ba`b`", "System`"}

This was all I had to add to the function to make it work, by the way:

FrontEnd`Private`newCont =
      Map[
        StringTrim[#, "`"]<>"`"&,
        StringSplit[FrontEnd`Private`newCont, "\[Bullet]"]
        ];

So you could even be more explicit and write the delimiter like "\[Bullet]SplitContext\[Bullet]"

Does anyone know a keyboard shortcut for Iconize?

That is, I highlight my slew of options, press my shortcut keys, and it iconizes them?

Checked the Shortcut listing and didn't see it ... may be just missing something obvious.

Iconizing all the options in your notebook is a dangerous form of procrastination.