the macros appear to be implemented by a preprocessor

thus they don't gain you any computational power unless the preprocessor is more powerful than the language itself, and the preprocessor doesn't look TC to me

specifically, I'm claiming the language is not Turing-complete because it is not possible to write an infinite loop (this automatically proves a language to be sub-TC)

there go my dreams of making a truly useless esolang

I thought being low in power generally made an esolang more useless, rather than less :-)

the most useless esolangs are things like Quiler

what the actual hell

@quartata ^ thoughts?

Nitpick: Answer upvotes are worth +10.

ah

he wouldn't know ;)

hush

lol

Hmm. Currently the Showcase mandates (well, recommends) n snippets for n votes, of lengths from 0 to n-1. What if we changed that to "n snippets for n votes, each longer than the previous one"?

many years ago, I wrote a program to map the infinite x-y plane onto the surface of a sphere

as a test case of this map, I decided to graph the plot of tan(x)

because even infinity is a point on this map

which meant that the graph would be a single, unbroken curve

Let me see if I can get the picture.

I'm trying to make a Sierpinski pentagon but accidentally got this instead. It looks cool, though.

@GabrielBenamy This looks inappropriate...

The sphere it's mapped on is invisible

@mbomb007 I thought so too. :P

Needless to say, I didn't exactly rush to publish my results anywhere

lol

Chat Challenge: how many regular pentagons in the above image?

answer: way too many

@mbomb007 way too much

@Dennis @MartinEnder For the record I would forfeit all my future rep from the Showcase if I could. It's not about "another small place to gain rep" for me.

Not that I'm saying you're accusing my, just saying :)

@mbomb007 I'm counting 29, but I'm probably overlooking some

@MartinEnder There's more for sure. Some overlap to form bigger, smaller, or inverted ones.

Like the tiny ones inside the "stars"

I counted close to 50, but it's hard to keep track

@El'endiaStarman Would you not find it a tad unfair to the opinions of those 400 upvoters that the challenge was fundamentally changed without their input or opportunity to change votes? (Yes, they technically have the opportunity, but you know realistically few will.)

Making it into a different challenge now seems disingenuous. So why not simply make a different challenge altogether?

I've got 54 pentagons.

@El'endiaStarman regular ones?

Just an FYI, I don't know the real answer, but I counted at least 45.

@Calvin'sHobbies Because a lot of the arguments don't revolve around the challenge but around the content it generated and will continue to generate. If that is the main argument for keeping it around then it might be worth thinking about whether a few changes can serve this content even better.

@MartinEnder Yep.

The actual drawing is made of 25 pentagons.

> actually drawing

I may speak English, but my fingers don't.

Wait, I revise my count to 59.

@El'endiaStarman Did you find the upside-down ones?

ah yeah, I just found another 20

@MartinEnder But our job should not be to rewrite old challenge to keep them popular. It should be to write new challenges that can replace them.

There are four centered pentagons, four for each corner, one for each side, and two different pairs for each side. 4+(4+1)*5+(2*2)*5 = 59.

@El'endiaStarman Did you count the ones inside each 5-pointed star?

@mbomb007 Yeah, that's one of the ones associated with the corners.

@PhiNotPi words ending in "net"

@Calvin'sHobbies The main argument for keeping the showcase open was about the content in its answers, not about the challenge itself. You can't really have it both ways. If the showcase is to be kept open because of the content it generates, then our final solution should first and foremost enable people to improve that content. If the specific content isn't that important and it's just about the challenge, then it's plainly way too broad and not a good fit for the site.

@MartinEnder Users could share and improve their content in a new showcase challenge, like "Showcase your language's golfing abilities" or something. There's no need to try to fit that content into a bastardized version of an old challenge.

I disagree that showcases are viewed as too broad. I'd bet that the authors and most of the upvoters of the top 4 answers at meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/10457/26997 are aware of the broadness issue, but voted for keeping the Showcase despite that.

the thing that irks me about the Mathematica answer is that most of it is "look at how good the library is" rather than being any language features that would be useful for golfing (unless the library happens to have an answer to the question already; it often does)

I'd like to note that I'm not a fan of the "put your answer in a snippet" solution. I really don't like snippets that much, and I have no idea what is interesting without clicking, then waiting for it to load

If the scope would easily allow for such a new showcase challenge, all of the top voted answer's points are moot.

and yet it's the most highly voted answer theree

to me that's a sign that something's wrong with the challenge as written

That happens on almost all challenges.

well, yes, but it doesn't matter much unless it's a popularity-contest

@NathanMerrill Oh, I forgot to address that. Same here, doing that is silly and only more convoluted.

@mbomb007 ><>.NET ?

that said, I'm rather biased against Mathematica for historical reasons that aren't worth going into

@MartinEnder I still don't get how you guys got "we should close and lock the Showcase" out of those top answers

@Calvin'sHobbies so you'd support closing the current showcase, and opening a new "Showcase your language" without any of the old answers or restrictions?

'night

brainfuck derivatives are fairly looked down on Esolang because there are a large number of low-effort ones

this might or might not be interesting, I can't tell from your spec

@Calvin'sHobbies I'm not sure what that has to do with anything at this point. The argument for keeping it open was "we don't have anywhere else to put this content". Apart from quartata's post, none of them said "this is a perfectly scoped and on-topic challenge, we should have more of them". So Dennis suggested making an exception and leaving it open while make some changes to support the content. And now you want to leave it open without changes because someone could just make a new challenge?

@NathanMerrill No. I say restore my Showcase to how it was but let Showcase challenges be on topic and they are welcome to get lots of votes (and it seems unfair that I should get to make the only one if we're keeping it around)

what's a "Showcase challenge" (in your mind)?

@Calvin'sHobbies if that is your opinion then the first 3 words of your answer to Dennis's meta post are misleading

it's not making an exception if you simply want to leave it as is and what similar challenges to be on topic

from experience elsewhere, I think that if we want showcase-like challenges to be ontopic and work well, they should typically be broadly defined, with a subjective (not objective) theme, judged either by popularity-contest or by a jury, and with a time limit of a couple of months; however, most of those points are more or less the exact opposite of the way this site normally works, which is part of the reason I think that this site is a really awkward place to have a showcase

I guess site rules have a tendency to fall into local minima; currently we have them in a place that works well through, presumably, progressively improving them via small changes

there are other places that work well (other local minima), maybe either slightly better or slightly worse; but if you're going to change the rules to make showcases work, you probably have to change most of them

@MartinEnder True

Gah. Ruby's support for unicode is awful

What version?

2.3.1

hmm, I found a bug in my solution to the water-in-a-desert problem

and fixing it, the program went down from 300 bytes to 255

from one round number to another :-)

You generally need to specify the flag --encoding=utf-8 to make it work correctly

(most of the improvement was just me remembering how to golf in Perl, my skills were a little rusty when I wrote the first version of the program, also I was trying to get it working quickly to ensure the challenge had a solution early, rather than really focusing on the optimization; you can always improve an answer later but questioners can get discouraged if they don't see any answers)

@MartinEnder But there was no call for changing the question from those answers, right? That was not suggested until today with Dennis' meta post. If it had been left alone as the 4 highest answers suggested the terrain of this debate would be very different.

@TuxCopter No, I'm reading utf-8 files, not working with unicode in the code

Sorry, not reading utf-8 files, attempting to read utf-8 files

I like Perl's current unicodiness solution, even if some of the earlier ones were dubious

File.read path, mode: "r:UTF-8"

OK, but how do I get the code-point of the characters in the file?

Google brought me here but it doesn't work

You want to open a binary file?

Oh duh, that's rails

No, it's a regular utf8 encoded text file with some unicode characters in it. I want to get the codepoints of each character in the file

c.ord

Only works for ASCII

You need the encoding flag

On the file reading? I already have that

For the interpreter

facepalm I'm an idiot.

Please disregard that last conversation, I know what I was doing wrong.

?

It's such a dumb mistake, I won't bother explaining it

My code was fine, I was testing it wrong

-.-

Anyway, g'night

@MartinEnder Suggesting changes while already acting in direct denial of community wishes by closing and locking is presumptuous. Why not at least reopen until meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/10656/26997 has more time to stew? There was never an indication that the majority of people wanted it closed.

I'm sick of democracy not working in 2016

@TuxCopter o/ night!

pls halp apparently JS does not allow multiple constructors

JS OO is weird

vrey wierd

s/OO //

^

brb learning typescript

Huh. I actually have a shot at a populist badge

If Luis's answer is accepted

what's that one for?

ceeeeeee

oh, it's for having an answer that's much higher voted than the accepted answer, right?

Oh the badge you mean? Yeah

I earned it once before, but it didn't count because it was my own challenge... :(

@El'endiaStarman This is actually 49. And I think that's actually my final tally.

No wait, found five more! :P

There's also another set of five that are almost regular.

@DrMcMoylex You have so many upvotes only because the code starts like your former name :-P

Green are for those that appear five times (once per corner or edge), blue and purple trace the two pairs that appear twice per side, and the red is for those that are centered. (@mbomb007)

@LuisMendo Hahaha, that's a great point

@NathanMerrill Who said "Close the Showcase, and open a new Showcase"

I said open the Showcase and allow new ones, like meta.codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/10467/26997 suggests

@Calvin'sHobbies As I talked to quartata yesterday, it basically boils down to "We allow pop-cons where good answers naturally get upvotes". However, if we really want to change it that way, then I feel we need another meta post to really solidify that option

(where good means "pursues the goal")

Ok, this seriously makes no sense

How does net 19 votes saying "not too broad" vs net 5 votes saying "too broad" = community agrees it is too broad