@RegDwigнt I printed out the Haydn and sight-read through it. Honestly, I don't see any particular difficulty with the music.

@MetaEd Of boredom?

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] No whitespace in answer: The tendency to try to find the answer to questions in one's own mind by sss on english.SE

@Robusto Gosh, I wish I could do that!

@Færd I doubt it. They could be Spaniards or Greeks or whatever.

Or Jews.

@Mitch We have normal cheese shops.

But these are specifically aimed at tourists.

We don't have that many Indian tourists.

Quite a few from East Asia.

But most are from Europe.

Not an insiginificant proportion are even from Holland.

Quite a few Americans and Brazilians, too.

Cheese is part of the tourist stereotype of Holland, so tourists want to buy cheese and stroopwafels.

Where are most of your tourists from?

@Cerberus It's a simple piece.

I suppose I would just look at how crowded/messy the score looks.

But I would have no feeling for the music just studying the score.

are questions about the origin of a saying off-topic?

specifically, "slower than gum"

That should be on topic!

google tells me nothing :(

The explanation of the meaning of an expression belongs on English Language Learners.

But its origin should be OK here.

But beware, a few old users are super grumpy here.

yeah, i noticed

So if you get annoying comments, it's part of the deal, don't take it personally.

ok, thanks for the heads-up pal

Good luck!

And the more you explain your question, the better a chance of success it will have.

i've heard of "slower than molasis" but not "gum"?

why would anyone think "gum" should flow?

Perhaps because it is somewhat viscous?

It's soft enough that might flow, yet too elastic to do so.

yeah, perhaps some old-fashioned use of gum?

That's also possible.

Although I suspect it's just simply "gum is a substance that sticks and won't flow/move".

hmm, that pretty much answers my question

@student Same here. So why are you asking about 'gum'? Did you hear someone use that?

yup

@Cerberus who are these super grumpy old users?

@student Oh. funny. never ever heard that before

@student But that's just what I expect the answer will be. I don't really know.

maybe chewing gum?

Yes, I was thinking of chewing gum.

@student Somewhat maladroit trope there.

@Mitch Surely you know.

@Robusto You should have seen the room a while ago.

It would be without conversation for 24 hours on end.

yeah, it is hot and cold

the room

@Cerberus hm...not sure. The Boston area is very worldly because of the schools and tech industry and hospitals, but specifically just tourists?

Sure, I didn't mean the usual expats and other immigrants.

They're not the intended victims.

@Mitch Lotsa tourists, but you don't see them because you don't go on the Freedom Trail much.

now that I think about it people who I've noticed as being tourists are families walking together in the middle of the business day, and speaking a foreign language, not because of race, so I'd expect mostly European tourists and less East Asian, Indian, African, or South American

If you can avoid it, that is.

@Cerberus I don't have a mirror handy

You also see them on the Duck Tours.

also I want to name names but I bite my tongue

As they drive past in those things.

@Robusto I've worked at bldgs right on or a block from the freedom trail

@Mitch I think you're usually less grumpy than the people I had in mind.

@Mitch I used to work on Commercial Street right next to the Charlestown Bridge, and you'd see them if you walked down to Rowes Wharf, etc.

have you guys heard about the comparison between the number of deaths in the US from drug overdoses last year being greater than the ENTIRE Vietnam War?

now that^ is an epidemic

@Robusto I used to walk by ... gah what's the name... near the state street blue line t station

I've been on the duck boats years ago but can't remember the other clientele

@student Hmm I'm not super surprised.

Wars waged by rich countries against poor usually don't involve that many rich casualties.

but they are getting younger?

And I've heard the drug epidemic is bad.

Who are getting younger?

the addicts

Right.

I wonder why those painkillers, or whatever they are, are made available to easily by doctors.

I think there was some lobbying by big pharma involved?

@Mitch Aquarium?

@Cerberus Because $$$

@Robusto that's the next stop from state in that direction. I went the other direction towards MGH

Govt. Center?

@Robusto Which?

so, keep the US dollar strong?

Drug companies paying doctors to prescribe their products.

@student I'm pretty sure the painkiller plague is hitting a lot of older richer people, who've gotten back surgery or other and are prescribed these high power painkillers and get hooked

@Robusto next stop, Bowdoin

@student ew. Sounds biblical

sorry

@Robusto Right, that's what I meant, big pharma lobbying with doctors.

Quite incredible.

Oh haha not that bad no need to self censor

No self censoring in chat goddammit

@Cerberus the numbers are staggering

@Mitch What does wealth have to do with it? It appears that deaths are otherwise.

@student Quite.

I'm not sure what you mean

:(

I feel like it's gotten a lot of attention only because older people have been affected

welcome to the information-age kids

I think it has got a lot of attention because numbers have grown rapidly?

^

The cynical remark is that the numbers of afflicted -white- people have grown rapidly

Yep, older people (but not the oldest)

@tchrist 55-64 is kind of the surprise spike there.

note: none of them is going DOWN

@student Well, neither is the population. Except by this kind of attrition.

true

> In 2010, 29% of fatal overdoses involved so-called "natural" and "semisynthetic" opioids (morphine, oxycodone), while only about 12% involved methadone, a "synthetic" opioid. Five years later, the percentage of fatal overdoses involving these drugs fell to 24% and 6%, respectively.

> In contrast, fatal overdoses involving heroin skyrocketed from 8% in 2010 to 25% in 2015 — essentially tripling.

@Robusto the graphs are per 100k (like percent) so it controls for change in overall population

per capa

Ah. Didn't notice.

np, pal :-)

But heroin?

yup, and fentinal

Needles and stuff, how do people start?

As opposed to painkillers, all pills, pretty innocuous

All those glorified pictures of corpses with needles hanging out of their arms.

they jump from coke to heroin

They start because they'll do anything to feel something different.

cops don't care about pot anymore

The ennui of life

When crossword puzzles and tea just won't give you that ZAZZ anymore

@Mitch Curiously, I always felt that programming was kind of like doing crossword puzzles all day.

Supposedly the short road to addiction is stealing leftover Rx opiates from someone else's medicine cabinet.

That's weird to me.

Who the hell goes over to some friend or relative's house and pilfers their medicine cabinet?

@Robusto yeah all the constraints trying to match up

Haha, I was just texting a friend who was asking what I thought of this woman he's interested in. I texted "I think she's looking for a handsome prince" which auto-corrected to "I think she's looking for a hands-on prince."

> “The No. 1 place people start misusing and ultimately abusing and becoming addicted – most people start with leftovers that are someone else’s in the medicine cabinet,” he said. “So it’s an attempt to clamp down on it.”

denverpost.com/2018/05/07/…

I just can't imagine how that happens.

@Robusto nice. Auto#MeToo

@Mitch Funnily enough, the only thing that made me feel a godlike state of bliss was finding other people's subtle bugs and fixing them. I mean, bugs that had been on the books for years.

@Robusto So, you're an addict? :)

I was. I kicked the habit permanently.

@tchrist it must be the bowl on the table next to the front door where everybody puts their left over pills

Well, not permanently. I still do my bike club's website. But that's different.

Right next to the stack of old money

A lot of people live with chronic pain.

Lotta old money trust fund babies were shooting drugs when I was in high school.

I never knew those people.

Since they didn't live in my neighborhood nor go to public high schools.

I went to a Catholic prep school, so I knew them.

@Robusto just compiling with no errors or warnings is satisfying for me

If it compiles, ship it!

What makes me miserable is spending days debugging somebody else's incredibly complicated framework's bugs.

@tchrist Why I hate frameworks.

So much second-system syndrome mixed in with an urge to hide what's really happening.

Frameworks drive me to abstraction!

Yes.

Or to tears.

Or rage.

Definitely cause infectious bipolar disorder.

Mine was a pun: distraction/abstraction

@Robusto I got the impression it was kids going over to rich kids hoses and going through the medicine cabinet for mothers little helpers

Which like @tchrist I don't understand

@Mitch A publisher's kid I went to school with was found dead of an OD in NYC less than a year after he graduated from high school.

I swear that all these frameworks are written by soi-disant "clever" twenty-somethings who are delighted with their own cleverness and industriousness, thinking it the answer to all problems.

@Robusto sad

The poet says that only in the middle of life's road can one see the simple path leading out of life's tanglewood.

It sounds better in the original Italian. :)

Once it becomes impossible or impractical to easily see the execution flow, you know that you have unwittingly passed beneath that storied sign of Hope's abandon. For when the logic is hidden from you, Tantalus and Sisyphus enjoy futures more promising than yours

@tchrist are you talking about things like react or ember or angular?

@Mitch Don't get me started on angular.

@Mitch Would it matter if I were?

@Robusto haha. It's how programming by stackoverflow started

> Test2 is a new testing framework produced by forking Test::Builder, completely refactoring it, adding many new features and capabilities . . . Test::Builder only provided a handful of methods for generating lines of TAP. Test2 took inventory of everything people were doing with Test::Builder that required hacking it up. Test2 made public API functions for nearly all the desired functionality people didn't previously have.

Brooks: "The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one."

@tchrist I'm just curious. It's like every language has an additional framework or API to actually do things and you just have to deal with it

@Mitch It was actually testing frameworks that were biting my butt in this instance.

How would you define a framework?

I am mortally tired of kids who cannot resist trying to show off how smart they think they are by afflicting us with such elaborate and intricate coding devices that not even the worst of Rube Goldberg's cartoon contraptions can hold a candle to them. Yes, smart people can write complicated things. So what? That isn't the point. The point is that really smart people write simple things.

@Cerberus A giant magical library.

@tchrist This.

I see.

Of the three Great Lies in computer programming, the greatest is "Hi, I'm your new framework and I'm here to help you."

@tchrist people are just programming reactively. Thinking really hard about small things and given no thought to the bigger ones

My brother-in-law, a dept. head at Georgia Tech in CS, with a global rep in parallel processing, says "Simple code is beautiful code."

Can we think of a framework example that Cerb might be able to identify with?

@Robusto furiously devises abstraction layer to solve that

Wait...isn't that what dependency injection is supposed to manage?

All problems (but one) in computer science can be solved by the addition of another layer of abstraction.

@Mitch God, I'd almost forgotten about dependency injection. Thanks for reminding me how great it is to be retired.

And that insoluble one is having too many layers of abstraction.

Isn't that what I just said?

twitches

I'm sure I said it before you. :)

Read: in front of you.

I thought it before you all

I have the fMRI receipts

Another term I despise nearly as much as dependency injection is inversion of control.

As Rob Pike so famously said about the seven different "types" of pointers in the C++ Boost library, this is all too rich for my blood.

I know what libraries are.

I can't follow programs where what happens where is hidden from you by magic side-effects.

I can imagine depending too much on a very complex library would cause issues.

@tchrist oMG they're inscrutable terms obscuring complication

On the other hand, isn't modern software always a huge pile of dwarves standing on each other's shoulders?

> Bread::Board is an inversion of control framework with a focus on dependency injection and lifecycle management. It's [sic] goal is to help you write more decoupled objects and components by removing the need for you to manually wire those objects/components together.

Give me an array and I'll...

Oh

Frameworks improve coding the way elaborate choreography would improve walking.

That would lead to me creating a framework for this thing I'll call 'pointers' and memory management

> It's

@Robusto people walking is just boring man

There's your frameworks.

Its sick goal indeed.

I read that perhaps the greatest advance in recent programming languages, the one that saves the most time, is the automation of memory mamagement.

Yes.

@Cerberus That's kind of old hat, though.

I'm sure.

It's better to have automatic mammaries than those old-fashioned kind.

Garbage collection

They all do it now except for C/C++

Right.

Even AHK does it

C/C++ isn't a thing.

C doesn't have it. C++ doesn't have it by default but there are frameworks for this.

Would you say garbage collection is the same thing as memory management?

Yes.

OK.

Or close enough.

BTW, my son had to program in R for his statistical biology. He says it's the worst thing he's ever seen. It's like a programming language designed by non-programmers.

That's why these are all called "managed" languages.

Do you sometimes get a nagging feeling that you may be reinventing the wheel, when you're programming something?

@Robusto Ditto PHP. And javascript.

I have heard Mr Shiny complain about PHP and download streams or something.

@tchrist I'll give you PHP, but I like JavaScript. Functions are first-class objects, man. And prototypal inheritance is pretty awesome when you grok it.

@Cerberus like he said, yes, but maybe depends on they layer. The is does memory management by swapping in and out virtual memory pages, which is different from programming language dynamic creation of memory in a program

And I've heard people in this room complain about Javascript, although I have forgotten what the most salient deficiency of the language was.

@Cerberus Well, PHP just sucks. It's what I have to use on the club website to get to the database.

The Three Worst Languages to Avoid Like the Plague

@Mitch I'm afraid that is a little bit over my head. But no matter.

@Cerberus all the time. New layer has to repeat some of the functionality of the old layer

@Robusto I have used some PHP, and I did not like it at all. Then again, who likes using an unknown language when one needs to fix something?

@Mitch Hmm why a new layer?

Why not just a new programme?

@tchrist One man's opinion. Looks like he is complaining about earlier versions of JS that don't have strict mode. You get ride of the auto-semicolon-insertion stuff if you stay up to date.

> In my father's onion there are many layers. If it were not so I would have told you so.