English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

17:00

@tchrist Haha yay!

tchrist

Listen to these:

amazon.com/Visions-Miracles-Alfonso-el-Sabio/dp/B000005IYZ

They’re in Galician.

►

That’s from a different album.

Damn it.

You have to wait about a minute to hear the Galician.

These were written by Alfonso el Sabio.

The first western musical notation we have.

Galician used to be the prestige language!!

It was used by the troubadours, along with Catalan and Provençal, but it was very important.

njboot

@Cerberus hello!

tchrist

@Cerb Try to find the Ensemble Alcatraz recording of Quen A Virgen Ben Servirà.

Alraxite

What's the difference between System Builder OEM and OEM?

I've looked at some explanations, but I don't think I understand them.

njboot

@Cerberus do you have any suggestions? I'm pretty good with BASH and the shell, but I'm looking to learn a programming language. Which would you start with? (It'd be primarily if an OSX based environment)

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

17:13

njboot

*in

Cerberus

@tchrist Can't understand a word of it, but I do seem to hear some ʃ's.

tchrist

@Cerberus You could read it here.

Cerberus

@njboot I am among the exceptions! The only language I can program anything in is Autohotkey...

@tchrist I'm sure.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 Awww!

tchrist

That’s Quen A Virgen Ben Servirà..

njboot

17:15

@Cerberus oh, haha.

anyone else have suggestions?

cornbread ninja 麵包忍者

@Cerberus that was for you, doggie.

Cerberus

The more cats, the better.

tchrist

Ensemble Alcatraz. The alcatraces (pelicans) are associated with the ancient Way of Saint James, the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. When the pilgrims, who wore scallops (vieiras, a Galician word now used by Castilian and Portuguese alike) as their sigil to show their ultimate destination.

When they saw the pelicans, they knew they were closing in on the end of their pilgrimage.

Cerberus

Scallops are also known as St James' shells.

At least in some languages.

Matt Эллен

@njboot learn you a Haskell

tchrist

17:22

I think you can listen to the tune here, but I have no stupid F*c*Book or Twatter signon to authenticate with.

njboot

@MattЭллен thanks, i'll look into that. interested in more popular/widely used languages that are broadly applicable though. Java? C#/C+? Which would you recommend?

tchrist

@njboot For a first language, Java and C++ are equally disastrous.

Alraxite

@tchrist Really...?

tchrist

@Alraxite Of course.

njboot

@tchrist so what's the starting point then?

tchrist

17:25

I don’t know what the goal is.

Matt Эллен

@njboot think of a project. find a language suited to that project. learn that language.

tchrist

My language acquisition order ran BASIC, Fortran, Pascal, PDP-11 Assembler, C, awk, Modula, ADA, Lisp, Prolog, Scheme, Perl, Python, Java, and I don’t know what else.

Alraxite

@tchrist Well, why?

tchrist

@Alraxite Because they’re crappy languages.

And they hide too much.

njboot

@tchrist @MattЭллен I have a few ideas for iOS apps, as well as simple OS X applications. I want to know the best approach to take

tchrist

17:26

Stop that, or I’ll flag you.

Alraxite

C++ is a good starting language, IMO.

Cerberus

@tchrist I don't think you can listen to it there, not even with Facebook?

njboot

@tchrist @MattЭллен proficient using BASH shell, as well as sed/awk. But no experience with programming languages.

tchrist

Oh.

Cerberus

(Besides, why not create a fake Facebook account like everybody else?)

tchrist

17:28

@Cerberus Because I am principled.

Cerberus

What is you principle?

Matt Эллен

@tchrist I second that emotion

tchrist

Maybe here?

Matt Эллен

@njboot Plan out your project. break it into manageable chunks. set goals for yourself. You'll learn whatever language ios requires as you go

Cerberus

@tchrist You can pollute their data pool this way, thereby improving the privacy of everyone.

tchrist

17:29

Honestly, I’ve forgotten more languages than most people ever learn.

2

Johan Larsson

but howmany do you speak?

tchrist

That is a different question altogether.

njboot

@tchrist computer or otherwise?

Johan Larsson

why so secret?

tchrist

@njboot Yes.

@JohanLarsson I have no secret. Your question is not very good.

Cerberus

17:30

@JohanLarsson You would need to define "speak a language".

Johan Larsson

meh

Alraxite

Cerberus speaks about ten. I remember.

Johan Larsson

meh

Cerberus

Depends on your definition...

tchrist

I cannot answer a question I cannot understand.

Cerberus

17:31

I can have a conversation without feeling seriously impeded by the language in Dutch and English.

tchrist

@Alraxite Few but Java would be worse.

Alraxite

@tchrist Is that 'few' like 'phew'?

tchrist

@Alraxite You do not use a language that is insanely complicated to start someone on the road to programming. You use it to drive them away.

Matt Эллен

quite

njboot

@tchrist @Cerberus @JohanLarsson so, of all the many different spoken languages you seem to know, which would you say was the most difficult to pick up?

Alraxite

17:35

@tchrist Maybe there are easier languages. But C++ is a language I don't consider not easy to start off with.

But that's just my opinion.

Matt Эллен

@Alraxite your litotes is revealing

tchrist

@Alraxite I’ve taught programming languages for more than thirty years. I know whereof I speak.

Cerberus

@njboot I don't know, probably whichever one has the greatest linguistic distance from your own language!

tchrist

@Cerberus Yes, again that should be the obvious answer, but people keep asking the question. So strange.

Cerberus

Well, we know certain things about linguistics that not everybody knows.

For which nobody can be blamed.

Matt Эллен

17:38

@njboot definitely English. I've been learning for 33 years or so and still haven't learnt everything

tchrist

iovibovi

@MattЭллен You misspelled lie totes, dude.

Matt Эллен

the totes don't lie

or should that be I totes don't lie?

njboot

@tchrist you've given many good reasons for all the languages i shouldn't start with. how about one that i should? one has to begin somewhere...

tchrist

One you don’t have to compile.

And preferably a procedural one.

Without a lot of tricks.

And which you can use later.

Matt Эллен

so python then :p

tchrist

17:42

Also avoid anything object-oriented or functional.

Cerberus

How about Autohotkey?

Matt Эллен

@tchrist lol.

tchrist

Logic-based languages may not be the best either.

Cerberus

Aside from one or two quirks, it's really easy to get into if you have no programming experience at all.

tchrist

By functional, I mean like Scheme.

Not as antonymic to dysfunctional.

Cerberus

17:42

Is Autohotkey functional? Object oriented? Procedural?

Matt Эллен

procedural, from what I've seen

tchrist

Ni p*** idea.

Matt Эллен

but I could be wrong

Cerberus

OK.

How could I test it for procedure?

Matt Эллен

do you just write one thing after another, without wrapping things in structures?

Cerberus

17:44

What are structures?

(So probably not haha.)

tchrist

Structures are a way of organizing a group of related variables.

By name.

Each variable can have its own name and type within that structure.

Cerberus

You don't need to organise variables in Autohotkey. But you can, and the ones in arrays naturally are. Right?

tchrist

You can them make lists of structures, etc.

Arrays are typically monotypic.

But yes, they are certainly a data structure in sensu stricto

Cerberus

I have to say I have never used the built-in array functionality of Autohotkey.

I have only sort of created my own when needed.

I think.

tchrist

The thing is, you do not address their contents by name but by integer index.

Johan Larsson

17:47

@Cerberus post some code

tchrist

One can have an array of structures, of course.

Cerberus

> Click

@JohanLarsson Is that enough?

tchrist

And a structure may itself have members that are themselves arrays.

Cerberus

What kind of code would I need to be looking for?

Johan Larsson

dunno, something you are proud of?

tchrist

17:49

struct complex_number {
    float real_part;
    float imag_part;
} vector[10];

Cerberus

@tchrist I have used variables that I automatically created based on integers, such as when I made my script that types IPA characters. The character ʃ will probably be something like S_2 or something, I'd have to look at the code. The script basically takes "s, ʃ" and converts those into two related variables.

@JohanLarsson Haha I have no such code.

tchrist

Now you can have vector[3].real_part, for example.

Cerberus

Especially not in the presence of people who can actually program, I'm just a dabbler.

tchrist

So every complex_number structure has two named pieces.

Cerberus

Yeah I'm not sure I understand that.

tchrist

17:50

And vector is an array of ten of this.

Johan Larsson

@Cerberus I suspect we are all dabblers compared to Tom

tchrist

You know that a complex number like 3+4i has two pieces.

Try something else: coordinates.

This could be (x,y,z) coordinates or (latitude,longitude) coordinates.

In any event, each coordinate has named subcomponents.

Cerberus

> Characters("a", "æ", "ɑ", "ʌ", "ɐ", "ɒ")
; Key1 := "a,b,c,d,e"
Characters("b")
Characters("c", "ç")
Characters("d", "ð", "ɖ")
Characters("e", "ə", "ɛ", "ɜ", "ɘ")
Characters("f")
Characters("g")
Characters("h", "ʰ", "ɣ")
Characters("i", "ɪ", "ɨ")
Characters("j", "ʲ")
Characters("k")
Characters("l", "ɬ", "ɮ")
Characters("m", "ɱ")
Characters("n", "ŋ")
Characters("o", "ɔ", "ʊ", "œ", "ɶ")
Characters("p")
Characters("q")
Characters("r", "ɹ", "ʀ", "ɾ")
Characters("s", "ʃ")
Characters("t", "θ")
Characters("u", "ʉ")

tchrist

Please indent.

Can’t read.

Cerberus

I suspect this is all very simple and not procedural or functional.

@tchrist Chat removed the indentation...

tchrist

17:52

It’s an event-driven procedural language.

Cerberus

Let me take a screenshot.

tchrist

@Cerberus Use fixed-font.

Cerberus

I created a function to generate the variables from the input above (the strings of different characters for each key.)

tchrist

That’s procedural.

Cerberus

Really?

tchrist

17:55

Certainly.

Cerberus

But all it does is use a loop to parse a string and create variables out of it.

tchrist

Certainly.

It’s imperative.

Cerberus

What is?

tchrist

Imperative programming

In computer science, imperative programming is a programming paradigm that describes computation in terms of statements that change a program state. In much the same way that imperative mood in natural languages expresses commands to take action, imperative programs define sequences of commands for the computer to perform. The term is used in opposition to declarative programming, which expresses what the program should accomplish without prescribing how to do it in terms of sequences of actions to be taken. Functional and logic programming are examples of a more declarative approach. ...

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus that you upgrade to windows 8

tchrist

17:56

> Procedural programming is imperative programming in which the program is built from one or more procedures (also known as subroutines or functions). The terms are often used as synonyms, but the use of procedures has a dramatic effect on how imperative programs appear and how they are constructed.

> Heavily-procedural programming, in which state changes are localized to procedures or restricted to explicit arguments and returns from procedures, is known as structured programming.

Cerberus

@MattЭллен Haha never! XP → 7 → 9.

@tchrist Ohh.

Matt Эллен

curses! outsmarted again!

Cerberus

@tchrist Ohh.

tchrist

Object-oriented programming is a subclass of procedural programming.

Matt Эллен

a better class

Cerberus

17:57

I see.

tchrist

> Declarative programming is a non-imperative style of programming in which programs describe their desired results without explicitly listing commands or steps that must be performed. Functional and logical programming languages are characterized by a declarative programming style.

Cerberus

Very abstract.

tchrist

@MattЭллен Well, kinda yes. Depends what you think a “class” is.

Matt Эллен

also, oop can be functional, if you do it right (e.g. Haskell)

tchrist

A recipe is imperative.

Cerberus

17:58

@MattЭллен Outsmarted by what?

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus you

tchrist

A regex is declarative.

See the difference?

Matt Эллен

damnit my connection is laggy today

Cerberus

@MattЭллен Unlikely.

How?

tchrist

I am getting such an echo here.

Cerberus

17:59

I, too.

The site is undergoing maintenance.

Johan Larsson

@MattЭллен do you like oo?

Cerberus

Try to open the main site.

You shall not succeed.

Matt Эллен

@JohanLarsson I like it the way I understand it, but a) I'm not good at explaining and b) other people don't seem to see it my way

@Cerberus I sucked seed

tchrist

If you must succeed, I find the chile-limón flavored pumpkin seeds are pretty good.

Cerberus

@tchrist Hmm I'm not sure. The Regex formula goes through a string in a fixed order until it's finished?

@MattЭллен Isn't that icky?

tchrist

18:01

@Cerberus A regex is a sequence of rules, essentially conditions that must be met.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus I could ask on the main site, if you like :D

Cerberus

Haha, both of your brains are apparently subject to the same associative processes. You should jinx.

tchrist

@MattЭллен You dog, you!

Cerberus

@MattЭллен I'm sure that would be a very appropriate question, if only the site weren't offline.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus it's online! that's what I'm saying :D

Cerberus

18:02

@tchrist But in a fixed order.

@MattЭллен Not for me!

>
We are currently offline for maintenance

Routine maintenance usually takes less than an hour. If this turns into an extended outage, we will post details on the status blog.

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus works on my machine. I must have access to the secret SE pipe they installed

tchrist

> Bjarne Stroustrup designed C++, an object-oriented language based on C. C++ was first implemented in 1985. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the notable imperative languages drawing on object-oriented concepts were Perl, released by Larry Wall in 1987; Python, released by Guido van Rossum in 1990; PHP, released by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994; Java, first released by Sun Microsystems in 1994 and Ruby, released in 1995 by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto.

Cerberus

@MattЭллен Nooo we have net neutrality here, this cannot be!

Matt Эллен

@Cerberus that's why it's secret

Cerberus

But that's not allowed!

Matt Эллен

18:06

@JohanLarsson I wrote some thoughts on it a few years ago, so you'll see what I mean

tchrist

Amazon’s Latest Crap. Billions and billions of dollars prove that might makes right.

Cerberus

@tchrist Money and art are enemies.

Johan Larsson

@MattЭллен I'm not anti btw, just feel I write a lot of text that does not do much at times :)

which I knew F# but never get started using it

Cerberus

@tchrist I cannot access the article in the NYT.

But, if this is about what I read about earlier, then I think Amazon may actually be doing those writers a favour, financially.

People tend not to understand price elasticity.

tchrist

> On Programming
· Never put the same information in more than one place.
· Encode similarities in data, differences in code.
· Treat warnings as errors until proven otherwise.
· Never ship your prototype: write it once to understand it, then write it again from scratch. That second one might be ready for production but it might not: third time pays for all.
· The first rule of optimization is Don’t.
· Proper abstraction is key to all good programming: organize your data into structures or objects, and organize your code into libraries or mod…

Cerberus

18:10

Basic though the concept be.

tchrist

> Reading Recommendations
· Oxford English Dictionary, published by OUP
· The Art of Mathematics, by Jerry P. King
· The Practice of Programming, by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
· Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, by W. Richard Stevens
· Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley
· The Wikipedia page on “Code Smells” – let this be if not your Bible, at least your decalogue of Thou-Shalt-Nots.
· Programming Perl (4th edition), by Tom Christiansen et al.

I recently had to deliver some valedictory remarks. Those were amongst them.

Cerberus

The OED is a bit of a tough read, especially if you want to remember more than 50%.

tchrist

There is that.

Cerberus

Recommending your own books, huh?

Johan Larsson

@tchrist nice enough for a star, I rarely see keep it small.

tchrist

18:15

> Gnomic Utterances

For my parting epigram – I shall not say epitaph – I must let abbreviated metaphor speak for me, using quotes from famous works of speculative fiction. Full understanding of my extended meaning will come only once you identify exactly who said each of these things, where, and why – and how those make these quotes especially poignant for me here and now.

· “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”

· It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes li…

Johan Larsson

@Cerberus you would too if you had any :)

Cerberus

Haha never!

tchrist

@JohanLarsson That’s because you live in a world asphyxiating of complexity.

Unix philosophy

The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to developing small yet capable software based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. The Unix philosophy emphasizes building short, simple, clear, modular, and extendable code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The philosophy is based on composable (rather than contextual) design. The UNIX Programming Environment In their preface to the 1984 book, The UNIX Programming Environment, Brian Kernighan and Rob...

> Small is beautiful.
Make each program do one thing well.
Build a prototype as soon as possible.
Choose portability over efficiency.
Store data in flat text files.
Use software leverage to your advantage.
Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
Avoid captive user interfaces.
Make every program a filter.

> This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

> Rule of Modularity
Developers should build a program out of simple parts connected by well defined interfaces, so problems are local, and parts of the program can be replaced in future versions to support new features. This rule aims to save time on debugging code that is complex, long, and unreadable.

Rule of Clarity
Developers should write programs as if the most important communication is to the developer, including themself, who will read and maintain the program rather than the computer. This rule aims to make code readable and comprehensible for whoever works won the code in future.

Johan Larsson

!!define asphyxiating

Had to copy-paste ^ no way to spell that

Matt Эллен

it means being unable to breath

Johan Larsson

18:20

tyty

Matt Эллен

similar to suffocating

Cerberus

> Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.

Matt Эллен

kitsox is having a snowday

Cerberus

Why not use a few lines in the program itself?

Or what do they even mean?

Like context menus tying into other programs?

tchrist

> asphyxia /æsˈfɪksɪə/.

Etymology: mod.L., a. Gr. ἀσφυξία, f. ἀ priv. + σφύξις pulse (whence also asphyxis has occas. been used). See also asphyxy.

1 lit. Stoppage of the pulse.

1706 Phillips, - Asphyxia, a Cessation of the Pulse throughout the whole Body; which is the highest degree of Swooning and next to Death.
1731 Bailey, - Asphyxia, a Deficiency or Privation of the Pulse in some Cases, where it stops for a Time.
1864 Webster, - Asphyxia..applied also to the collapsed state in cholera, with want of pulse.

@Cerberus They mean to combine tools with pipelines and backticks.

Cerberus

18:22

Huh?

I don't get it.

tchrist

prog1 | prog2 | prog3

Feed one program’s output to the next one’s input.

Cerberus

Is that what they mean by shell scripts?

tchrist

It is part of it.

Those are filters.

Cerberus

Filters?

Johan Larsson

they look pretty nix :)

tchrist

18:23

You can also write: prog1 ˋprog2ˋ | prog3, but that is something else.

Cerberus

Well, never mind, the terminology is all so abstruse that every explanation includes yet obscurer terms...

tchrist

It’s about combining different simple things.

It’s how you connect programs together.

Run this program. Produce some output. Feed that output to some other program.

Programming basics.

Let me tell you a secret.

Johan Larsson

finally

tchrist

Imagine the math equation fn3(fn2(fn1(x)))

That is the same as this in the shell: fn1 x | fn2 | fn3

The advantage of a pipeline version is that it reads left-to-right not right-to-left.

And you do not have to maintain an mental evaluation stack.

When you are reading left-to-right but forced to think right-to-left, it is harder.

Cerberus

Left to right I get.

tchrist

18:27

When the data flow and the reading flow are both going in the same left-to-right direction, it is much easier to understand.

Cerberus

But I speak only English.

tchrist

You speak algebra.

f(x) vs f(g(x)).

Cerberus

Yes, but not computerish.

tchrist

f(g(x)) is actually taking the output of g(x) and feeding it into f.

Cerberus

I get the point about mathematics and the direction of notation.

tchrist

18:28

g x | f

Cerberus

But I do not get words like shell and stack.

tchrist

Shell scripts are glue that ties several command invocations together.

Cerberus

I imagine this is something about the direction in which programmes feed each other data, but it is not made explicit.

tchrist

At their simplest, they can be a way to encapsulate (say) running 3 programs in a row.

Cerberus

Command invocations?

tchrist

18:29

But now you only mention the one command and it runs three.

A command invocation means running a program.

Cerberus

Ah.

tchrist

To invoke something is to run it.

Or call it, depending on your choice of terminological poison.

Cerberus

I use different Autohotkey programs to make sure the code in one does not interfere with the code in the other, despite my best effort.

tchrist

It is better to do one thing well than many things poorly.

It is better to let each component do one thing only.

Cerberus

And much easier to troubleshoot.

tchrist

18:31

Then combine them way undreamt of when they were written.

My nightmare is now over.

Cerberus

What nightmare?

tchrist

The idiots in Very Upper Management fired all contractors everywhere, without informing even the Director level. My Director was told I would be saved. They lied to him, or changed their mind, or whatever.

Cerberus

They fired you?

Is that good, bad, or medium?

tchrist

We were right in the middle of a major release, and I was the project lead, the release manager, its best programmer, and its hardest working one.

They fired everybody.

Cerberus

Strange.

tchrist

18:34

They are idiots.

The could not have done more to cripple the project unless they had fired the manager himself.

Cerberus

I'm sure you could have done it without the manager.

tchrist

Meanwhile, people who do 1/3rd or even 1/10th the work I do are left alone. For now.

Cerberus

So is this good, bad, or medium for you?

tchrist

@Cerberus In general yes, and he has been trying to have us do that.

For me, it is immediately bad but probably long term good.

Cerberus

Ah OK.

How bad is it for now?

tchrist

18:36

Not enough savings.

No immediate prospects.

Spent $12k on flood repairs.

Cerberus

Not enough for what?

tchrist

Oh, and it flooded again yesterday for the love of all that's holy.

Not enough to coast by without another job.

Cerberus

Again?

To coast by for how long?

Will it be hard to find a new job?

tchrist

> Firing a successful project’s de-facto lead programmer and release manager, its best programmer and its hardest working one, right in the middle of a major release no less, is surely the stupidest thing that I have ever seen (CENSORED FIRM) do. Without notification. Without cause. Without reason. Without appeal. I feel like an accidental casualty in some random attack by a suicide bomber. It’s awful. I did nothing wrong and everything right, and I still get shot anyway.

@Cerberus I don’t know.

Since the moment the betrayal came to light, I have been working 15-18h days to rescue my team so that they could live on without me.

So much was in my head alone.

Cerberus

OK that sounds very annoying.

tchrist

18:37

So I had to keep writing stuff down.

Cerberus

Why even bother trying to rescue the team?

tchrist

Because they are my friends.

Cerberus

Hmm.

tchrist

It is not their fault.

Cerberus

Hmm.

tchrist

18:38

It is not even my boss's fault, or his boss's, or even his, the corporate Director proper.

Cerberus

Is it uncommon for people to strike in such situations?

tchrist

All were betrayed.

Cerberus

Here, there would be a major strike to bring the company down.

tchrist

The employee cuts won’t come till either June 6th or June 20th.

Cerberus

Or there could be.

tchrist

18:39

It may be as high as 25% layoffs.

Technically, I was not “fired”.

There is a legal distinction.

Cerberus

Then why doesn't everybody organise a strike?

tchrist

Because it hasn’t happened yet, and they don’t know how many it will hit.

Cerberus

But you already know.

tchrist

The problem is, the stupid big companies have grown over-reliant on so-called contractors.

Yes, I kinda do.

Cerberus

Contractors can also organise a strike.

tchrist

18:41

I have been doing the job of the team lead for almost two years now.

Cerberus

If enough people who do the actual work go on a strike, the company is brought down.

tchrist

They couldn’t get the VPs to make me a proper employee.

So I was a mandatory layoff, no matter that I was doing the job of three people.

Cerberus

Yeah we have the same problem here. Even universities do it.

tchrist

They do this.

It is very wicked. The contractor system is both abused and abusive.

Cerberus

Yup.

My friend used to be fired or "laid off" every summer for three months.

tchrist

18:42

They gave me a nice going-away party yesterday.

Cerberus

Why? So that she could not build up enough time to get employer's protection against firing.

tchrist

And when my manager had to announce that I was leaving on Tuesday, he actually choked back tears.

Cerberus

Aww.

tchrist

I was by far the most valuable person he had. I made the entire team better.

Cerberus

And the modestest, no doubt.

Johan Larsson

18:43

:)

tchrist

You want honesty or modesty?

It is simply true.

Johan Larsson

honesty

tchrist

I make no boasts.

Johan Larsson

have you been working there for long time?

tchrist

@Cerberus Actually, I was quoting our Director.

@JohanLarsson Two years to the day.

But mostly 50-60 hour weeks, no vacation or holiday.

But paid hourly.

It wasn’t a lot of money, but it had health-care and was regular.

It was low six figures only, sigh.

And I was the architect they needed.

Johan Larsson

18:46

Is Norway an alternative?

come here for some fresh air imo

tchrist

I don’t want to move.

If I did, I would have taken the Google offer of $165k to move to California and work on Unicode.

Johan Larsson

what would a typical day working on unicode look like?

tchrist

> That this was done without even consulting my management chain up to [our Director] himself makes it even worse. They even told you guys something completely different, so I am not the only one they betrayed here. I lay no blame for this at your feet or [our Director]’s, and I would gladly work for all three of you again. I know you all did everything possible, but in the end, nothing mattered.

I have worked day and night to try rescue the team since I was told. You have no idea how hard this has been. I mean that.

@JohanLarsson That’s a good question. I don’t know. It probably means updating Unicode-dumb libraries to be Unicode-savvy, or better, writing smart new ones.

I was in the top 2% of performers across the larger group, one of the last people who would ever be cut, and in a sector that was making money, gaining customers, and growing at well over 100% per year. But because of the contractor status, none of that mattered and they simply fired everyone.

So so so so stupid. This is going to cost them a lot.

I had to finish up some of my projects without giving them the full documentation effort they merited.

Fortunately, one thing will save them.

I spend more time on writing simple code than on writing potentially deceptive comments.

So because the code is simple and clean, with everything small and focused, or at least separated in walled-off namespaces and privacy realms, and I use clear identifier names and consistent formatting and style, they will have much less trouble with my code than with the crap they used to hand me.

Plus I have lots of DWIM built into the code.

Here's another secret.

The language doesn’t actually matter: good programmers write good programs in any language, and bad programmers write bad programs in any language.

@Cerberus See the Gnomic Utterances above. There were things I dared not say directly, so I cloaked them in metaphor.

Johan Larsson

dwim?

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