It isn't necessarily hurtful. But it is sexist.

What man refers to any part of his body as "she"?

I refer to my methyls as she.

You're not a man, you're a molecule

I can't think of any right now, but I don't think it's sexist. If I'm picturing a person alone in a boat, it's more likely a man.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 This is manist. Or moleculist. I need to decide

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I may refer to my pinkie as a "she", in some special situations, if I'm in the mood.

@Færd okay, fine, but do you know of any men who refer to their genitals as "she"?

Yeah, that's hardly as sensitive as the genitals, if you have to calculate and evaluate and compare things.

@DEAD It's chemist!

Hello hello.

Are we talking about sexual organs?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 To me, it shows lack of taste to refer to the clitoris as a man.

It may or may not be sexist.

Hi Cerb! Yeah.

Hi!

@Færd Or just ridiculous, vulgar.

@Færd It's possible there are no tasteful ways to refer to any part of any person's genitalia.

True.

Depends.

Does anyone here use Sublime Text?

Does anyone here use linters?

@Cerberus Looks like vi has all the advantages of Sublime Text plus the added feature of no embedded Python.

@MetaEd U no like snake?

@MetaEd earthy? musky?

What's so great about Vi?

Does it have good linters?

@MetaEd looks like vi has all the advantages of being broken

I do love a good religious argument but I will spare you today.

@Cerberus The advantage of vi is that it doesn't have an overblown feature set. That is, it is unusable.

Um OK.

@MetaEd pico for the win!!

Sounds like a balanced overview.

@Mitch Give me a TECO macro and I'll move the world.

It's name is OK I'll give you that

Do you use linters?

I've only recently heard about the very concept, but now I'm wondering why they haven't existed always.

@MetaEd Give me a TECO macro and I'll thank you for it and only bring it out when you visit. The first time. Then the second time I'll tell you that we had to send it off to a farm because it effing died!

You mean macaroon?

@Cerberus Do you mean a syntax checker?

@Mitch Your sentence is a valid TECO macro.

@Mitch Yes, probably.

Eslint, for example, warns you when you're using a variable that hasn't been defined.

Or when you define a variable that you don't use.

@MetaEd Lisp/Scheme is a playtoy for people who for their day job work on cellular automata.

@Cerberus chuckle YOu've just gotten your first taste of 50 years worth of type checking.

@Cerberus Macaroon? mmm... dipped in chocolate?

@Færd OK 'witch' and 'which'?

I'm not sure. I'd have to hear a lot of witches and whiches. But I'm quite sure about kitchen.

@KitZ.Fox oh ho ho! How daring!

Wait, you're really saying that you don't want any tea?

sighs

@Mitch confused What doyou mean?

@Mitch Sure! Why not?

@KitZ.Fox kicks back a cup of tea

kicks back another

gets woozy

I think I'm gonna...

BBIAS

@KitZ.Fox Oh can you add an undelete vote to the following... I mean, if you care. I'm not sure how right it would be to undelete someone who deleted their own meta post.

@Mitch I could, but it's already undeleted.

@Færd The 'ch' and 'tch' in all varieties of English are identical. If you are trying to distinguish them, then you are taking spelling too literally. Literally. Really. Your time is better spent on distinguishing vowels like pin and pen or cot and caught. That's what'll be the best part of an accent.

@KitZ.Fox Oh

Nice.

I thought I just checked.

Nevermind

@Mitch I don't care about the spelling (in English) when I concentrate on what I hear. Forget about ch and tch. All I'm saying is that kitchen is pronounced differently in the American accent than in the British accent:

Does yours? Surely not.

@Færd in which varieties of British is it pronounce differently?

@Færd something between BrE and AmE may be different in kitchen, but it's not whether there's a glottal stop. the 'i' may be different. When you say 'Forget about ch and tch', that sounds like you're repeating back to me what I've been telling you all along. worry about the vowels; those are the primary differences in accent anywhere. Also 'r'.

@Mitch I asked a simple question, and you didn't answer. We won't get anywhere just repeating ourselves. :)

In those in which I've heard kitchen so far. RP, for example.

@Færd so, the slight pause between syllables?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yeah, but not just a pause. I can hear the tension in the glottis too.

Not a big deal, I know. Got blown out of proportion.

@Færd I'm sure it happens with other words too.

Even which?

I am guessing it'd happen in words where the first syllable is stressed and ends in -i and the next syllable starts with ch

@Mitch John Conway called and wants his game back.

Hmm. Makes sense. Maybe.

Speaking of cellular automata, I've been playing with an Android game called Cell Lab by Petter Säterskog.

@JasperLoy Good John Conway and Evil John Conway?

Or does their goodness and evilness have an integer range from 0 to 3 that varies according to who's standing in the squares immediately adjacent to them?

John H Conway must be Good Conway. So that leaves Evil John B, who I'll refer to henceforth as Sloop for obvious reasons.

@MetaEd He's not really evil, he just wants to go home.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That might be Evil Tim Conway.

Or E. T. to his friends.

@JasperLoy Ah. Then I've got the pairings right. Textbooks! Faugh!

@Helmar Howdy.

Hi

meta post voting... posted two things and both posts got each +2-2 :D

@Helmar Glad you're jumping in.

Glad to do it, congrats on making mod :)

@Færd It's getting a little warm in here.

Yes, I listened to all those. When you brought up the question, you were saying that the BrE unvoiced palatal alveolar affricate is really a glottal stop followed by the fricative. I entirely disagreed with that and gave a number of examples in different contexts where that does not happen.

As to the forvo clips that doesn't happen either for any of those.

I made no claims about a difference in the vowel, and in fact encouraged you to consider that more than the following consonant.

@MetaEd There's a minecraft simulator for the game of life with the example game of a prime producer

@Mitch That might be fun to try.

That would be a big, clunky board.

I've heard there have been processor chip simulations.

Wonder if you can simulate enough of a PC to run Minecraft on it.

And the minecraft engine is written in php

@Cerberus You're saying you like 'lint' removers (checking for parsing bugs ahead of time). That's exactly what a compiler does, makes sure that things are 'legal' before creating underlying system code (which in an interpreter just tries and fails or not).

In more structured languages like C or Java, instead of hoping that youhaven't made a mistake, you have to give variables and functions a type label which makes it easier (immediate) for the compiler to check that inputs and outputs match correctly.

You do a little work ahead of time to make sure you don't have to do a lot of debugging afterwards because you tried to assign an integer to a string.

That may be more confusing. To simplify, a compiler does some of the same things a 'linter' does (I've never heard that term before, I'd just say syntax checker). And I introduced type checking to you as an additional thing a syntax checker might do. Type checking is pushing syntactic checking a little closer to semantic checking without having a full proof of correctness checker.

@Mitch Oh dear god.

@Mitch Ah OK, yes, a compiler and a syntax checker or linter will overlap.

But a linter can use any rule it is programmed to check.

And doesn't anybody try to prove their code anymore? Dijkstra is probably not sleeping well.

I've written a rule for Autohotkey about something that may be correct if it was intended that way, but that will be confound and befuddle people if they do it accidentally. The compiler has no idea.

"Program testing can be used very effectively to show the presence of bugs but never to show their absence."

This code is correct in Autohotkey, but it will not do what you want (it will never match).

So I want to warn people (and myself) against it.

Especially people who are fairly new to coding or to Autohotkey: a comprehensive linter that throws lots of warnings with clear explanations can help people a lot.

On April 1 I should introduce a new ==== operator in ECMAscript.

But tonight I should clean my house. See ya later.

@MetaEd Sure but only for special code. Most code nowadays is "put a button here, listen to the button events, send bitcoins to St Lucia". The closest people get is unit test coverage.

For calculation libraries, yes, proofs should be made but are usually a late after thought.

For some systems like chip design or space shuttle OS process schedulers, there are proof systems for the code that are explicitly used or part of the compiler.

@Mitch We should remove the E.L.L. tagline from the Gen. Ref. close reason to make room for a link to our resources thread in there instead. Part of the reason I say we should remove that bit is because they don't want mere dictionary lookup questions anymore than most of us at English Language & Usage do, it's "not a dumping ground" and most importantly because we have another close reason to address questions that should've been asked at E.L.L.

also, haha you caught me. You assumed that people ever used to prove their programs correct, which was basically never. SO progress has been made, more program proofs are being done, but not necessarily by actual people.

uh oh I let slip that the computers are doing most of the proving now

@Tonepoet are you a mod or high rep or editor or concerned citizen for ELL?

Wai...what is our other close reason to send to ELL? There are two?

@Mitch There's a migration close reason.

"This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network" gives you a choice to select between meta and E.L.L.

It's a little trickier to find questions that are actually closed for that, presumably because they get migrated.

Wait a minute...

Hey, suggestion I made was already implemented! I could've sworn the Gen. Ref. close reason recommended E.L.L. the last time I saw it. Am I crazy @Mitch? Have I lost the final remnants of my mind? v_v

@Tonepoet You ma have noticed if you've been here a long while, that there actually is nothing with the terms 'Gen Ref' in them any more. You may want to start with that.

Gah! That must mean that I have! >_<

@JasperLoy but what do you use to edit your latex files

Latex isn't an editor, it's a type scripting language

guess where i am

@Jez Hmm it's not Amsterdam.

Where are you?

guess lol

surprised you cant tell

Wait, that isn't the Eiffel tower on the right?

hehehe no

look at the flag in the middle

Red square?

You know, flooded for the gladiatorial games

with ferries on

just off the right of the picture there is a famous bridge

I see no starships colliding, so it's not off the shoulder of Orion.

Wembley?

That flag looks either Norwegian or British.

London?

ding ding ding

I don't recognise the buildings.

next to tower bridge

@Mitch That makes sense. Perhaps the OP was embarrassed by the question or its (lack of) reception. Why not post a new question, linking to the deleted one? The discussion between you and @Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 would be useful in a Meta post on the subject. I like the idea of a pop-up dictionary / thesaurus if implemented well. One possibility in addition to those already mentioned is to have a list of all the words in a separate box, each linked to its dictionary / thesaurus entry.

What are you doing there?

Pushing off the island?

i have a 3 day course here

you a mod now cerberus? congrats

I've had a 3 course meal but never a 3 day course. Oh you mean a course, like training

yup

@Lawrence I fear it would still be un used

Gracias.

Have fun in London.

i didn't realize how much The Shard looks like it's unfinished at the top, or has been hit by something

at first i thought it was under construction

@Lawrence 4 items: OED search, thesaurus search, forvo for pronunciation, and "'an' before vowels 'a' before consonants usually h, w, y, eu"

If only there were a grammar reference.

heh the guy doing my training is French Canadian with a very French accent. he dropped the "h" from "hack" and said "an hack" to make up for it :-)

it's an 'ack

or it's a nack

Hon hon hon

I've never heard anyone French ever say that