Josh K

@SLott For Python, sure. Your statements appeared to suggest that because Python didn't use braces, braces were proved to be useless in any other language. Python can do whatever it pleases.

@SLott Yeah, I'm going to dispute that. This is assuming “programmer” doesn't include the copy paste programmer examples you listed as example questions.

@psr I'm more then happy to stop, I just don't want @SLott to feel I'm ignoring him.

@SLott I'm not disregarding your experience, I'm saying that putting that experience forward as fact, obviously disproven by the many people who have grasped the concept of using braces and other punctuation in code, is wrong and misleading.

@SLott I said that your offering these questions up as “fact” is a nonsense argument. This isn't “fact” programmers have issues with curly braces. Would you like me to list all the questions that have proper punctuation and syntax? Guaranteed mine will outnumber yours.

It proves that there is a different way to delimitate blocks other then curly braces. I could take the opposite side and say braces make whitespace completely irrelevant and superfluous and the compiler should ignore it.

@SLott I don't see how I can explain it any better. Python (as a language) does not conclusively prove that curly braces are “That seems to make the utterly superfluous and completely useless”.

I removed the “extra curly braces....like them.” line because it's your subjective opinion about braces, not a fact concerning braces. It's opinion.

I would also point out that the example questions you've listed are obvious straw man arguments. Dumb people ask dumb questions, it is not an indicator of the community as a whole. Maybe limit the questions to only include people that have >10k rep and show an active pattern.

@SLott “extra curly braces aren't really all that helpful” is your personal opinion about braces. Taking PHP as an example language, curly braces for block delimitation are required, not “aren't really all that helpful”. To continue the example to another language like Python, “extra curly braces” are in fact not helpful because the language uses another method for delimiting scope.

I'm also going to archive our comment thread discussion as I believe it's served it's purpose.

Could you also point out where I said curly braces were not optional in a language design? You seem to be harping pretty hard on this point, and I would like to bring whitespace into the discussion to provide the counter point that not only can you avoid punctuation and braces but you can avoid all letters too in the design of a language. Still doesn't make it a good idea.

I would be very interested in seeing the 100's of questions where people misuse punctuation marks. Neither myself nor the dozens of programmers I've worked with seemed to have an issue with it either.

@slott Please take further discussion to this chat please.

@Scrooge If you flag it we will take a look at it.

That was actually the example I read when I originally read this. Funny I remember the example but not the term.

Etc.

@DanMcGrath I mean the term that describes say some Firefox extensions. Firefox is a browser, great. Extension to show page errors, fine. Extension to provide a full featured torrent client inside a browser? Not fine. Extension to do programming inside the browser? Not fine. Extension to monitor system usage? Not fine.

What's the term for when you've developed a piece of software past the point of just being an application and it starts taking on an operating system role in user space?

@@2637: It does not provide pseudo-classes, objects, inheritance, modeling, or any other sort of structure.

@@2637: Frameworks (like Prototype / Mootools) actually change the way you write JavaScript. jQuery simply makes interacting with the DOM easier.

@@2637: You are incorrect. The only change is when performing async actions like AJAX or where you must provide an action (.bind and other events). CPS is not new, it is simply different then what people are used to.

@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen: Even when testing?

@Pearsonartphoto: I don't do iOS development, so I may be misinformed on the costs associated with actually building the application. My understanding was the $100 membership fee was to cover app store submission and sale, not the SDK.

If I'm not in the room you can do an @@ reply to grab my attention.

Have those college students ever tried a bit of savings? I think that while the upfront cost ($100) seems high, it's a very low cost for what you're getting. Distribution, payment, development tools. A very complete package.

@@1078: In regards to

A lot of the current beta / public sites to come out of Area51 seem to be full of programmers with hobbies, shooting off of StackOverflow. I would like to see that change to encompass a more general audience.

@Pierre303 Could have sworn it was. I guess we'll see if it gains traction.

Someone (I think it was @Pierre303, but I could be wrong) prompted me to work up a proposal for general business / office questions (things commonly said to be not programming related). Done! See the Area 51 proposal: "Around the Water Cooler".

Sorry we weren't around @Dori, thanks for taking care of that

@OscarMederos Hello!

@AnnaLear I would assume not because it's for a code review – of code you should understand.

Pattern replace = new Pattern("/(\.\/)?(.+)\/?.*/");

(if I'm remembering the syntax right) that would be Pattern match = new Pattern("/(\.\/)?(.+)\/?.*/");

Just put the regex into a new Pattern

@Jinjavajin You don't need to break it up.

Just substitute those in

preg_replace is called as preg_replace([MATCH], [REPLACE], $haystack)

@Jinjavajin You would be looking for something in the util.regex package. Probably Pattern and Matcher.

@Jinjavajin: It's replacing one pattern with another pattern using whatever is in $unique_cache_dir

php.net/manual/en/function.preg-replace.php

It's a pretty straight forward regex replacement.

Ah, I see that.

@giddy I can't seem to find a question with that id.

@Jinjavajin How complex is the PHP code? And how "legacy"?

@SnOrfus Typically about an hour total a day. Maybe less. I normally drop in 3-4 times a day and if something comes up I check it. That's why flags rock, it's a simple little note that I need to check something instead of digging through stats to find something.

Cool beans