social topic

2016-02-09 08:43:31 pm

it has impressed me how they've been pretty determined to fix all the stupid faults that existed in the beginning, php was a piece of fucking swiss cheese security wise back in the day but they've not been afraid to break compatibility to fix those problems, which is commendable

arkarian

2016-02-09 08:44:19 pm

red chamber dream

yeah wasn't it written by like, a 15 year old initially

arkarian

2016-02-09 08:45:08 pm

red chamber dream

anyway i'm glad they're improving it so i can keep using it as my main scripting language ... i like php if only because it's syntactically similar to js, so i can easily switch between them

whereas if i used python or something that would be more of a pain

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 08:46:59 pm

yeah I'm annoyed how python has garnered quite a bit more support in the last decade or so, because fuck languages that dictate how you indent them

arkarian

2016-02-09 08:47:26 pm

red chamber dream

yeah, i can't fucking stand it

and everyone thinks it's all the rage these days too, especially at my office

arkarian

2016-02-09 08:47:36 pm

red chamber dream

we do use python for lots of shit but i'm like why ... why not ruby instead

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 08:50:58 pm

you can find all the temporary code in my projects just by scrolling through them, because any code which I might want to remove later isn't indented along with the surrounding code, so it sticks out like a sore thumb

can't do that in python, but I suppose python people would call it a 'bad habit'

arkarian

2016-02-09 08:51:35 pm

red chamber dream

oh totally, python people are all about "bad habits" in relation to "rules" they just made up

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 08:54:51 pm

I also never do 4 spaces per tab (which python enforces), because it just wastes too much horizontal space, so I've always used 2

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 08:56:06 pm

so yeah fuck that nanny state of a language

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:00:04 pm

red chamber dream

oh wow i didn't know python didn't let you set the tab width

but i guess if it uses spaces it couldn't

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:00:13 pm

red chamber dream

i actually like a lot of horiz space, i use 6-space tabs

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:00:19 pm

red chamber dream

sometimes even 8

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:01:20 pm

it is a bit better these days now everything is widescreen

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:02:59 pm

it did used to piss me off having 50% of the line just being whitespace though and then having to split a line of code up because the whitespace has shoved it off the screen

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:03:18 pm

red chamber dream

lol yeah that bugs me too

the conventional wisdom is to just use more functions though right

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:03:23 pm

red chamber dream

but sometimes, fuck that

sometimes i don't care

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:06:02 pm

well again there are legitimate reasons why you might not want to which are happily ignored by the "bad habits" brigade

particularly true if you're using C and a) you don't want the overhead of an extra function call and b) you don't want to have to scroll to the top of the file and add a function declaration on top of the actual new function you need to write

people would tell you to use inline functions to cope with (a) but the fact is that not all compilers and C revisions support inline, so you're compromising your code's compatibility

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:06:43 pm

although I admit in practice these days it's less of an issue than it once was

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:08:07 pm

but yeah I'm not a huge fan of needlessly sticking code in a subfunction unless it's code that gets called from more than one place, i.e. it actually requires a function

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:09:10 pm

then on top of all that you need to think up a sensible function name which in the case of very deeply nested code is usually harder than it seems, and if you have deeply nested code it usually needs to take a shitload of arguments

it's just tedious

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:09:55 pm

and you end up with this fucking function that is not reusable in any way, shape or form, like the only possible place you could ever want to use that piece of code is the place you took it from

DJGrenola

2016-02-09 09:11:03 pm

it's like people who tell you not to use goto in C and I'm always like er have you checked the linux kernel recently

arkarian

2016-02-09 09:31:49 pm

red chamber dream

Quote from DJGrenola:

but yeah I'm not a huge fan of needlessly sticking code in a subfunction unless it's code that gets called from more than one place, i.e. it actually requires a function

this is my rule. don't split anything out unless there's a reason to. following dogma just because it exists is so stupid

arkarian

Edit history:

arkarian: 2016-02-09 09:39:03 pm

2016-02-09 09:38:49 pm

red chamber dream

and naming shit is hard indeed haha ... it's probably the thing i care most about, because if you give stuff good names, code magically becomes way more clear