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Me, trying to learn flat assembler: “What is even an object?”
Me, as a professional Haskeller: “What is even an object?”
Haha! Reminds me when I arrived in a team whose API accepted JSON and all the booleans were “True” or “False” (meaningful case, obv.) That was fun.
This certainly Tcl’d my funny bone.
God, that reminds me of the debate on XML that I had with a developer about fifteen years ago.
Both our companies were working for a client who needed to publish product catalogues in several languages twice a year.
They had implemented a sort of Content Management System which they used with a plugin to feed data into Quark Xpress files as well as their website, IIRC. Cross-media publishing, essentially, and they had their own little set of format instructions to make words appear in bold, different colors, etc.
Since my company was tasked with translating the text into various languages, I suggested they come up with a way to store their data as XML. The standard tools in the translation industry can be easily customized to work with that, and XML would be a good way to future-proof their software. After a lot of delaying, grumbling, and ho-hum, they agreed to implement this plan.
Lo and behold, when the first meeting on the new XML format came around they showed it to me for the first time and… everything was in CDATA sections. Entire paragraphs of text with proprietary formatting instructions. 😐
When I tried to explain, very politely, and very patiently, that this was not going to work, the lead dev started insulting me. I swear to God, I’ve never been this close to punching someone in the face at a business meeting. 🤬
Thankfully, the client understood the issue and we eventually got an XML-based data exchange going. It is probably still in use today.
I am strongly strongly statically typed pilled and I will not apologize.
100%. Though I can’t imagine the meme is actually saying that things being stringly typed is a good thing.
But what about the absraction and portability and the inheritence and bunch of other buzzwords?!
[Laughs in computed TypeScript strings]
I took great pains last week to convert a big python project to make it typed. (shoutout to MonkeyType)
It’s so much nicer to develop now…
Oh that’s a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don’t have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.
Yeah, I stopped developing in JS for good ~1.5 years ago. After using TS, it seems crazy to go back.
Empty string used to be like my own version of null pointer.
easy there satan
Oh, you worked at Oracle by any chance?
Dark times…
Like -1 for an Int nil value.
Which language can nil an
int?Probably some monad magic idk functional programming.
Groovy will automatically convert integers into objects, as it sees fit. And one such case is when you assign
nullto an integer.There’s some more languages, which try to treat primitive types like objects, to make them more consistently usable. As I understand, nullability is a big part of the reason why it can’t be solved with syntactic sugar, so presumably this would be possible in all those languages.
If I’m not mistaken, Ruby is another one of those languages.Groovy is pretty wild. It’s like, honey, you need me to make this a BigInteger for you? I got you honey, don’t even worry about it.
Yeah, I kind of respect the stance, because it knows what it wants to be, but I also wrap number types into a separate data type to document that maybe you shouldn’t multiply a port number by the wheel count and pass that into the temperature parameter, because I want more fine-grained typing, not one-size-fits-all.
I love the idea of “tiny types” like that and wish they were built into more languages.
Just cast it. /s
I believe, that would mean that any 0 is equivalent to the null pointer, since the null pointer is just memory address 0…
Not exactly “memory address 0”; there be dragons there. https://c-faq.com/null/index.html
In C that would make sense yes.
where my Ada bros not committing war crimes at?
There are two genders: string and null
There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.
nil
Ah, the SQLite approach!
Me: Puts a boolean into sqlite
Me: Asks for that boolean
SQLite: “Here’s that int you asked for”
They finally added strict tables which avoids most (all?) of those shenanigans.
I never really minded the shenanigans, after reading the docs once it all mostly made sense
I don’t really mind them either, it’s just exciting that there is finally a way to make it actually act type safe.
It is also the bash approach, isn’t it?!
Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).
more directly, sqlite was originally for tcl which is why they share the semantics.
also I’d argue that sqlite is a bigger contribution than tk, but I suppose in a more roundabout way
Does GNU make count? It’s crazy what you can do with the macro expressions, basically a Functional language using only string types. There’s even a math “library” that will do arithmetic with numbers in strings.
You can calculate n and n?
28
That’s easy
God, I’m so over SQL.
It’s great, but it is so old and shows it. Feels like 99% of my SQL queries are just cheese.
Works though, and quick.
SQL is the only bedrock in my entire career. Its the one thing that has stayed relevant.
SQL is great but when you start having issues processing what is actually going on, its fine to pull out what you need and throw another language on top (python, C#, etc…etc…). Getting it to work slow is one step in making it fast again.
Yeah, this is what I end up doing. SQL does all the heavy lifting, and python or M usually doing the rest. Though M can be soooo slow.
Yeah it’s curious that it hasn’t really undergone some major changes or had some major challengers (except NoSQL I guess).
Its been a while but yeah NoSQL was the closest.
I remember a good 4-5 years where developers all around me were using couchdb, mongodb, and a host of others. mostly json in <-> json out kind of systems. And VERY hard to maintain after the initial TODO. I remember so much debugging and finding out old records didnt have a way to deal with changes in the “tables” or equivalents. It was maddening.
Dont get me wrong, it did create some really awesome specialty tools but you cant really get around ACID compliance when dealing with databases.
I think SQL has some awesome properties that keep it going:
- Most major distributions are rock solid stable.
- Its optimized and fast for data.
- Its understandable to many types of industries. Software development is only the start.
- Its integrated with everything already. So ODBCs can just plug and play most of the time.
- Its the devil we know. ACID, transactions, etc… are all things we know about and are proven to work very well. Definitly when you need to MAKE SURE a thing made its way into the system.
Yeah 100% with you, had this mongo database where the first entry was like a description, the nr 2 and on the actual data. I mean if there were a description… Sometes 2 descriptions…
Why oh why.
And for sure SQL is kind of the cement of DB today, don’t get me wrong, I like that what I learned yesterday actually still works, I’m just pondering the fact that it is so.
Maybe SQL isn’t the hip language so people doesn’t try to reinvent it all the time 😁
sql as the language executed by the db hasn’t changed notably, but I do think there’s been significant developments in ORMs. for a lot of developmers sql is now just an intermediate target
Cool concept, didn’t know about it will check out!
It has though
Window functions were an addition, but more recently struct, json, and array fields with native support. Pipe syntax is getting multiple implementations.
Match recognize is a whole new standard abstraction of window functions.
Union by name is being added (fuck union by position).
Isn’t this more like evolution or even just optimisation? I mean it doesn’t seem like a fundamental shift (can be wrong, just checked it out quickly).
Sure, i think its just sql has not had any breaking version changes in like… ever?
Yeah, that’s really one in a kind for such an important feature.
at the end of the day everything’s a []u8 if you want it to be
void*We don’t touch that unless we really know what we’re doing.
Everithing is bytes.
… Little Endian or Big Endian?
Middle Endian ftw!
I made a joke about that lately after someone suggested YYYY-DD-MM.
how big is your word and how would this work
You know, I was just joking, but turns out, Middle Endian really does exist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Middle-Endian
And it’s just as crazy as one’d think. It’s a 32bit value consisting of two 16bit little endian words jumbled together in big endian. So the byte order is B A D C.
Whenever I think “This is a really stupid idea, nobody would do that”, turns out, someone actually did that.
oh lord why but that is about what i thought itd be
The NHL banned the use of 00 as a number in the 95-96 season because they claimed their databases couldn’t handle it. They still are fools because this continues to be a banned number to this day.
(i am old) both my brother and i were number 00 in our younger hockey years. we were goalies, so we got first pick of numbers on all new teams we played on, heheheh.
