jimmahoney

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Best scifi I've read in awhile; a really nice one in the first-person-nonhuman genre.

I have the Ikea Markus at home and it's been fine, especially for a $200 chair. I use a Herman-Miller Aeron in my work office that I got when I was having back problems, and like it a lot ... but I've found the Markus to be a good solution given the cost disparity. I don't feel like I need to spend $1000 for my home office.

I second "Eloquent Javascript" - it's excellent.

Lois McMaster Bujold is just the best - almost everything she's written.

I teach intro programming using python, and use it regularly for various projects.

But I agree with the author's central point that the language has a number of issues.

He mentions the python2 vs python3 issues, but doesn't discuss what is to me the biggest problem of all that: there is no standard simple way to identify within the code what version of python it needs or is written for. Coming originally from the perl world, that has always seemed like a significant oversight.

Nor does he mention several of my other biggest issues with the language, such as the arbitrary assignment of some operations to global functions (i.e. a=[3,2,1]; len(a)) while others are method calls (i.e. a.reverse()) which return nothing. And then there's list(reversed(a)) and all the iterator awkwardness ...

Explaining to students learning programming for the first time why neither of these do what they expect is never fun.

    >>> print(a.reverse())
    >>> print(reversed(a))

It looks cool, but I don't really want to wait half a minute for it to do anything.

  $ time curl cs.marlboro.college
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
  <html><head>
  <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
  </head><body>
  <h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
  <p>The document has moved <a href="https://cs.marlboro.college  /">here</a>.</p>
  <hr>
  <address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>
  </body></html>

  real	0m0.269s
  user	0m0.004s
  sys	0m0.005s
  
  $ time http cs.marlboro.college
  HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
  Connection: Keep-Alive
  Content-Length: 321
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
  Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2018 18:04:17 GMT
  Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
  Location: https://cs.marlboro.college/
  Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)
  
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
  <html><head>
  <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
  </head><body>
  <h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
  <p>The document has moved <a href="https://cs.marlboro.college/">here</a>.</p>
  <hr>
  <address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>
  </body></html>

  real	0m30.553s
  user	0m0.437s
  sys	0m0.052s