machine_ghost

What I don't understand is why, after twenty years, we still haven't versioned Javascript. A simple:

'v2';

At the top of every file could let us eliminate all this 20-year old cruft (like document.all hacks to support Internet Explorer).

Yet, despite the already established `use strict`; (which is basically 'v1.5'), the community seems completely against modernizing the language.

I read the website, but I still don't get what value it's offering over Chrome? Better viewport sizing?

You have a (very common) mistaken view of what the W3C is and how it works. It is NOT an independent standards body that tells browser makers what to do! In fact, it's the exact opposite: the browser makers (and Google is a big one) tell the W3C what to do.

This makes perfect sense if you think about it, because the browser makers ultimately decide what goes into the browser. If the W3C was "in charge" and tried to make Google (or another browser maker) do anything, Google could simply ignore them. That system wouldn't last.

It has to work this way ... and Google (along with Apple, Microsoft, etc.) have decided this syntax is best for them (and possibly their users).

Kent Beck is just as bad as Uncle Bob! He drank his own proverbial Kool-Aid and went all in on the crazy XP programming fad he started (... which contains brilliance like requiring pair programming for every line of code written).

Look, both authors are very smart people who have great insights into development that we can all learn from ... but both also have the failing of being way too in love with their own ideas.

It blinds them to the flaws in those ideas, and makes it so when you read their work you have to be skeptical and evaluate each individual idea on their own.

So, this is anecdotal, and it's not true at the moment (because the end of the Santa Cruz wharf just fell into the ocean, and now the clam chowder restaurants are closed), but ...

... I had an ex who was a huge clam chowder fan, so she did her own "experiment" and tried every chowder-serving restaurant on the Santa Cruz wharf (I think there were seven).

Her completely unscientific finding was that the very best chowder was at the end of the wharf, and generally speaking the chowder got worse as you got closer to the start of the pier (ie. the closest place to The Boardwalk ... where all the tourists come).

It makes perfect sense to me: if people come to your restaurant because of its location, you don't put much effort into quality. If you're far from the walk-in traffic, you need to do something (like make really delicious chowder) to get people to walk out to you.

"We also looked at different types of psychedelics and didn’t see any systematic differences there."

This was the most fascinating finding to me. I really wouldn't have expected Salvia, Acid, Shrooms, etc. to all produce the same hallucinations ... but I guess ultimately they're all operating on the same core neurochemicals, so I guess it makes sense.

I know it's dumb, but when a library requires me to install Yarn to install it, I think so much less of it.

I just hate the idea that I have to install an entire package manager simply to use some Node.js code, when NPM almost certainly could have done the job.

>Smartphones didn't come from a VC-backed startup.

This isn't entirely correct: both Palm and Apple (the creators of the smart phone) were originally venture-backed.

The fact that the very foundation of our legal system is fundamentally undemocratic (in the sense that no regular citizen can be reasonably expected to understand it) is starting to bubble up into societal awareness.

With everything Trump is doing to destroy the rule of law, and all the potential for technology to help us simplify it, I can only hope that when Trump burns it all down, the people who rebuild will be wise enough to do better.

This same is also known by another name when it's used to teach new programmers: pseudo code.

Sadly, because it's associated with learners/juniors, pseudo code gets a bad rap. But really, all engineering is translating English into code ... which means almost any complex operation (setting up a new employee's account, or anything else) can be made clearer by utilizing such an "in-between English and code" step.

In the article they used Python, but for all the important stuff, they didn't: they used English. A "do-nothing" script is really just a script where instead of converting pseudo code to code (like programmers normally do), you just leave the English/pseudo code in, and wrap it with a print.

In the long run, yes, but if programming were so rote and simple, we all wouldn't have jobs in the first place.

Look, technology has always replaced jobs, throughout history (how many of you know professional lamp lighters, elevator doormen, or switchboard operators?) But the thing is, tech has always replaced the jobs that are easiest to automate ... not the "intellectual work".

I would be far more worried about being a real estate agent, food preparer, or heck, even a lawyer (for some specialties at least). I think they're all at more risk than programmers.

I don't know Cursor, but VS Code is a very full-featured editor with many years behind it; I rather doubt an upstart editor could achieve full feature parity with it so quickly.

But that's almost beside the point: even if it had perfectly identical functionality, people would still want to use VS Code, if only for its well-established ecosystem of extensions.