n1ghtm4n

4) books with inscrutable titles like Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology and Rage and Time. check. (LOL! How big do your balls have to be to give a book a title like that?)

5) constant name-dropping of fashionable intellectuals. check.

Must be European philosophy!

UPDATE: quote from Amazon description of Bubbles. Behold the enormity of Peter Sloterdijk's balls:

    "reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an
    inherently spatial and immunological project, from the 
    discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world 
    (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam)."

http://www.amazon.com/Bubbles-Spheres-Microspherology-Semiot...

Comment · 13 years ago

The RedMonk programming language rankings seem much more plausible to me. They're based on 1) questions on StackOverflow and 2) projects on GitHub.

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13...

Comment · 13 years ago

Function overloading can be accomplished by name mangling at compile time.

  PROGRAMMER SEES        INTERNAL REPRESENTATION
  foo(int a, char b)     foo_int_char
  foo(int x)             foo_int

Comment · 13 years ago

>Ok, so it's not just a language wart, but a fertile source of pointless inefficiency in everyday Python code, glad to know.

The fact that it's used all the time would suggest it's not pointless inefficiency, no? Maybe you should try Python before bashing it.

>Python is doing the exact same thing as Go here, but in a less efficient manner.

It's not doing the same thing. "�є" is not the same as "єℓℓ".

Comment · 13 years ago

Thank you for the explanation! Converting to a rune slice and back does give me the behavior that I wanted. It still looks butt ugly to me, but at least it works.

In Go:

    fmt.Printf("%s", string([]rune("нєℓℓσ")[1:4]))
    // єℓℓ

In Python:

    print("нєℓℓσ"[1:4])
    # єℓℓ

Comment · 13 years ago

You're right. You're not very familiar with Python. String slicing with numbered indices is used all the time. And you can slice more than just strings! It's one of the coolest features of Python and you're really missing out if your favorite language doesn't have that.

This might explain why my comments seem like heresy to you. I would point out that the OP is about Python programmers switching to Go.

Comment · 13 years ago

Thank you for expressing it so eloquently.

Comment · 13 years ago

> What happens when you take a slice of a string?

What happens when you slice a unicode string in Go is that it cuts multi-byte characters right in half, unless you get the byte boundaries just right. I know real programmers keep the byte boundaries for all the chars in all their strings in their head at all times, but for people like me this basically makes string slicing unusable for non-ASCII text.

Python somehow magically slices unicode strings without chopping characters in half.

In Python:

    s = "нєℓℓσ"
    s[1:4]  # "єℓℓ"

In Go:

    s[1:4] // "�є"

Comment · 13 years ago

A very good point. I still think it's a big win if it makes it 1% easier for new programmers to understand.

Comment · 13 years ago

Why not a 2-word struct with the rune count instead of the byte count? There's zero performance cost for many strings because the rune count is known at compile time. For the rest, most strings are too short for Big-O analysis to be relevant and I would guess (enlighten me if I'm wrong) that the cost of computing the bounds of each character is negligible on a modern processor. Multi-byte chars in a string are going to be adjacent in memory, adjacent in cache, and therefore trivial for today's not-at-all-instruction-bound CPUs. Again, correct me if I'm wrong.