xigma

The point I'm making is not "use short variables everywhere", it's that in this case, the verbose alternative is not "much more readable".

Abbreviating "element" to "el" or using "attr" instead of "attribute" (etc.) can significantly reduce noise in web client code. Everybody either knows what it means, or they shouldn't be editing the code in the first place.

They'll figure it out. They're a programmer, figuring things out is their job.

> The more software developers there are, the easier it becomes to automate the drudgery and toil of life.

By "easier", you must mean "cheaper", but I don't believe that at all. There are now more software developers out there than ever before, yet project costs are the highest they have ever been and failure rates remain high.

Software developers are preoccupied with creating problems for themselves, which they then get to bill clueless clients for. The more programmers there are (especially juniors), the worse it will be.

Also, don't assume people actually want automation everywhere. Automation means killing jobs. Managers don't want to fire, they want to hire - it boosts their ego. Employees don't want to get fired, when in doubt, they'll come out against more automation in their day-to-day tasks.

If the economy really needed way more programmers, their wages would go through the roof (across the country, not just in overpriced Silicon Valley) and even otherwise disinclined groups of people would go for it. As it is, the wages are commensurate with the effort required to learn the profession.

Of course, up to a point. The same goes for very long but extremely descriptive variable names. Hence, it is a tradeoff.

426.

Except there isn't any problem here whatsoever. Yes, it's coupled, but it doesn't matter. No, this kind of code doesn't scale. It doesn't have to.

The time you spent writing this comment was longer than what it took writing this code. Considering what kind of site this is, that code may work indefinitely. Or, if necessary, someone from the future will need to change that 3 to a 4 at some point. In terms of total cost, it's almost certainly the cheapest solution.

> It costs almost nothing more to write "event" instead of "ev" or "removeElement" instead of "remEl", but it makes the code much more readable.

No, it doesn't. Unless you're an absolute beginner, it takes you a couple of seconds to realize that in this codebase, "ev" (or "evt" or even "e") means "event". The same goes for "remEl". If that's consistent, then it's not a big deal at all.

Having less characters makes code more readable (or rather "scannable") as well, it's just another tradeoff.

> Its a good point, if you overlook the fact that the British destroying the Indian & Chinese economy (through war/invasion) created a vacuum for the US economy (British colony at the time) to flourish.

You're making some sort of moral argument, but the argument against protectionism isn't moral. Protectionism is stupid from an economic perspective, no matter if India or the U.S. does it. If there's a moral argument to be made, it's against protectionism: It denies citizens to partake in free trade and therefore makes them poorer.

What's in it for India if everyone has to use the (inevitably crappier) Indian version of Google, Facebook or Amazon? It's not like anybody outside of India is going to want to use that stuff, so it doesn't bring in foreign capital. It'll just reallocate local tech talent to a domestic market that is less profitable than the international market. It makes no sense.

That's exactly why people need to bring in emotions and hot words like "colonialism": To make a psychologically powerful (but irrational) case. It might just work.

> Never forget India was #1 in world GDP (for more than 1000 years) pre-invasion.

I'd be skeptical about estimates on GDP dating to 1000 A.D., but if there's anything to learn here it's that you should probably spend some of that GDP on defense, lest you get invaded by tiny-old Britain.

> Russia with Putin as its leader stands in the way of American domination of Eurasia. Hence, the military encirclement of Russia and the belligerent anti-Russian rhetoric from American leaders.

Is the US really dominating Europe and if so, is that not better than being dominated by Russia? Why did the Ukrainian civil war break out, wasn't it the desire of ethnic Ukrainians to break away from Russia? "Greater Russia" is a thing that many ethnic Russians want and Putin would take it if he believed he could get away with it.

Historically, if your nation bets against the US, you end up on the losing side. We're not going to be ever living in a world without major superpowers and the US - imperfect as it may be - is by far the best such "regime" that has ever existed in history. I'm worried about a world where the US retreats from that position, leaving it up to autocrats to divide the spoils among them.

Of course, if you're an international leftist, you're knee-deep in denial and resentment about the abject failure of every regime that ever challenged US hegemony. You crave some sort of justice that history will never deliver to you, defending some of the most oppressive countries in the world while maximizing and exaggerating the oppression at home. Cognitive Dissonance at work!

Having said that, the Democrats really need to move on from whining about the Russians interfering in the elections, it's just not effective.

Military people applying their experiences to company leadership are problematic, because they worked with a selection of people that doesn't reflect the general population.

In the general population, not everyone wants to be a leader, not by a long shot.

People tend to have a strong urge to avoid responsibility (and therefore making decisions), that's the whole point of having superiors. If everyone's fully responsible for what they do, they don't do their work.

Even an incompetent superior helps here, because at least in theory you can divert responsibility to them. It allows people do their work for the majority of the time when things don't go wrong. If they do go wrong, everyone gets to blame everyone else somehow, maybe the company tanks, but really life goes on.

You may point out problems here and there, but no other obvious alternative (like flat structures) are devoid of problems.

I'd be wary of solutions that take human responsibility completely out of the equation (such as AI). Sometimes a decision not made is actually for the best.

No, this is a permissions problem. Reading and writing to an application directory does not cause any issues until some code in that directory starts running with privileges it shouldn't have.

It should not be possible for an application that happens to install other applications to bypass the user for specific permissions. The user must be asked explicitly.

This has nothing to do with being able to "sideload" apps or not. Sideloading apps is actually possible on iOS, it's just such an effort (getting a developer account) that it's rarely done in practice.

That's not true. I'm sometimes faced with a lot of companies to choose from and if one of those companies has a badly designed logo, I'll immediately become suspicious of all of their other qualities.

On the other hand, a really good logo doesn't have the opposite effect, because I know some designer (or AI, whatever) made it for them.

I can't remember ever having been stunned by a logo.

The height of my experiences could be described as:

"Oh, nice logo." or "Hmm, clever."

The line between "clever" and "trying too hard to be clever" is also quite fine.

Some logos become iconic, but that has as much to do with the brand itself as with the logo. Even if Microsoft had the Nike logo, it would still be uncool.