Why does nobody ever mention HTML Dog? I learned all the basics the right way reading from it, the ideas behind them, and what to avoid. It's a seriously great website (and formerly a book, I think? I was a penniless teenager back when I read it), serving as both a tutorial and reference, and it's been around for a really long time.
Academia reaches out to the common programmer and student all the time; they write books.
Academic research papers are aimed at other researchers, i.e. people who are up to speed with the concepts and terminology, if you or I don't understand the latest research on machine vision, then though luck, we just lack the necessary background, and that's discounting the fact that we are different audiences and seek for different content and form from each other.
How often are we programmers interested in detailed proofs? Or even sketch proofs? If you decide to helpfully include code samples and they are full of boost::this or ApacheFooXMLFactoryThat, would that be of help to an academic who only implements his algorithms in isolation and doesn't know of massive APIs, or to researchers 20 years from now?
> You're living in a HN bubble if you seriously think no new projects are being created in PHP, or if you think there are no valid use cases for PHP in modern applications.
I asked for reasons. You just told me it happens. I know it happens, I want to see a solid justification.
> Simply take a look at popular job sites - you don't even have to look at Monster.
For less pay.
> Once you get into the higher level of skill, though, it starts evening out. IIRC the average senior salary for Ruby/RoR devs is only ~$5,000 more than a PHP dev.
Why shouldn't I take the job with better pay and a better language?
> The allegation that PHP is being used by people who don't know anything else is just subjective and wrong, and ultimately nothing but flamebait.
That wasn't my allegation, though it's a good point you bring; PHP is sold as a language for novices, and novices tend to use it, despite being the most difficult language in common use due to its innumerable pitfalls, which isn't aided by the poor instruction material all over.
> You can get cheap PHP devs because PHP is so ubiquitous. You can also get really good ones.
No, but really, the pay is generally less. Being a good PHP dev is less profitable than being a good Java or Ruby one, if the same holds for other countries, then I guess that accounts even more for the reputation of the language (people who are actually good programmers tend to move to other languages for better pay among other things).
And, you know, this wasn't the point. With much better alternatives available, why choose PHP if not for familiarity or cheapness of labour?
What would be valid choices for using PHP today if not for dealing with legacy code bases? It's the only thing you know? You don't have money to pay programmers for other languages? (PHP devs are commonly the cheapest)
The whole story is suspect. Why now? If the US government were to use this kind of intel to address issues as small as this, and this is at the level of shop lifting, wouldn't such incidents have made it to international news several times by now?
I think the idea was that people should feel outrage because they found out about this kiddy, small-time, mockery of a fraud by reading some random civilian's chat logs.
What makes you think the site is "serious" now? She just doesn't know what Hacker News is, and can't be blamed for that. She just knows that some self-proclaimed "hackers" brought her site down with lots of traffic.
They could be regularly piping filtered information to serve the US's Government's interests, as part of project they know by another name but happens to have the code name "PRISM".
There; no "back door", no "direct access", no "PRISM", not "broad", as said elsewhere in the release.
I'm sorry, but is this what passes for academic typesetting nowadays? I felt as if I were sitting in some farcical business presentation as my eyes scanned this typographical travesty! This thing is an affront to the eyes as much as to the mind, utter tripe. Don't the mods have any taste? Hacker News is truly in the pits now.
Because it's been years in the works, it's finally about ready, and Racket only now is in everyone's mouths? Guile is now also able to run other languages as well, like Javascript, or at least so their maintainers claim.
Besides, I know that among users of fringe languages like us (you too are, I presume) this is a bit of a taboo question... but who uses Racket so much as for it to make a difference here?
They are "better" in that they are, in fact, more constrained; only when the error case arises will there be any accessible error value; otherwise, the actual expected value will be found. Since go uses an ad hoc product type, you always get an error value and the return value, even if they are mutually exclusive most of the time.
Also, they are both ways to build larger types from smaller ones, and the way they go about doing it is rather obvious from their names, and thus the contrast.
> On a side note, the same people who claim that sum types are "better" are never able to come up with a constructive proposal how sum types could be integrated into Go in an elegant way.
Forgo the cutesy anonymous members for the massive benefits of sum types? For a team which prides itself for its ability to perform trade-offs, they sure were rigid in this stance.
And yet you keep handing out these passive-aggressive put downs to everyone left and right. Maybe you should just not invoke the blog versions of scientific results into everyday conversation, much less to denigrate others. And maybe you shouldn't go around imparting your perceived wisdom on others so liberally. I think it's rather pretentious, and it's all part of an unfortunate ailment of geeks who feel the need to appear cultured, to pop random facts and factoids into conversation, and the Dunning Kruger effect has to be one of the most abused of these. I should know, I suffer it too.
Either way, I didn't get that the OP wanted to put down other developers, rather that the language designers did, by "simplifying" their languages by sticking to tradition and leaving crucial features out, and needless features in.
None. It's something which is, ironically, used by people who overestimate their own understanding of pop-psychology to put down others. The fact that it was used in earnest without presenting any justification just makes it all the more hilarious, unintentionally so.
http://www.htmldog.com/
For everything else, there's http://www.quirksmode.org/ and Stack Overflow ;)