I disagree that the web site is fast; it took at least 10 seconds before the video would start playing.

I feel like the modern name for it would be just “Script”.

Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there’s literally no way you can write pure Python that’s 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there.

Completely agreed, but it can be surprising just how often C++ really is written that inefficiently; I have had multiple successes in my career of rewriting C++ code in Python and making it faster in the process, but never because Python is inherently faster than C++.

Sure, but if you are not regularly expressing code that has the potential of summoning elder gods that will swallow your soul into a dimension of ceaseless screaming then are you really living?

I don’t always use regular expressions, but when I do, I use it to parse XML,

I find the author’s writing style immature, sensationalist, and tiresome, but they raise a number of what appear to be solid points, some of which are highlighted above.

I tried reading the article and gave up because life is too short for me to read a tiresome article making points that aren’t even particularly that new.

Something that definitely separates me from some of my less experienced coworkers is that, when I sit down and start to implement a plan I came up with in my head, if it turns out that things start exploding in complexity then I reevaluate my plan and see if I can find a simpler approach. By contrast, my less experienced coworkers buckle down and do whatever it takes to follow through on their plan, as if it has now become a test of their programming skills. This makes life not only more difficult for them but also for everyone who has to read their code later because their code is so hard to follow.

I try to push back against this when I can, but I do not have the time and energy to be constantly fighting against this tendency so I have to pick my battles. Part of the problem is that often when the code comes to me in a merge request it is essentially too late because it would have to be essentially completely rewritten with a different design in order to make it simpler. Worse, the “less experienced” coworker is often someone who is both about a decade older than me and has also been on the project longer than me, so even though I technically at this point have seniority over them in the hierarchy I find it really awkward to actually exercise this power. In practice what has happened is that they have been confined to working on a corner of the project where they can still do a lot of good without others having to understand the code that they produce. It helps that, as critical as I am being of this coworker, they are a huge believer in testing, so I am actually very confident that the code they are producing has the correct behavior, even when I cannot follow the details of how it works that well.

Every one had already been launched.

Easy: recognizing bird calls on my phone.

Sometimes this can help, but lately I’ve been running into the opposite problem where people have been following this advice to such a degree that one cannot ever figure out what is going on without having to constantly jump around to find the actual code involved in doing something.

Because some of us are bitter at the trees for generating so much pollen at this time of year and want revenge.

Spotted the INTERCAL programmer.

Because it looks like that functionality uses special compiler functionality only available on GCC and clang?

“This isn’t us encouraging you to gamble-it is us asking you to think about how bad you would feel years from now if you learned that you could have made a ton of money if you had only placed a bet right now! It’s completely different!”

Ah, yes, the good old git off --my lawn command.

Yes. My rule of thumb is that generally rebasing is the better approach, in part because if your commit history is relatively clean then it is easier to merge in changes one commit at a time than all at once. However, sometimes so much has changed that replaying your commits puts you in the position of having to solve so many problems that it is more trouble than it is worth, in which case you should feel no qualms about aborting the rebase (git rebase --abort) and using a merge instead.

The way I structure my commits, it is usually (but not always) easier and more reliable for me to replay my commits one at a time on top of the main branch and see how each relatively small change needs to be adapted in isolation–running the full test suite at each step to verify that my changes were correct–than to be presented with a slew of changes all at once that result from marrying all of my changes with all of the changes made to the main branch at once. So I generally start by attempting a rebase and fall back to a merge if that ends up creating more problems than it solves.

I’m not the one you asked, but what I like isn’t really about PHP itself, but the fact that I can get dirt cheap hosting with PHP and MySQL.

Oh, wow, I looked a little into this and hosting really is dirt cheap! That is a benefit that I genuinely was not expecting.

Either way, it’s an awesome language, happily been using it for decades now

Mind taking a moment to share why you like it? I am not very familiar with it.

I appreciate this sentiment a great deal in general, but sometimes it is difficult to uphold when I have to regularly deal with “time vampires” who not only require that I explain the same thing to them over and over again beyond reason but who also show no willingness or ability to actually learn the thing that I am explaining to them; at some point I just run out of patience and start ignoring them to the extent that I am able.