Is COBOL subject to buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs? I honestly don’t know.

I don’t recall the COBOL code I’ve read using pointers.

lol, right, this is terrorism!

If 10 people are sitting at a table…

When Russian citizens understand there are direct consequences to them, Russian citizens stop supporting Putin’s actions.

Personally I’m glad the sanctions have some bite. You can’t expect to just keep living your life as you wish when your country is obliterating its neighbors and disrupting stability worldwide.

Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison

Yeah let’s not forget the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) which was more full-featured of an object-oriented language than most “current” languages.

The dynamism allowed both Smalltalk and CLOS to avoid a dark corner that will confound your typical OOP’er today - the circle/ellipse modeling problem; they allow an object to “become” a different type on its own accord. Take that, Java!

Could be a crypto key, or a randomly distributed 64-bit database row ID, or a memory offset in a stack dump of a 64 bit program

And then JSON doesn’t restrict numbers to any range or precision; and at least when I deal with JSON values, I feel the need to represent them as a BigDecimal or similar arbitrary precision type to ensure I am not losing information.

That’s because the nearest representable float to 0.99999999999999 is 1.0 - not because Python is handling rationals correctly.

This is a float imprecision issue that just happens to work out in this case.

It’s worth wondering why, if Python is OK with “/“ producing a result of a different type than its arguments, don’t they implement a ratio type. e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node18.html#SECTION00612000000000000000

How would you implement this in code?

JavaScript is truly a bizarre language - we don’t need to go as far as arbitrary-precision decimal, it does not even feature integers.

I have to wonder why it ever makes the cut as a backend language.

You have to explicitly check if the return value is an error and propagate it. You write the same boilerplate if (err) return err over and over again, which just litters your code.

That’s only true in crappy languages that have no concept of async workflows, monads, effects systems, etc.

Sad to see that an intentionally weak/limited language like Go is now the counterargument for good modeling of errors.

If you think of low frequencies as “red” and high frequencies as “blue”, corresponding to the range of the visible light spectrum, then pink noise has more “red” and less “blue”; white noise has equal amounts of all frequencies, etc.

Yes, it is a huge pain, especially if you want to have round-trip interoperability with humans using markup. Wikipedia had a major challenge with this when they decided to add a rich text editor alongside wiki markup.

yeah, communities should have subject tag sets. I don’t care for anime or sports or video games - i should be able to turn off those tags. Not block 50 different game communities ad hoc

Surge suppressors do not drop extra voltage to ground. They selectively short out surges between whatever two conductors have a high potential between them.

No ground conductor means there cannot be a high potential between it and anything else!

If your company is using story points to “measure” developers, they are completely misusing that concept, and it probably results in a low-teamwork environment (as you describe).

The purpose of story points is so a team can say “we’re not taking more than X work for the next two weeks. Make sure it’s the important stuff.” It is a way to communicate a limit to force prioritization by the product owner.

And, in fact, data shows that point estimation so poorly converges on reality that teams may as well assign everything a “1”. The key technique is to try to make stories the same size, and to reduce variability by having the team swarm/mob to unblock stuck work.

Who creates these tasks? They need to close the year old items, reevaluate the work and break it down into sub-5-day chunks. If there are so many unknowns that it’s impossible to do that, the team needs to brainstorm how to resolve them.

FYI, banks do run exactly this type of analysis inside their own system to get around not being able to share your account activity.

honestly, I don’t want established Reddit supermods land grabbing topics in the Fediverse. The right people will find it organically based on their own motivation (as simple as searching for “reddit alternatives”).

Especially don’t want the shallow, low-quality content from default/“top” subreddits.