Accurate. LaTeX is great, it makes you feel like you have superpowers compared to “office suite”-style software. But every once in a while you just run into some bullshit that feels like it’s stuck in 1985 and it completely breaks your flow. I remember wanting to make a longtable where text in the “date” column would be rotated by 90 degrees to leave more horizontal room for the other columns. It took me two rotateboxes, a phantom, a vspace, a hspace and 40 minutes of my life to get the alignment right. Would probably have taken a duckduckgo search and three clicks in Libreoffice.

You also need that usepackage just like python.

I got way too excited Lemmy parsed LaTeX for a second

Real fast inverse square root algorithm hours

C should show some overflow corruption of the problem graphic.

I had this in CSS.

What makes JavaScript so widely disliked? I know very little of it, and in skimming different stuff I think I’ve seen like a million different frameworks for it, so is that a part of it?

Ever wanted to be somewhere inbetween java and JavaScript?

Yeah, that’s Groovy. Only it’s the wrong groove

I used to think Javascript was hell when I barely used it. Now I have to build with it regularly and… once in a while I’m just right about things.

JS is ironic punishment as a programming language. It’s fun to screw around in! And then you have to use it for stuff, and pain ensues.

It lacks a lot of malloc() 🤣

…with 19 bugs 9 of which are exploitable.

But this doesn’t return the Solution. You don’t invoke the lambda.

(Or does C++ have implied returns now? Last I heard there was implied move)

C:

return *(solution_t*)&problem;

I’ve seen this before but don’t accept it myself. There are cases where you just wanted to cat. In this case, maybe to review the problem. Then you want to extend the command. Preserving it in the next commands where you start stacking on pipes is useful since it can be fewer strokes and maintain a habit.

I personally never understood how anyone could find Perl appealing or even “good” to program in, probably because I could never understand wtf the code was meant to do

Be honest: you just mashed your fist on the keyboard, didn’t you?

I was hired twice to write Perl, both times switched my department to something else after a few years.

Perl is good for command line processing, and absolutely god awful read-only magic hacks. Nothing else.

Over the top tone: “Pretty sure that won’t compile. $EVAL_ERROR modulo what you get from the filehandle called = isn’t an lvalue that can be put through the Goatse operator that I’m aware of.”

But seriously(?), I’m almost certain that’s not how that would be parsed. = isn’t a valid bareword, so Perl would choke on the spaceship operator not being a term… I think.

After testing… It’s worse. I think it’s parsing <> as the glob operator and = as a filespec.

For those who don’t know Perl:

Because of its appearance, <=> really is called the spaceship operator (at least, when it can be parsed as an operator and not whatever happened above).

=()= by comparison has unofficially been called Goatse. If you don’t know what Goatse is, find out at your own risk. If you do know, you can see why this particular pseudo-operator was given that name.

And if you’re still reading, =()= is a pseudo-operator because it’s not actually parsed as part of the syntax. It’s literally an assignment operator = followed by an empty list () followed by another assignment operator =, providing list context to the outside of the equals signs that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

[Why are you still still reading?] Context is important in Perl. If a function returns a list of values (which is something Perl functions can do) and you try to store the result in a scalar variable, replacing the usual = with =()= will store the number of elements returned rather than the last element of the list.

Perl is write-only code. Larry Wall raised a monkey’s paw and asked for a language that works the way programmers want. So most Perl is the first thing someone tried, unfiltered by rigid syntax putting your thoughts in order, compiler warnings bringing side effects to mind, or even names forcing you to decide what a variable is. An uncommented Perl script is raw brain patterns displayed as ASCII.

Thank god it runs like crap. We’d be in so much trouble if it was fast. Optimized C isn’t exactly gorgeous, but any project that compiles proves someone looked at the code more than once.

https://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_4/tpj0404-0015.html

The Perl Poetry Contest - The Perl Journal, Winter 1999

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# asylum.pl
# by Harl

close (youreyes);
bind (yourself, fast);

while ($narcosis) {
   exists $to($calm);
   not calm;
}

accept the, anesthesia;
seek the, $granted, $asylum’
and wait;

stat ically;

unlink and listen (in, $complicity);

for (a, little) {
   system (“sync hronicity”);
}

Sry, the best I can do on mobile

JavaScript is a great language until you ask it to do more than toggle a div or send a request to the server

Typescript is amazing though.

I thought it was a jab at all the NPM packages

You’re completely correct. But what I meant by that graphic is “poor solutions leading to more problems”, not “breaking down problems into smaller ones”. It was inspired by a cube drone comic that made the same complaint, but I can’t find that particular comic now