Wrong–it’s a cube!

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 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!”

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.

What I like to tell people is that I am as good a programmer as I am for the simple reason that I began when I was about 8, which gave me a very early start on making all of the mistakes one can possibly make when learning how to code.

(It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

And if it doesn’t have objects, then it has no class!

That is conceptually how dynamic programming works, but in practice the way you build the cache is from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It’s a bit like how you can implement computation of the Fibonacci sequence in a top-down manner using a recursive function with caching, but it is a lot more efficient to instead build it in a bottom-up manner.

Sure, but shouldn’t you want your generated markup to adhere to the complete standards so that you know it will be interpreted correctly, rather than hoping that the browser will make the correct guess about what you really meant?

I completely agree with that assessment, but what is weird to me is that most people use frameworks so they don’t actually touch any of the markup themselves.

That approach makes a lot of sense for amateur web sites, but less sense for professional web sites.

Wait… I just noticed this:

[XHTML] never took off on the web, in part because in a website context so much HTML is generated by templates and libraries that it’s all too easy to introduce a syntax error somewhere along the line; and unlike HTML, where a syntax error would still render something, the tiniest syntax error in XHTML means the whole thing gets thrown out by the browser and you get the Yellow Screen of Death.

This confuses me; don’t you want to make sure you are always generating a syntactically valid document, rather than hoping that the browser will make something suitable up to work around your mistake?

In fairness, the actual title of the article is “What’s Your Go-To Java Stack [emphasis mine]”.

Thanks, it’s actually kind of nice to hear someone who likes using PHP explaining in detail why they like it.

Yeah but performance has way more to do with architecture than it does code readability.

Indeed, I am a bit notorious at work for speeding C++ code up by rewriting it in Python, and I have been able to do this not because my Python code is particularly fast but because the architecture of the C++ code was such a complicated and inefficient mess that it actually managed to be slower than Python.

In fairness, sometimes it is useful to get hands on experience with a system before you dig into its fundamentals so that you have a reference point that helps you absorb the information.

I am not really sold that going to all of this effort to implement a new communication mechanism is really a better plan than just going with WebSockets, even if WebSockets is not a perfect fit (which they very briefly cover in the article). However, if I am wrong then perhaps someone here could explain to me what I am missing.

Q: Why the name “Fleece”?

A: It’s a reference to the mythical Golden Fleece, the treasure sought by Jason [emphasis mine] and the Argonauts.

I see what you did there…