Nice to see Crotchless Pants (Mathematics) from a few days ago in the background https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mathematics-2
Nice to see Crotchless Pants (Mathematics) from a few days ago in the background https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mathematics-2
You can put magnets near dogs.
Not all bearings are created equal. This might last for years. This also might explode into fast-moving metal shards in a day. It shouldn’t be a big problem if it does, as an angle grinder should be built to contain exploding bearings, but it might be worth ordering a higher-spec bearing to have on hand before you need it in a hurry.
If the AI had any actual I, it might point out that the most recent Halloween Document was from twenty years ago, and Microsoft’s attitudes have changed in that time. After all, they make a lot of money from renting out Linux VMs through Azure, so it’d be silly for them to hate their revenue stream.
I’d be unsurprised if it’s just set up to abandon the conversation if accused of lying, rather than defending its position.
I think you’ve misunderstood my complaint. I know how you go about composing things in a Unix shell. Within your post, you’ve mentioned several distinct languages:
grep -P
ps
’s format expressionsThat’s quite a lot of languages for such a simple task, and there’s nothing forcing any consistency between them. Indeed, awk specifically avoids being like sh because it wants to be good at the things you use awk for. I don’t personally consider something to be doing its job well if it’s going to be wildly different from the things it’s supposed to be used with, though (which is where the disagreement comes from - the people designing Unix thought of it as a benefit). It’s important to remember that the people designing Unix were very clever and were designing it for other very clever people, but also under conditions where if they hit a confusing awk
script, they could just yell Brian, and have the inventor of awk
walk over to their desk and explain it. On the other hand, it’s a lot of stuff for a regular person to have in their head at once, and it’s not particularly easy to discover or learn about in the first place, especially if you’re just reading a script someone else has written that uses utilities you’ve not encountered before. If a general-purpose programming language had completely different conventions in different parts of its standard library, it’d be rightly criticised for it, and the Unix shell experience isn’t a completely un-analogous entity.
So, I wouldn’t consider the various tools you used that don’t behave like the other tools you used to be doing their job well, as I’d say that’s a reasonable requirement for something to be doing its job well.
On the other hand, PowerShell can do all of this without needing to call into any external tools while using a single language designed to be consistent with itself. You’ve actually managed to land on what I’d consider a pretty bad case for PowerShell as instead of using an obvious command like Get-ComputerInfo
, you need:
(Get-WmiObject Win32_ComputerSystem).FreePhysicalMemory / 1024
Even so, you can tell at a glance that it’s getting the computer system, accessing it’s free physical memory, and dividing the number by 1024.
To get the process ID with the largest working set, you’d use something like
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet | Select-Object -Last 1).Id
# or
(Get-Process | Sort-Object WorkingSet)[-1].Id
I’m assuming either your ps
is different to mine, or you’ve got a typo, as mine gives the parent process ID as the second column, not the process’ own ID, which is a good demonstration of the benefits of structured data in a shell - you don’t need sed/awk/grep incantations to extract the data you need, and don’t need to learn the right output flag for each program to get JSON output and pipe it to jq
.
There’s not a PowerShell builtin that does the same job as watch
, but it’s not a standard POSIX tool, so I’m not going to consider it cheating if I don’t bother implementing it for this post.
So overall, there’s still the same concept of composing something to do a specific task out of parts, and the way you need to think about it isn’t wildly different, but:
Select-String
does what it says on the tin. grep
only does what it says on the tin if you already know it’s global regular expression print.Specifically regarding the Unix philosophy, it’s really just the first two bullet points that are relevant - a different definition of thing is used, and consistency is a part of doing a job well.
Powershell isn’t perfect, but I like it a lot more than anything that takes sh
as a major influence or thing to maintain backwards compatibility with. I don’t think the Unix philosophy of having lots of small tools that do one thing and do it well that you compose together has ever been achieved as I think being consistent with other tools you use at the same time should be part of doing your thing well, and things like sed, grep and perl all having different regular expression syntax demonstrate inconsistency and are easy to find. I also like that powershell is so verbose as it makes it much easier to read someone else’s script without knowing much powershell, and doesn’t end up getting in the way of actually writing powershell as the autocomplete is really good. I like having a type system and structured data, too.
Some of these things are brought to a unixier shell with nushell, but I’m not convinced it’ll take off. Even if people use it, it’ll be a long while before you Google a problem and the solution also includes a nushell snippet, whereas for any Windows problem, you’ll typically get a GUI solution and a powershell solution, and only a maniac would give a CMD solution.
Commands and flags (for native powershell commands) are case insensitive, but the autocomplete both in the shell and text editors is really good, so people typically use it and have it tidy up whatever they’ve written to match the canonical case.
He got upset that there was an X button making it look like he could remove the ads, but it didn’t remove the ads.
There are other rarely-used C+±like languages that fit your criteria, and they basically all aim to eliminate the kind of thing I was talking about. If someone was used to one of those and tried picking up C++ for the first time, they’d probably end up with working, but unnecessarily slow C++, having assumed the compiler would do a bunch of things for them that it actually wouldn’t.
The popular low-level systems programming languages that aren’t C++ are C and Rust. Neither is object-oriented. C programmers forced to use C++ tend to basically write C with a smattering of features that make it not compile with a C compiler, and produce a horror show that brings out the worst of both languages and looks nothing like C++ a C++ programmer would write, then write a blog post about how terrible C++ is because when they tried using it like C, it wasn’t as good at being C as C was. Rust programmers generally have past experience with C++, so tend to know how to use it properly, even if they hate the experience.
I’d say this is pretty dependent on the language. For example, with C++, you need to micromanage (or at least benefit from micromanaging) a lot of things that you can get away without knowing about at all with other languages. That stuff takes time to pick up if you’re self-teaching as you can write stuff that looks like it works without knowing its half as fast as it could be because you aren’t making use of move semantics, and if a colleague is teaching you, then that’s time they’re not spending directly doing their own work. On the other hand, someone with Typescript experience could write pretty decent Javascript from the get-go.
The legalese in the US (which might as well be everywhere as you need to have compatible copyright with the US to have a trade deal with the US, and your country is in trouble if it doesn’t have a trade deal with the US) is basically that:
I’m sure plenty of publishers would love for the second set of rules to apply to things like books, and from a quick googling, it seems like occasionally academic textbooks have included a licence agreement instead of you actually owning the physical book, but I imagine that most publishers are concerned about bad PR from attempting this with a hit novel and also don’t want to be accused of fraud for having their not-a-book-just-a-licence on the shelf next to regular books and thereby tricking consumers into thinking they were buying a regular book. EA attempted to double-dip over a decade ago with Battlefield 3, which included a copy of the game (with regular First Sale Doctrine rights) and a licence key for the online pass (which wasn’t transferrable) and got bad press because of it. Newer PC games often come as a key in a box with no disk or a disk that only runs a web installer, so you’ve not got a copy of the game to claim you’ve bought and obviously only have a licence, and this seems to have caused less upset. This wouldn’t work with a book, though, as you have to fill in the pages at the printing factory, and can’t magically do it only after the user’s got it home.
Have you set up linear advance/pressure advance? I found it worked wonders with making sure the extruder gets back up to pressure after a retraction.
If we’re having thonk, we need angery.
I’ve yet to find tooling that supports this. Clang format has a setting that looks like it does it, but actually does something else. If I have to press the spacebar a bunch of times each time I add an argument to a function, that’s a pain, and it’s a bigger pain to convince the people I’m working with that that pain’s less bad than using spaces everywhere and having the IDE deal with it.
Until the people making editors and auto formatters acknowledge that the obvious most sensible whitespace style is even a thing, I’m forced to do something else and be really grumpy about it.
Your spoiler tag isn’t working.