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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve read all of them, and I really enjoyed them. It’s true that it’s basically “Royal Navy in space”, and it might be a little cheezy, but it’s a pretty relaxing read.

    The space combat stuff gets much better in the later books, Weber managed to build satisfying mechanics for it. There’s some good political intrigue too. The one thing that pulled me “out” of the books a couple times were some character names, some of them are pretty ridiculous (Queen Elizabeth III for example).





  • shove some text into stdout

    That’s not what this operator does normally, and if you try to “shove” something into anything else (an int into a variable? a function into an object?) you’ll get surprises… Basically it’s “special” and nothing else in the language behaves like it. Learning hello world in C++ teaches you absolutely nothing useful about the language, because it doesn’t generalize.

    C, in contrast, has many instances of complex functions like printf (another commenter mentioned variable arguments), and learning to call a function is something very useful that generalizes well to the rest of the language. You also learn early enough that each different function has its own “user manual” of how to use it, but it’s still just a function call.


  • this std::cout << "hello world" bullshit is in no way intuitive. You’re using the bit-shift operator to output stuff to the console? WTF? Why 2 colons? What is cout? And then these guys go on to complain about JS being weird…

    No, C is where it’s at: printf("hello world"); is just a function call, like all the other things you do in C.





  • I use Canadian Multilingual on a ISO-style keyboard, mostly because my main language is French and typing accents on a US keyboard is horrible.

    Coding makes a hefty use of Alt (“option” on mac), but they’re relatively well-placed (see the labels on the bottom-right of the keys in the pic)

    My main annoyance with it is that the ANSI-style keyboard puts “ù” to the left of “1”, instead of the “/” you get on that key on a ISO keyboard (where ù is between the left shift and z). You can see how annoying this would be when programming or using the command-line. And of course, Apple stores only stock MacBooks with ANSI keyboards…