• 1 Post
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle


  • Imagine the following:

    You actually can stop the time by snapping you fingers, but it stops time for the entire universe, including yourself, with the exception of one single observer on some unimportant planet in the Andromeda galaxy. After 100 years from the POV of that observer, time resumes again.

    Would you even be able to tell?









  • waigl@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldSmugly
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    5 months ago

    After googling around for a bit, and then switching to duckduckgo instead (Google becomes aggressively unhelpful as soon as you have words like “ejaculated” in your query. Duckduckgo does the same thing, just not quite so much.), it seems the book in question might be “The tenant of Wildfell Hall” by Emily Brontë.






  • waigl@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@programming.devUniversity Students
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    61
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Writing good comments is an art form, and beginner programmers often struggle with it. They know comments mostly from their text books, where the comments explain what is happening to someone who doesn’t yet know programming, and nobody has told them yet that that is not at all a useful commenting style outside of education. So that’s how they use them. It usually ends up making the code harder to read, not easier.

    Later on, programmers will need to learn a few rules about comments, like:

    • Assume that whoever reads your code knows the programming language, the platform and the problem domain at least in general terms. You are not writing a teaching aid, you are writing presumably useful software.
    • Don’t comment the obvious. (Aside from documentation comments for function/method/class signatures)
    • Don’t comment what a line is doing. Instead, write your code, especially names for variables, constants, classes, functions, methods and so on, so that they produce talking code that needs no comments. Reserve the “what” style comments for where that just isn’t possible.
    • Do comment the why. Tell the reader about your intentions and about big-picture issues. If an if-statement is hard to parse, write a corresponding if clause in plain English on top of it.
    • In some cases, comment the “why not”, to keep maintenance programmers from falling in the same trap you already found.





  • waigl@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldTake your FICO and shove it!
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Not very easily. Concise, easy to understand and correct explanations of how modern money (arguably since 1971) works are not easy to come by, and also the system just is a bit weird and counter intuitive. (Concise, easy to understand, but wrong explanations are, of course, all over the place. Almost everybody thinks they know how money works. Almost nobody actually does.)

    One source that explains some of it would be “Debt: The first 5000 years” by David Graeber, but a) it’s a fairly lengthy book with quite a lot of historical background and b) it has a fairly strong politicial spin to it.