Fork me on GitHub
#off-topic
<
2020-08-20
>
Daniel Tan07:08:11

i wonder if you guys do get a transparent scoring rubric when you get some programming test

noisesmith09:08:27

whose test? what kind of test?

Daniel Tan10:08:15

take home assignments basically

borkdude09:08:59

Question to native English speakers: should stacktrace or callstack be spelled with or without a space?

flowthing09:08:22

Not native, but I would spell them with the space. It seems Wikipedia agrees with me.

Mno09:08:43

Here’s a not very satisfying answer: I consider it to be separate words that are transitioning into a compound state, so either way is probably acceptable.

p-himik09:08:34

But comparing numbers of results in Google says that "stacktrace" is the most used one. Yeah, languages evolve. Often "the correct way" lags behind "the actually used one".

p-himik09:08:51

Also don't forget about "traceback". :) Python uses the word without spaces.

borkdude09:08:55

Is traceback the same concept as stack trace? I've always wondered about that, not being a Python user

Mno09:08:38

I’ve always used stacktrace all together, but then again I don’t google it very often.

dominicm09:08:02

Don't you need quotes around the space version?

dominicm09:08:06

Quotes is about the same. Slightly lower.

Mno09:08:41

I’m not sure, I don’t use this often, but I also tried checking out Google Ngram Viewer, which checks for occurences in books

noisesmith09:08:30

> Often "the correct way" lags behind "the actually used one". what fascinates me are the very rare exceptions to this rule for example, victorian academics made a game of creating fanciful names for collections of animals, and symbolism for flowers / bouqets it started as a fun game and directly became correct usage as soon as it was publicly visible

Mno09:08:34

If learned anything from this one is that when it’s all together it tends to be referring to a class because it’s most commonly found as “StackTrace” when together. (turn smoothing down to 0 to understand what I’m referring to)

noisesmith09:08:51

we do this alot in programming language / library design :D

p-himik09:08:30

Oh how I despise that fanciful names game. Really "fun" now to learn hundreds of words that are used only in a single context. Worse than the irregular verbs.

dharrigan09:08:31

In the Java SDK APIs, it's two words "stack trace"

noisesmith09:08:09

@U2FRKM4TW and it happens a lot in front end programming as well (not just names, weird semi useful abstractions too)

p-himik09:08:36

Hmm, I can't think of an example right now. Can you give some?

noisesmith09:08:47

the whole churn of build tools / dependency systems / frontend frameworks / ui toolkits / css techniques and conventions that follows the same rules as the width of men's ties and the length of women's skirts

noisesmith09:08:21

these should be abstractions that help us write code and focus on the parts that are meaningful to our app, instead they are endless churning sinks for brain power

noisesmith09:08:29

(getting back down off my soap box now)

p-himik09:08:11

Yeah, sounds about right. Wait, you just used both "front end" and "frontend". :)

noisesmith09:08:24

having survived eating my own dogfood of bad libraries as a junior engineer and wasting effort on solving problems at the wrong layer, I can't help but think an entire ecosystem of overproductive juniors is doing this to each other in the js ecosystem

noisesmith09:08:50

@U2FRKM4TW you found my joke 😄

p-himik10:08:06

A master sleuth, this one. :) My current perception of the ecosystem is 100% in line with yours. Definitely thankful for the churn-less CLJS.

Lyn Headley11:08:40

Postponing is refusing: The practical effective of prioritizing something low is to refuse to do it. But verbally one may be committing to it or at least signaling a desire to do it, trying to do it. There is a lot of social flexibility here. In fact this is the way software managers often handle importuning feature requests. One drawback of this procedure is that it clutters the list of things to be done with irrelevant or distracting information.

p-himik11:08:24

That's quite an absolute.

Lyn Headley11:08:33

yeah should soften it a bit

p-himik11:08:34

Honestly, I don't think there can be enough softening to make it something that's universally true. That is, without adding words like "often", or even "sometimes".

Lyn Headley11:08:40

I'm describing a strategy, not a law.

p-himik11:08:03

What's the end goal?

Mno11:08:00

I don’t think people would disagree with: “Postponing (can be/is) used as a refusal”

Mno11:08:40

Though I consider putting something on a low priority that you don’t intend to do a type of lying. Since it is in fact obscuring the fact that you don’t plan on doing it, even if the list were to empty up to that item.

p-himik12:08:17

I've postponed tasks for different reasons: - I don't know how to do it - I don't know if it will be useful in a year or even in a month - It requires something that's not yet implemented - It genuinely has a low priority, and we don't have infinite resources to do all tasks at once - It should be easy to implement and looks like a perfect entry-level task (and has a low priority), so I'm waiting for a new junior dev - It would be better handled by a person with more experience in that particular area - The customer that requested that change is not sure themselves on how exactly it should end up being The list goes on.

noisesmith13:08:03

@UDF1WUJTH as the other side of this tactic, which is a wedge, there's an alternative of collaboration, in iterated rounds, collaboration wins

noisesmith13:08:17

most workplace interactions are iterated, on the internet nearly everything is iterated

noisesmith13:08:04

also this is probably a tactic not a strategy?

✔️ 3
noisesmith13:08:36

I find that taking actions with human beings that introduce the framing that we are competing and only one of us will win is not conducive to happiness and quality of life

noisesmith13:08:00

(that's also more of an absolute than it should be!)

Lyn Headley13:08:27

Tactical and strategic questions are relevant in large corporate settings. You may find yourself in a face-to-face meeting where someone makes a feature request that strikes you as misguided, but which you cannot refuse outright, perhaps because they outrank you or because there are unsolved technical questions involved. By agreeing that the idea is good and putting it on the backlog somewhere, you can gain time to collect your thoughts and make your case without giving away your immediate reaction. I don't think this is always unethical. You might even change your mind and end up agreeing with the suggestion without having to backpedal on your initial negative reaction.

noisesmith13:08:13

oh no I agree that a wedge used sincirely (reflecting your actual intent) is not unethical!

noisesmith13:08:11

(also, going back and backpedaling is a strong tactic for collaboration)

walterl19:08:56

More specific: "Postponing is refusing for right now". In my mind postponement says "current priority is low". But priorities change. As mentioned, the reasons why something isn't fitting for right now, are many and varied. If it doesn't need to be done now, it may need to be done later (its priority may rise). Or it may become clear that it was never needed (it will go from low priority to closed/removed). This ties in with using postponement as a tactic: a manager may foresee that an idea won't pan out, but, rather than spending a lot of time explaining why, they "accept as low priority"/"accept & postpone" it, and let the reasons why it never would've worked out, become apparent over time. I don't see anything wrong/dishonest about that.

p-himik12:08:43

I'm watching a video about group theory, the current topic is "26 sporadic groups" (ones that don't follow any pattern). For some reason, this sentence made me laugh out loud: "That a field of study rooted in symmetry itself has such a patched together fundamental structure is... I mean, it's just bizarre. It's like the Universe was designed by a committee."

6
jaihindhreddy12:08:47

^ For anyone curious what this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH0oCDa74tE

👍 15
👹 3
coby19:08:40

I don't know nearly enough about group theory/pure mathematics to be sure, but this seems heavily related to the work Stephen Wolfram has been doing: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/