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Bug #915: Solved

nedbatchelder.com

81–90 of 111 posts

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#81
post #77
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a power-law dropoff when it comes to follow-up submissions, since the hivemind craves novelty. But it would be fun to try. Maybe it could become a thing: Bug HN! The trick would be to make the bugs interesting: weird or hard, preferably both.

I think the biggest dragon to slay would be the legendary GTK issue #233 which has been open for 15 years and has become sort of a meme by now. So many people try to solve it but fail since it requires intricate knowledge of the framework. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

Didn't one of the other gtk derived DM replaced the file picker with their own which had thumbnail view? I thought Gnome never changed it because it didn't fit their vision.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#82
post #4

Pretty funny how the entire HN rallied together to solve some github issue on someone's personal repo. I'll try posting some of my bugs here to see if it'll work for me as well.

It's the kind of drive that made stackoverflow work.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should give a warning at least because it (and this is probably a C thing) treats or implicitly casts a boolean true / false to a 0/1. You shouldn't be able to do PORTA & true. One more for my list of "why I don't like C".

Implicit casts are both convenient and evil. JavaScript deserves its own place for it. I've never understood why any language does this. To save a few keystrokes? Code is much more read than written.

Javascript and PHP deal with HTML, where input forms can only request text* but are often used for numbers, so the conversion rules are an attempt to automatically treat numbers as numbers instead of forcing programmers to always do the conversion themselves (as other frameworks rely on instead).

With this kept in mind, I've personally found almost all the implicit conversions in both languages to be intuitive.

* You can limit the values to numerics, and nowadays use attributes to handle javascript, but that wouldn't help PHP where it gets encoded to querystring anyway.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#85
post #77
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a power-law dropoff when it comes to follow-up submissions, since the hivemind craves novelty. But it would be fun to try. Maybe it could become a thing: Bug HN! The trick would be to make the bugs interesting: weird or hard, preferably both.

I think the biggest dragon to slay would be the legendary GTK issue #233 which has been open for 15 years and has become sort of a meme by now. So many people try to solve it but fail since it requires intricate knowledge of the framework. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

I dunno, but the GTK devs do not seem like a sympathetic bunch there. In fact it looks downright toxic.

After reading an issue like that I would be very hard pressed to motivate myself to contribute anything.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#86
post #85
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest dragon to slay would be the legendary GTK issue #233 which has been open for 15 years and has become sort of a meme by now. So many people try to solve it but fail since it requires intricate knowledge of the framework. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

I dunno, but the GTK devs do not seem like a sympathetic bunch there. In fact it looks downright toxic. After reading an issue like that I would be very hard pressed to motivate myself to contribute anything.

My impression is the opposite: random users demanding that some devs spend their time on a tricky corner issue and getting angry about it. After reading their comments, I'd be very hard pressed to motivate myself to work on it.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is "open file" throwing an exception when file doesn't exist but "find substring" returns -1 when substring doesn't exist? Well, first, there's more to it than that. "Open file" will throw an exception when you open the file to read and it doesn't exist. If you open the file to write and it doesn't exist, you won't get an exception because that's expected behavior. Instead, the file will be automatically create…

> The same problem is more frequently discussed in the context of hash tables. If I look up a key in a hash table and I get a null value, is that because there is no value stored for that key, or is it because null is the value stored for that key? People would like accessing the table to be convenient while distinguishing these two cases, and python doesn't allow that. You can choose from some different behaviors: O…

Javascript's solution is actually obj.hasOwnProperty(key) and the "in" operator ("in" checks the inheritance tree, hasOwnProperty doesn't).

Checking for undefined is better known/easily discoverable but hasn't been the right way to do it since at least IE 5.5 / Firefox 1.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#88
post #77
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a power-law dropoff when it comes to follow-up submissions, since the hivemind craves novelty. But it would be fun to try. Maybe it could become a thing: Bug HN! The trick would be to make the bugs interesting: weird or hard, preferably both.

I think the biggest dragon to slay would be the legendary GTK issue #233 which has been open for 15 years and has become sort of a meme by now. So many people try to solve it but fail since it requires intricate knowledge of the framework. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/233

There are a lot of open source projects with decade+ old bugs. Could be a community sport to tackle one ever month or something and accidentally improve the world as a side effect.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#89
post #86
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, but the GTK devs do not seem like a sympathetic bunch there. In fact it looks downright toxic. After reading an issue like that I would be very hard pressed to motivate myself to contribute anything.

My impression is the opposite: random users demanding that some devs spend their time on a tricky corner issue and getting angry about it. After reading their comments, I'd be very hard pressed to motivate myself to work on it.

Well one person actually provided a solution, but then one of the maintainers just dismissed it because it was on Github, then locked the issue.

Re: Bug #915: Solved

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hardly just "someone's personal repo". coveragepy has 1k github stars and is used by nearly every Python project under the sun.

Ive been a Python (among other languages) dev for about 25 years and I've never heard about this project until just now.

We all have blind spots.
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