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The Norway Problem

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Re: The Norway Problem

#121

Post by aasasd »

goatinaboat wrote: post #91
WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Anyone who invents a format that involves…

The obvious first step toward the brighter future is to refrain from using any and all software that utilizes the malevolent formats you mentioned. Doing otherwise would mean simply being untrue to one's own conscience and word.

Re: The Norway Problem

#122

Post by coopierez »

asiachick wrote: post #115
WalterBright wrote: post #47

> The most tragic aspect of this bug, howevere, is that it is intended behavior according to the YAML 2.0 specification. This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. Other bad ideas that resurface constantly: 1. implicit declaration of variables 2. don't really need a ; as a statement terminator 3. assert shoul…

What do think of implicit member access (C++, Java, C#) vs explicit (python, javascript)? Is there a concrete argument one way or the other? I feel like I prefer explicit self.member = value this.member = value vs implicit member = value But clearly C++/Java/C# people are happy with implicit ... though many of them try to make it explicit by using a naming convention.

That was my single biggest pet-peeve of C++. A variable appears in the middle of a member function? Good luck figuring out what owns it. Is it local? Owned by the class? The super-class? (And in that case - which one?)

The added mental load of tracking variables' sources builds up.

Re: The Norway Problem

#123

Post by kstenerud »

chousuke wrote: post #106
kstenerud wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem space I'm targeting with https://concise-encoding.org/ * Text AND binary so that humans can edit easily, and machines can transmit energy and bandwidth efficiently. * Carefully designed spec to avoid ambiguities (and their security implications). * Strong type support so you're not using all kinds of incompatible hacks to serialize your data. * Versioned, because there's no such thing as the perfe…

I'm skimming through the human readable spec, and it seems decent, but I noticed the spec allows unquoted strings. What's the reasoning for this? In my experience unquoted strings cause nothing but trouble, and are confusing to humans who may interpret them as keywords. Any reason for not using RFC2119 keywords in the spec? Using them should make the spec easier to read.

> I noticed the spec allows unquoted strings. What's the reasoning for this? In my experience unquoted strings cause nothing but trouble, and are confusing to humans who may interpret them as keywords.

Unquoted strings are much nicer for humans to work with. All special keywords and object encodings are prefixed with sigils (@, &, $, #, etc), so any bare text starting with a letter is either a string or an invalid document, and any bare text starting with a numeral is either a number or an invalid document.

> Any reason for not using RFC2119 keywords in the spec? Using them should make the spec easier to read.

I use a superset of those keywords to give more precision in meaning: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

Re: The Norway Problem

#124

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #89
tremon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does the inclusion/requirement of parity features reduce the expressivity of the language? This was a real eye-opener for me when learning Latin in school: stylistic expressions such as meter, juxtaposition, symmetry are so much easier to include when the meaning of a sentence doesn't depend on word order.

> stylistic expressions such as meter, juxtaposition, symmetry are so much easier to include when the meaning of a sentence doesn't depend on word order. Eh.... some things are easy and some things are hard in any language. The specifics differ, and so do the details of what kinds of things you're looking for in poetry. Traditional Germanic verse focuses on alliteration. Modern English verse focuses on rhyme. Latin v…

[deleted]

Re: The Norway Problem

#125

Post by DennisP »

Something that used to plague me is that I had database processes importing Excel docs from clients, and if the first few rows in a column were numbers, SQLServer assumed that all the values must be numbers. Then it would run into cells containing other strings, and instead of revising its assumption, it would just import them as null. Since clients often didn't have great data hygiene, it was a problem.

I finally solved it by exporting to csv, and using third-party software that handled its own import and did it correctly.

Re: The Norway Problem

#126

Post by dpratt71 »

I don't understand why Haskell gets brought up in the middle of an otherwise interesting and useful article. This sort of thing cannot happen in Haskell. And while Haskell is not universally admired, I can't recall seeing Haskell's flavor of type inference being a reason why someone claimed to dislike Haskell.

Re: The Norway Problem

#127

Post by Waterluvian »

I have never gotten far into a project and thought, "my config files are too verbose. I wish there were clever shorthands."

Does Yaml have any sort of strict mode?

I imagine I could find a linter that disallows implicit strings.

Re: The Norway Problem

#128

Post by mcv »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #25

This is part of more general problem, they had to rename a gene to stop excel auto-completing it into a date. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... Edit: Apparently Excel has its own Norway Problem ... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...

The real problem here is that people use Excel to maintain data. Excel is terrible at that. But the fact that it may change data without the user being aware of it, is absolutely the biggest failing here.

Re: The Norway Problem

#129

Post by qwertox »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #25

This is part of more general problem, they had to rename a gene to stop excel auto-completing it into a date. https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... Edit: Apparently Excel has its own Norway Problem ... https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_...

Regarding Excel: It also happens with Somalia, which makes this issue even stranger. Apparently because of "SOM".

Re: The Norway Problem

#130

Post by thrower123 »

I've never seen anything that used YAML that I didn't want to douse with gasoline, nuke from orbit, and then salt the ground where it once stood.

I cry and rage and rend my clothes when I stumble upon some new thing that makes me have to use it.

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