231–240 of 374 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?
Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?
In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g. /* |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Application Name |-------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the | fra…
In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.
It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.
This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.
In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
> old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong also some abbreviations work fine: min max row col beg (vs start) end key val src dst pos len and we have public_key secret_key (vs private) from till push pull load save init done inner outer ----- and if you speak Norwegian you have two options: ja yes no nei but that may trigger a different kind of OCD :-)
In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
There's only two things I hate in this world: people who do column alignment for vars and function params, and the Dutch.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/379482-there-s-only-two-thi...
Someone who is unfamiliar with the quote will just be confused.
suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically https://tom7.org/bovex/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some UK speakers pronounce "H" as "haitch" (with a non-silent leading 'h'), not "aitch". Which leads to "a haitch tee ...". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H#Name
Specifically, upper-class Brits pronounce the "h". See this classic Monty Python sketch which makes fun of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw&t=66s Praline: 'Ello. I would like to buy a fish license, please. Clerk: A what? Praline: A license for my pet fish, Eric. Clerk: How did you know my name was Eric? Praline: No, no, no, no. My _fish's_ name is Eric. Eric the fish. 'E's an 'alibut. Clerk: What? Pral…
I think you have this slightly muddled. It's not that upper-class Brits
pronounce more of the "h" sounds. The idea is that upper-class types go
to private schools and they learn French, and so they know that lots of
English words that have a leading "h" are French loanwords and thus the
they are unaspirated in the original, i.e. the "h" is silent – it ought
not to be said. "Hotel", "hospital", "honour", "homage", and so on - no
leading "huh" sound. Which means that the word starts on a vowel sound,
and in turn, that means it takes "an" in front not "a".
But people who don't know French and don't know which words have a sort
of silent H on the front and which don't try to hyper-correct – so they
start inserting extra initial "huh" sounds on words beginning with some
form of vowel.
This is how old British TV comedies tried to parody policemen talking -
they are often working class but in dealing with lawyers, judges, etc.,
they are aware of speaking to someone from a higher social class and so
they try to speak more "proper" and insert loads of extra "h" sounds.
"Hin my hopinion, your onner, the suspect was hup to something."
Drop the "h" sounds where they _should_ be, and at the same time insert
extra ones where they shouldn't be.
I think this is what the Pythons were playing with. Now that Britain is
a little bit less class-conscious – and foreign accents are heard a lot
more often – it doesn't seem funny any more so it's gone away. That's a
good thing overall, I reckon.
(Wondering how long I should keep this up...)