21–30 of 158 posts
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Really. Every time I whine publicly how web programming people aren't familiar with even basic CS, I get a slap. But really, I should move to web programming. I'll be an expert computer scientist there, probably.
Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect? "Oh, please come and do web development so we can bask in the glow of your self-righteousness and infinite knowledge of computers." /snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke) I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stere…
I'm not very familiar with Ruby; where exactly did the duplication occur in the original code?
I believe it's in the Gem::Specification.traverse method here: http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.3/libdoc/rubygems/rdoc/Gem/Sp... The 'trail' parameter, an array, was implicitly duplicated by applying the '+' operator on each recursion through a dependency.
trail = trail + [self]
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Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect? "Oh, please come and do web development so we can bask in the glow of your self-righteousness and infinite knowledge of computers." /snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke) I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stere…
I keep repeating myself on Hacker News, but once more, we've found the difference between Software Engineer and Computer Scientist. One makes things work, the other is a mathematician. Why do we keep conflating the two?
Ideally, they overlap.
Ruby people discovering algorithms ducks
In Java and Ruby, the standard library uses an object `+` operator to mean concatenation (not numeric addition), and the implementation did immediate data copies, rather than doing reference linking and copy-on-write (or immutability).
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"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet." — Michael A. Jackson
I prefer full quote from Knuth: "Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass…
What people often miss is the measuring part.
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Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect? "Oh, please come and do web development so we can bask in the glow of your self-righteousness and infinite knowledge of computers." /snark (apologies for being offensive, but good lord, what a silly statement - unless I missed the joke) I stand before you as a counterpoint to your foolish generalisation, and guess what, I know plenty of other people that don't fit your stere…
I completely agree that software development is such a vast field that it is completely impossible to be proficient in everything. I am kind of a lamer in web development, for example. But fundamental CS is a different thing. "Annnndddd.... what reaction do you expect?" Admitting your shortcomings and try to fix them is not an option at all? When some central web frameworks do lamest mistakes like making an O(n^2) qu…
goto:fail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281378
shellshock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8365110
I'm sure whoever wrote this would feel a little chagrin when coming back to their code and seeing how inefficient it was (though it got the job done when the lists were small), and they probably would admit their shortcomings, why wouldn't they?
Condescending snark is really easy, and it's easy to say in retrospect and with time to reflect that most useful code has flaws and point them out - software is never finished, and there are a lot of different levels of experience and requirements. If rubygems had never become popular, this wouldn't even be an issue.
PS Rubygems isn't a web framework, it's a package management tool, so the straw man you're hacking away at is the wrong one.
I'm torn on this one. It's a great performance improvement, but on the other hand I would expect this way sooner than after almost 4 years of usage.
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1. Make it work 2. Optimize
From working with Ruby guys its normally 1. Make it work 2. Spin up more AWS boxes
Yeah, down the line you will eventually have to do optimization, but you will prioritize.