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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

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Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#431
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of that entire fiasco is quite comprehensivly summarized at https://phil.tech/2013/wtf-is-t-paamayim-nekudotayim/ .

What a childish rant that blog post is though...

That was a nice history lesson actually. I remember being confused at the error message, looking it up, being confused at the explanation... because I hadn't learned static calls yet. I may not have even understood classes at that point, but that was way back in the day.

If PHP support has to handle the same stupid question about the meaning of a very unnecessary term that's confusing people and causing more support requests than anything else... then it made sense to change it.

I'm glad I read the blog post; it clears up a LOT of thoughts I had about the error... calling it childish seems off. Maybe you had a dog in the fight at some point?

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t speak hebrew but someone online said that this is an unnecessarily literal translation of "double colon" and it’s not what most developers would call it. Take that with a grain of salt though.

Seems plausible since afaik the other constants were in English, so this seems to be a developer's joke.

It was a joke, a troll really, that just gave PHP haters something else to deride the language with to people who don't know it that well.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#434
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in principle, but if there's one thing internet commenting has taught me, it's that a tragically large number of people are somehow getting though life with broken sarcasm detectors.

A lot of people have a particularly tough time understanding sarcasm in a language other than their mother tongue.

That's true as well, and a good thing to remember.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#435
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they took it upon themselves to take everything." What would be the correct pronouns here in your view?

I'm suddenly very interested in the distinction here - as yea themself also works in both of these contexts but themselves feels like a very distinct connotation and not incorrect. I can't point to a specific grammatical rule or learning to base this feeling off though - I don't know why it feels correct it just does.

> A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers back to the subject of a sentence or clause. You can recognize a reflexive pronoun by its second half: they all end in -self or -selves. [...] Only the dual-purpose your* has two reflexive forms: singular yourself and plural yourselves. [...] But if you'd been typing in the late 1300s, themself would have been the default: it was the only version around until the mid-1400s. [...] Eventually, themselves became the only accepted form. But themself never fully disappeared.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/themself

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#436
post #426
post #137

And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278734 .

Sorry about that - I didn't realize my comment would turn so intensely off-topic!

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#437
post #436
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278734 .

Sorry about that - I didn't realize my comment would turn so intensely off-topic!

These things are co-creations and it's usually upvotes that are the bigger part of the problem :)

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think laziness (in this comment or the ones about the bash-like C macros) is the right word. I guess there is some pressure/tiredness/newness/taste/external factors driving the choices, test count, and style guide aberrations.

Probably typing on a non english keyboard. When I learned C a long time ago, I read somewhere 'isnt it nice that one doesnt need a lot of keystrokes like for begin and end', and I thought pls give me begin and end instead of this unpleasent slow hand movement.

> I thought pls give me begin and end instead of this unpleasent slow hand movement

Have you tried trigraphs? (/me ducks.)

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#439
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recollection from my time there, as well as one of the biggest cultural differences noticeable between my and my workplaces since, is that big chunks of the company really do believe in the blameless postmortem ideal. But culture isn't a magic tool that completely neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_ organization of sufficient size, like the "[name redacted]" character in the previous post

(I've redacted the person's name from the parent comment and other comments in this thread. I realize you didn't introduce it originally. Probably best not to leave up though, and it isn't necessary for any of the substantive points here.)

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