this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Actually had a colleague who determined distances on microscopy images that way. She would measure the scale bar included in the image with her ruler on the screen, measure the distance she was interested in and calculate the distance using the rule of three. I mean, why bother using the measuring tool included in the software.

[–] sznio 49 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I've heard of people printing out charts, then cutting out the part they wanted to calculate an integral of, then weighing the paper.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've heard of it too. You would need an analytical balance to get accurate measurements weighing a piece of paper. Just cut out the part you want to take an integral of, then cut out a piece of paper with known size (or cut several pieces with different sizes to get more accurate results) and weigh each of them. I guess this used to be cheaper and faster than using computers when computers were big and expensive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Or maybe just a powder balance. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Dad did a lot of reloading his own ammunition. We kids had fun doing things like weighing our names (weigh a small piece of paper to get the tare, weigh again to get the loaded weight, subtract) and other miniscule things. As I recall, it was accurate to less than a grain (0.065 gram).

One of the things we did was weigh different shapes of paper to calculate area. Start with a sample of a unit area. Cut out a funky shape and weigh it, then do the math.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Nono that's genius

..ignoring the part that it's just a discrete approximation of an integral a la a Riemann sum.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How inaccurate is your scale?

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[–] cybervseas 11 points 1 year ago

If it works it isn't stupid.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Better than counting curly braces.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'll take the curly braces

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me too, any day. I hate everything where indentation matters. Let me just throw my garbage there and YOU sort it out, you are the fucking computer, not me. You do the work.

So fuck you, YAML! All my homies love JSON!

[–] KIM_JONG 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

All your homies hate comments.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

My code also documents itself, of course.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup.

Spaces? Tabs? Don't care, works regardless.
Copied some code from somewhere else? No problem, 9/10 times it just works. Bonus: a smart IDE will let you quick-format the entire code to whatever style you configured at the click of a button even if it was a complete mess to begin with, as long as all the curly braces are correct.

Also, in any decent IDE you will very rarely need to actually count curly braces, it finds the pair for you, and even lets you easily navigate between them.

The inconsistent way that whitespace is handled across applications makes interacting with code outside your own code files incredibly finicky when your language cares so much about the layout.

There's an argument to be made for the simplicity of python-style indentation and for its aesthetic merits, but IMO that's outweighed by the practical inconvenience it brings.

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[–] kameecoding 19 points 1 year ago

if you have to count the curly braces I understand why you are a python developer

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You don't usually count them. They just have to form a neat diagonal.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

parentheses

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (4 children)

People here are taking this way too seriously lol. I love Python, and I never really had any issues with the indentation being used instead of curly braces or something. This is just a silly meme, not a personal attack

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Precisely. It's like programmers lost their humor.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I have not known happiness for 12 years now.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Then you never had to share a codebase with someone who had different ideas about how things should be indented.

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[–] calzone_gigante 7 points 1 year ago

I really like the identation aproach, or begin/end instead of curly braces or parenthesis. When people start to nest things too deep, it gets painful to look at.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Right? Especially since there are plugins for VS Code that colorize the indents.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

VSCode? Is that an Emacs extension? Or is it for vi?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a bash script made to be run on MS-DOS on a breadboard computer.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Let me introduce you to YAML, you'll love it!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Ugh, there's some parts of YAML I love, but ultimately it's a terrible format. It's just too easy to confuse people. At least it has comments though. It's so dumb that JSON doesn't officially have comments. I've often parsed "JSON" as YAML entirely for comments, without using a single other YAML feature.

YAML also supports not quoting your strings. Seems great at first, but it gets weird of you want a string that looks like a different type. IIRC, there's even a major version difference in the handling of this case! I can't remember the details, but I once had a bug happen because of this.

Performance wise, both YAML and JSON suck. They're fine for a config file that you just read on startup, but if you're doing a ton of processing, it will quickly show the performance hit. Binary formats work far better (for a generic one, protobuffers has good tooling and library support while being blazing fast).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

It's so dumb that JSON doesn't officially have comments.

So much this.

Used to work at a company where I sometimes had to manually edit the configuration of devices which were written and read in JSON. Super inconvenient if you have to document all changes externally. As a "hack" I would sometimes add extra objects to store strings (the comments). But that's super dicey as you don't know if it somehow breaks the parsing. You're also not guaranteed the order of objects so if the configuration gets read, edited and rewritten your comment might no longer be above/below the change you made.

Always found it baffling that such a basic feature is missing from a spec that is supposed to cover a broad range of use cases.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@alphacyberranger
This is why I have my VSCodium set to highlight all indentation levels in my settings.json

To see the editor indent guides, set "editor.guides.indentation": true and "editor.guides.highlightActiveIndentation": true.

editorIndentGuide.background: Color of the editor indentation guides.
editorIndentGuide.activeBackground: Color of the active editor indentation guide.

https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/theme-color

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[–] amanaftermidnight 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Most disingenuous post ever.

The image shown is a dude with a browser dev console, probably measuring a div for the its CSS size (which do support centimeters and inches).

In python, 4 spaces is just enough spacing between indent levels. And if your levels get too deep it's a sign that you're not being pythonic. Nesting too deep is the problem, not the whitespacing being significant.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Python are fine with whatever number of spaces you want to use. You can use 8 spaces which forces you carefully consider each nest, you can use 1 if you're a monster, or you can use tabs if you're enlightened, python only demands consistency.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Programming languages that use white space to delimit structure are annoying at best. I get annoyed at yaml too, but I'm ok once I have a few templates set up.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

YAML comes with its own unique pains in the ass https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

These things actually matter, come up often enough to actually be annoying, and are a bit difficult to explain and learn into people. You’re basically fine if you just string quote everything that you can, but nobody does that.

[–] lemmylommy 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was interesting. And possibly the most Dutch name I have ever heard of.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And God forbid you use tabs in a document with spaces instead of tabs (or vice versa)

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[–] RoyaltyInTraining 11 points 1 year ago

I don't think this is a huge problem with a correctly set up text editor and the right techniques to limit code nesting. Doesn't change my dislike of python tho.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He could wrap a rubber band around the screen

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