/prague/ Q&A

Ask /prog/ anything.

Although don't expect an answer or even a good one.

Also, keep it /prog/ related.

>>80
Wasn't Kaspersky the shithead who suggested that internet access should be deanonymized and that everyone should have 'internet passports'?

>>81
Yes and?

>>80,82
Then join any of these universities:
https://www.novainfosec.com/2012/05/23/nsa-looking-to-train-students-in-cyber-ops/
https://www.novainfosec.com/2011/10/07/top-infosec-schools-in-the-metro-dc-area/
Just be sure to respect our machines, like we do to yours.

>>82
I wouldn't work for him.

>>84

I just said Kaspersky as an example. But I wouldn't mind working for them as long as I get to do what I'd love to do.

Just be sure to respect our machines, like we do to yours.
/nsa-looking-to-train-students-in-cyber-ops/

xD

Why is interpretation considered bad compared to compilation? What advantage does interpreting have over compiling aside from you can see the output that makes it easy to teach?

>>87

Why is interpretation considered bad compared to compilation?

Vroom vroom.

What advantage does interpreting have over compiling aside from you can see the output that makes it easy to teach?

Debugging.

Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

>>89
You're the tool.

Why aren't you programming in Ruby like a real Nihonjin?

>>87
Interpretation is necessary when the user is provided with a console where ey may enter commands at run time to be interpreted as commands within the programming language. Embedded scripting is a good example of interpretation done in the right place. Also cgi scripts and such, although those too can be compiled and cached.

>>91
Real Nihonjin write badly formatted Sepples for Win2K.

Ruby? Is that what nihongogah use to write super famicom games >>91-domo?

Why do you hate Python? Is it really just because of the indentation? You are going to indent your code anyway so why bother? Or do you people really like braced languages so much and would rather argue which bracing style is the best?

>>95

if (this_is_a_very_big_function_name (1, things,
more_things,
even_more_things))
if (1 + 2 + 3 == 5 && 2 + 5 + 3 + 10 + 9 + 7 == 4
&& 3 + 9 == 8 || 3 + 5 == 7
|| (1 + 2 == 5 && 8 + 3 + 6 + 2 + 6 + 2 + 7))
;


>>96
Why'd anyone who can program do it like that anyway?

>>97
because he is not a nigger

check my d-bus

>>99
nice dbus!

how about mine?

>>95
I don't really hate Python, but I'm unsatisfied with it, and there are other languages that fulfill the same role better, so I use them.

Sure, I hate the indentation (I believe that since you aren't supposed to see whitespace at all, it shouldn't have any effect on a program), but the philosophy behind Python (there should be one way to do it, and that way should be obvious) really just strikes me as incorrect. Really, Guido? There should be only one way to do something, and it should be obvious? Then why the fuck didn't you just write my program for me, since it's so obvious, and build it into the language? Writing in Python is a fine experience when you want to do things that the language designers predicted you'd do, but it becomes incredibly awkward if you have to write something they didn't think of.

To their credit, those situations don't come up often, even when you take into account that OOP is slapped onto the language in some places, and not in others. But it only takes one time to run into the brick wall of ``We didn't think you'd want to use this construct like that, so this feature that should be trivial is missing and to build it in yourself would take more space than the rest of your program'' to turn you off.

I can't remember what it was for me. I think I was trying to do something with map and object construction intertwining, and I spent ages beating my head against the documentation, thinking I just didn't know enough Python, and finally I found some blog (by somebody who evidently did know enough Python) and it turned out the only way was to have two layers of objects and use one type as a proxy for the other in a manner that was incredibly awkward. And since ``Not writing awkward code, and being able to write it quickly'' was Python's selling point, and since it had failed at both for my particular task, I dropped it like a sack of rotten potatoes and used Perl for everything I would have used Python for. I'm no better at Perl now than I was at Python then, but I've never run into that problem again.

I know you're probably saying to yourself ``Well, you must have been doing it unpythonically to get into that situation in the first place,'' and you're probably right, but I don't care. As a language, Python advertises itself as being the choice where that doesn't happen, because all the subcomponents of the language are so intuitive that once you know a decent bit about the foundations, everything else just falls into place and you can worry about your algorithms and flow control. There are other languages that fill the same niche as Python, so it doesn't have a lot of leeway on failing to come through on those claims.

>>101
Ruby, PHP, or Python.
You are forced at gunpoint to choose. Which one, and why?

Python; array handling is decent (unlike PHP) and there's no variable scoping mess like in Ruby.

>>102
Take the gunshot.

>>102
Assuming I can't follow >>104 's advice, I'd pick Python in a heartbeat.

PHP, above everything listed in A Fractal of Bad Design, is (apart from truly perverted setups) a lock into web development. Sure, it's on the backend, so it's not quite the same kind of cancer that Javashit is, but I don't really want to spend the rest of my life writing interfaces to various databases, CMS software, and/or shopping carts.

My reason for despising Ruby is mostly a cop-out; I'll just say that the Ruby community (even beyond Rails) is a cancerous bunch. I do actually have reasons for disliking Ruby, even on a technical level (I hold it to be a prime example of why Reference Implementations are a horrible concept, for example), but I haven't ever bothered to organize my thoughts on the matter, and frankly I don't care to. Ruby doesn't deserve that much of my time.

Python, for all its insufferable smugness, is a language in which I have done some non-trivial things, and therefore know they can be done. I think that for any problem or project that I would be interested in, there are better languages, but that doesn't mean Python is completely useless as a tool for all such problems/projects. PHP is.

>>102
PHP

>>102

I'd rather use Ruby than anything you listed.

>>102
FIOC or Ruby.

PHP is an outright insult and being shat on the face, the others are kind of like calling you a nigger ``jokingly'' and realizing they really mean it after you're deep in.

Why do programmers name their variables i when they use for loops? Who started this convention?

>>109
Some may argue it started with FORTRAN, COBOL or some other ``oldskool'' language, but it obviously has to do with mathematics. I don't even know why you're asking that question, everyone here should at least have taken a course on linear algebra.

>>95
"People hate Python because of forced indentation" has got to be one of the biggest strawmans in programming history, but it is a perfect summary of the Python community, which will ignore any real issue the language suffers from.

I personally dislike Python because it has ridiculous flaws a proper language shouldn't have to deal with. Scoping issues in 2013? List comprehensions with messy semantics in favor of clean higher-order functions? Why is self a thing? Why is nonlocal/global a thing? If forced indentation is so good, why do you have to introduce noops like pass in order to have an empty block? It should be obvious it's empty from the indentation, no? The same thing goes for the colon after each statement. What's the point? Python also lacks a numerical tower, which doesn't go well with the whole "errors only show up when they actually happen" thing you can attribute to Python's lack of static typing and overly dynamic nature - have fun hunting silent errors. Finally, it doesn't offer anything new; there is no feature specific to Python that would make me ignore these flaws for the time being. It's yet another scripting language with no redeeming feature, a ton of flaws, and a poisonous community that suffers from guru worship (a sign that the community is incompetent, similar behavior can be observed in Clojure and C++) and refuses to fix these language flaws.

The list could actually go on, but I don't want to write yet another essay on why Python is "teh suck". Long story short: Indentation is its smallest problem.

Why isn't there a FOIC version of C? Is it possible to write C such that it follows everything in da standard except the use curly braces to delimit blocks?

>>112
Because that would be dumb, and nobody wants to either make or use such a thing.

Is [i]coroutine[/i] considered harmful?

Donald Knuth once said:

Subroutines are special cases of ... coroutines.

I would add:

Coroutines are special cases of ... goto statements.

>>114
Most flow control is a special case of goto statements, but considering things harmful as a blanket statement is a terrible idea.

>>111
i agree with you that people arguing about FIOC (or really any similar syntactic complaints) have no idea about actual language design or use

what are the "messy" semantics of list comprehensions?

why is self a thing? to reference the current object? if you mean why is explicit self a thing, it's because explicit is better than implicit

global is a thing because more often you are going to be declaring local variables with the same name as global variables than you are going to be reassigning global variables. furthermore it discourages use of global variables to keep mutable state

again, pass being explicit is good for the sake of being explicit, plus it is easier to read "while spinning: pass" than it is "while spinning:"

one of your complaints is colons? seriously?

dynamic typing is not a valid complaint against a language, it's your personal preference

python's benefits are large and comprehensive static libraries, easily readable code, and the ability to directly use low-level procedures and structures in high level code.

i'm not saying python is a perfect language, just that your complaints are ridiculously stupid. here are some valid complaints:

lack of tco
cpython
handling of strings (e.g. 'c'[0][0][0][0][0] == 'c')
comparisons with None and booleans being int (this might have been fixed in 3.x+?)

>>116

s/static/standard

>>116
I honestly tried to read what you said, but I couldn't finish it because of your complete lack of capitalization and the confusing way you flow in and out of quotes/rhetorical questions. From the little I read, you seem to have completely missed the point >>111 was making about Python's syntax, which is that it has flaws like self which make its design self-contradictory. I would add that a clean syntax is one of Python's core selling points. If being explicit is good, then why is it `pythonic' to use the colon-appendation instead of consistently using a function named something like append? If, on the other hand, syntactic brevity is desired, then as >>111 pointed out, use of : in flow controls is unexpected and makes no sense. If a language which advertises itself on the basis of good syntax can't get good syntax right, why should I bother with it?

I don't know if you bothered to move on to something more interesting by the end of your post. Maybe if you reformat it I'll read it. Probably not.

>>118

tell me again how self is contradictory to python's design

again, if your only complaints against a language are about its syntax, you have absolutely no business criticizing it or engaging in discussion about its design. go read baby's first plt textbook until you have something meaningful to contribute

>>119
Fuck off back to /g/ nigger.