JMFT @jmft@qoto.org

@ajlanes Greetings!

@revjorobertson sorry if I’ve just completely misremembered where you’re from

@revjorobertson Hi! I’m visiting WA for work twice later this year and wondered if you had recommendations for things to see at the weekends (iirc that’s where you’re from)?

I’m not really an outdoors person and not really into hiking, unlike pretty much all of my colleagues, so would love to have something to do that doesn’t involve risking freezing to death!

Despite the slow death of the #Twitter community, and the declining user experience, I’ve so far occasionally checked in just to keep in touch with the few people who still used it. But recent developments (that I’ve heard about, but mercifully haven’t come across in person) mean that the platform just isn’t safe anymore, with illegal content being posted and condoned by the site owners.

It’s in the Apocryphal Gospels somewhere

#java - the Lawful Evil of programming languages

#cplusplus being the Neutral Evil

#javascript being Chaotic Evil

If Harry Potter characters were names of programming languages:

RON - Beginner-friendly language, nice clean natural syntax. Very poor performance, not suitable for production code.

MCGONAGALL - Formal logic language developed in the 1970s. Full of exotic punctuation marks that require a special keyboard. Average developer has two categories in category theory.

DOBBY - Tries too hard to be helpful, overoptimizes everything.

HERMIONE - Fast, performant language but hard to learn. Very strict typing and compile-time exception checking, with compiler errors to tell you that you’re doing it wrong before you take someone’s eye out.

DUMBLEDORE - Legacy language, missing many modern features and promoting practices now considered antipatterns. Important in its day, but there are better choices now.

DOLOHOV - Developed by the Soviet space programme in the 1960s, surprisingly advanced for its time and now seeing new applications in embedded systems.

PETTIGREW - Low level language, tons of security vulnerabilities. Would not use. Had much potential, but now universally hated.

SNAPE - Java.

GILDEROY - JavaScript.

POTTER - Annoying dev community who go on and on about how great this language is, despite its many shortcomings.

Lesson I’ve learnt the hard way, which I wish I’d known during my PhD: Keep everything under version control!
#git isn’t just for code. Configurations belong there too!

It’s like if that weird kid in high school turned out to be a multimillionaire dictator.
(I was that weird kid. Not a multimillionaire dictator, though, yet.)

When you stop and think about it it’s really weird how the same #javascript is both the annoying ’90s thing that script kiddies used to spam you with alert()’s or do flashing messages, and also the backbone of the whole cybereconomy and the means of choice for scraping all your personal information and psychological behavior in preparation for the technodystopia.