Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

I can't help but wonder if the broad success of #Klingon as a language would be deeply frustrating to Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof.

@ocdtrekkie Yeah. It would be nice if the law caught up and treated "Gathering everyone's info and then putting it in a big pile with a sign that says 'please steal me'" as, I don't know, some kind of "negligence" or other.

@ocdtrekkie I gotta be honest, never seen it happen yet.

I got a letter some years back letting me know my information had been stolen from a part-time job I had in high school as a movie theater usher. The vector of information loss? Dudes busted into the warehouse containing pallets of employee tax records and made off with one from a decade and a half ago.

I'm finding my relationship with C++ improves if I think of it like a collection of wild, ecosystem-evolved beasts... And I'm Steve Irwin.

"Crikey! Would you look at *this* li'l bugger! It's a distance calculator on N-dimensional coordinates! Now most people'll never even see this in their lives, but it's part of the standard templates, so it's runnin' around in the background, doin' the heavy work for you. Oh, here! Would ya look at these templates! Fully recursive! So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna write a concrete implementation at N=2, shortcut the recursion right out from under 'er! This is wicked dangerous, but we've had some practice, so let's get crackin'."

@georgetakei

@lauren I'm sure that when Nintendo reached out to Twitter to address the issue, the response they got was "💩".

Having worked at four places that have used #cplusplus, I now have a nugget of wisdom worth considering if you're in a position to hire engineers and are on a C++ project.

C++ is wide enough that it's a "dialect-y" language. I've worked at places that used macros and places that banned them. I've worked at places that relied on exceptions and places that forbade them in all contexts except the ones the compiler forces upon you. I've worked in places that are comfortable with the implicit casting rules and places that are hyper-paranoid and require you to use `explicit` everywhere and eschew default operator implementations.

Point is: if you interview someone for a C++ project and their résumé says they know C++, they probably don't know *your* C++ and that might introduce friction. Multiply your ramp-up time estimates appropriately.

@gwynnion Truth. There are multiple axes one could use to contradict the hypothesis. The most obvious should be that human toddlers are self-aware and their input to that point has been mostly running around in a semi-controlled environment, bumping into things, and throwing sounds at the world to see what sounds come back.

They certainly haven't digested every published document from the UN website, but somehow they know that their feet are their own.

@ZiggyTheHamster It's the namespaces. The need to write `xmlns` on everything just sucks the life right out of people.

@codinghorror I wouldn't expect a daredevil to actually have an origin story, but there we go.

@arstechnica

@ch1m3r4c0mpl3x @lowqualityfacts We could probably use a word for a worldview that embraces the idea that playful use of concepts and words is innately harmful to the public constitution, deprives the body politick of some vital essence, and should be suppressed or even punished.

But I can't think what word might be fas..........hionable to use.

@msavener You got it; I erred in reading comprehension, my apologies.

You made two distinct points with your first post (if I understand you correctly): that "literally" is transitioning towards meaninglessness and that evolution of language is an irresistible tide-like process that cannot be stopped. I became focused on your first statement and missed the nuance the subsequent statements bring.

I disagree with you on the notion that "literally" is losing its meaning (it's rather gaining another one, and the one intended can be gleaned from context; some precision is lost, but not the entire definition of the word), but that's irrelevant really if your primary point is "Language changes; get used to it." Completely agree.

@0x00string Directions unclear, burned enough fossil fuels to fundamentally change the climate.

@msavener How is it "yucking yums" to ask the impact of a change to speech? What is the "yum" here?

Because from context, I think the "yum" is "criticizing people who enjoy speech changing," or in other words, "yucking yums." And yeah, I'll yuck yucking yums all day long.

@msavener I don't think I know what was lost. Is communicating "I am speaking seriously and not figuratively" a real problem that real people have often enough to dedicate a whole four-syllable adverb to it (vs. letting that adverb get consumed by misuse to highlight how absurd that situation is)?

@RedStateExile And in addition, freedom of the press is in the exact same amendment.

@msavener What communicative capacity have we lost in the cheeky usage of the 'literally' adverb? Is it something crucial? How often is it important to communicate that what one is saying should be taken as concretely true (and how hard is it to communicate that idea when "literally" is ambiguous?)

@Popehat I've worked on excising "biweekly" from my lexicon because thanks to the ambiguity of how to apply the prefix the word has literally come to mean both "twice a week" and "every other week."