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  • You know what really grinds my gears about Iron Man 3?

    Jarvis: "Sir, the Oracle cloud has completed your computations"

    What a load of crap. See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf



  • @jamesn said:

    See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf

    I'm glad it says "Fiction" in the upper-left. Otherwise I might have thought Oracle was really helping to build robot super soldiers.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @jamesn said:
    See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf

    I'm glad it says "Fiction" in the upper-left. Otherwise I might have thought Oracle was really helping to build robot super soldiers.

    This says a lot about what Oracle thinks of it's customers. Like, the creative teams from Marvel and Oracle were sitting down together to go over the final proofs and one of the senior Oracle guys is like "Wait, we better put something on here to let people know it's fiction." And the Marvel guys are like "Are you serious?"

    And the Oracle guy is all "If we don't, we're gonna have a few hundred CIOs calling us up and asking to buy robots. Look, our customers are about as sharp as those guys who get tricked into signing up for a monthly subscription of dick enlargement pills and then are too embarrassed to cancel. In fact, I bet there's a lot of overlap there. If we put this out there without clearly stating it's fiction, we're going to have a lot of pissed-off C-levels. Do you know how much hookers and blow it takes to smooth over a sales incident like that? A lot, son. A lot."



  • @jamesn said:

    You know what really grinds my gears about Iron Man 3?

    Jarvis: "Sir, the Oracle cloud has completed your computations"

    What a load of crap. See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf

    Nothing new here. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already had a brief cameo with Downey commenting "It's the oracle of Oracle" in Iron Man 2. The battle at the Stark Expo during that movie's climax also took place in a dome that had the Oracle company logo plastered on it.



  • @Ragnax said:

    Nothing new here. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already had a brief cameo with Downey commenting "It's the oracle of Oracle" in Iron Man 2.

    What the fuck?? Is Ellison just single-handedly financing these movies? How much hookers and blow did they have to give Downey Jr. to get him to say that line?



  • What, you missed the 2 Snoracle racks in Tony's lair? And the purple rack in the news van?


    It really was Iron Man 3 : Brought to you by Sunoracle, speedtest.net, Verizon Fios (which, hey, does that even cover BFE, tennessee, as it's not a population center?), and Audi


    What really made me cringe : "Go up there and get me some more ISDNs." Who was that guy, TelcoMan? Able to conjure up dark fiber in a single roof-climb? Able to renegotiate satellite protocols with a handwave?


    This is the problem with the gui-centric whatever he logged into. Speedtest.net said he was getting 2mbps down (or so, iirc). I know, I know, it's less visually interesting if he's poking about using ssh and unix commands.



  • Haha imagine if this was normal! Imagine if, for example, Cisco did product placement in G.I. Joe-- they did?

    Oh.



  • @tweek said:

    This is the problem with the gui-centric whatever he logged into. Speedtest.net said he was getting 2mbps down (or so, iirc). I know, I know, it's less visually interesting if he's poking about using ssh and unix commands.

    I don't have a problem with push-button hacking and unrealistic GUIs*, but 2mbps is pathetic.


    (Shut up about this, nerds. Do you think the medical or legal shit you see on TV is any less ludicrous? For example: you do realize there is no such thing as a "surprise witness", right?* Both parties in a case have access to each other's witness lists before the trial even begins. They're even allowed to question the opposing witnesses, at length, before the trial begins. Otherwise trials would just be a random clusterfuck of surprise evidence and witnesses, and it would be nearly impossible to build a coherent case because you'd have no idea what's going on.)

    (**There are extremely rare cases where there are actual surprise witnesses, but they're emergency hearings where there is no time for proper discovery. And these emergency hearings are for temporary things like TROs or temporary injunctions.. basically just a way to temporarily stop a potentially-dangerous or -irreversible thing from happening before the real trial begins.)



  • You know what grinds my gears? I left the cinema early, while the credits were still rolling, because one of our group had to rush dinner so he wouldn't have to wait an extra hour to catch his train home. So I (and all the others) missed the post-credits scene.

    The next day I opened an email from another friend who had sent a YouTube URL for the scene we had missed. But when I went to see it, it had already been blocked because of Disney.

    All I could then find were people with their "news videos", promising to show the "leaked footage" but never delivering. Including one (which I can't find now) where the presenter asked the viewers what they thought the scene would be like, despite the comments being disabled.1

    1Though on second thought I suppose the video could be embedded on some site.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ragnax said:
    Nothing new here. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already had a brief cameo with Downey commenting "It's the oracle of Oracle" in Iron Man 2.

    What the fuck?? Is Ellison just single-handedly financing these movies? How much hookers and blow did they have to give Downey Jr. to get him to say that line?

    Oh it gets worse. Far far worse.



  • @Ragnax said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Ragnax said:
    Nothing new here. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already had a brief cameo with Downey commenting "It's the oracle of Oracle" in Iron Man 2.

    What the fuck?? Is Ellison just single-handedly financing these movies? How much hookers and blow did they have to give Downey Jr. to get him to say that line?

    Oh it gets worse. Far far worse.

    I don't even get the thinking here. Is it just "Hey, let's piss away money on some mediocre, CGI-heavy snoozefests?" Think of the Venn diagram for "People watching Marvel movies" and "People buying Oracle shit". See that tiny sliver over overlap in the middle? That's Larry Ellison.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Haha imagine if this was normal! Imagine if, for example, Cisco did product placement in G.I. Joe-- they did?

    Oh.

    If I ever make movies, I'm going to do product placements for companies that are totally neglected by big-budget movies. Hell, they don't even have to pay me:

    [two guys sitting in an apartment, Guy #1 goes to fridge]

    Guy #1: [opening fridge] Hey dude, you want something to drink?

    Guy #2: Sure, what have you got?

    Guy #1: Clamato and Dr. Shasta.

    Guy #2: Ugh. I guess a Dr. Shasta, then. [pauses for a few] Dude, you should really consider going on food stamps. Then you could buy real Dr. Pepper.

    Guy #1: Shasta's not so bad. It comes in three petroleum-derived flavors.

    Guy #2: And the FDA was forced to drop their inquiry into Shasta's production methods because one of the warrants they had wasn't properly initialed, meaning all that evidence got thrown out!

    [both sit an enjoy a Dr. Shasta. scrolling text along the bottom "Shasta: Marginally preferable to drinking something made from clam extract!"]



  • @tweek said:

    I know, I know, it's less visually interesting if he's poking about using ssh and unix commands.
     

    And yet in a recent Ironman comic when Stark tried to recover portions of his memory, Reed Richards tore a strip into him for not being dilligent about taking regular backups, citing that a quick crontab would have taken very little effort.

    Yeah, it made me chuckle. Proper propeller-head stuff.



  • @Cassidy said:

    And yet in a recent Ironman comic when Stark tried to recover portions of his memory, Reed Richards tore a strip into him for not being dilligent about taking regular backups, citing that a quick crontab would have taken very little effort.

    Wow, a billionaire playboy who plows a new supermodel every night and who uses Unix? I was wrong, nobody's going to confuse that for non-fiction.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Think of the Venn diagram for "People watching Marvel movies" and "People buying Oracle shit". See that tiny sliver over overlap in the middle? That's Larry Ellison.
     

    You think Ellison actually USES Oracle? The dude's rich. He can afford a real db like NoSQL, or a flat .txt file.

    I'm sure that this has nothing to do with advertising, though. It's probably a way to launder money away from the hemorrhage hole that's Oracle and into a nice safe "loss of profit" net that Hollywood accountants are so good at burrowing.



  • @tweek said:

    It really was Iron Man 3 : Brought to you by Sunoracle, speedtest.net, Verizon Fios (which, hey, does that even cover BFE, tennessee, as it's not a population center?), and Audi

    Only 4 overt sponsors? That's not bad at all. I just finished a novel (the 2010 winner of the Prix Goncourt, no less) which seems to be sponsored by Budweiser, the Emirates Hotel in Abu Dhabi, McDonalds, Carrefour, Lexus, Audi, and possibly Michelin, although that particular brand has a justifiable reason for being mentioned... Not to mention a blatant Mary Sue.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Wow, a billionaire playboy who plows a new supermodel every night and who uses Unix?
     




  • @morbiuswilters said:

    (Shut up about this, nerds. Do you think the medical or legal shit you see on TV is any less ludicrous? For example: you do realize there is no such thing as a "surprise witness", right?* Both parties in a case have access to each other's witness lists before the trial even begins. They're even allowed to question the opposing witnesses, at length, before the trial begins. Otherwise trials would just be a random clusterfuck of surprise evidence and witnesses, and it would be nearly impossible to build a coherent case because you'd have no idea what's going on.)



    I'm aware the medical bullshit is bullshit, and the legal bullshit is bullshit. That irritates me as well, but I'm not a doctor or lawyer. The thing that irritates me is when it's not something complex, like building an operating system on the fly while falling out of the sky, but when it's easily look-up-able facts. Like ISDN == copper. I'd prefer they'd have made up an acronym.


    Some handwaving is perfectly fine, and if he had just said "Get me some more bps, or get me more bandwidth", I'd be ok. The gui thing just irritates me because it does. Blah blah, don't want to have to pay microsoft to show their gui or have to teach an actor how to navigate gnome or some form of bastardized CDE that still looks like it's from the 80's. (I assume all screens are either put in afterwards, or videos playing for the actors to react to on localhost.)


    It's all well and good until it's your boss going to see the movie and wondering why the product you work on can't behave that way. "Because it's make believe" is my stock answer, but he's tiring of that.



  • @Cassidy said:



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Cassidy said:
    Nerd joke

    Necrophilia joke

    Ninja joke



  • @tweek said:

    I'm aware the medical bullshit is bullshit, and the legal bullshit is bullshit. That irritates me as well, but I'm not a doctor or lawyer.

    Do you know how lame movies and TV would be if they didn't fudge on this stuff? Have you seen Miracle on 34th Street? They let him out of the booby hatch because the fucking post office delivered some letters addressed to Santa Claus to him. It's asinine. If that movie were at all realistic, it would have ended with Santa on Riker's Island being traded to skinheads for a pack of cigarettes after a big black guy got done "using" him.

    @tweek said:

    Like ISDN == copper. I'd prefer they'd have made up an acronym.

    Fair enough, but it's a pretty minor thing compared to most of the goofy shit in movies and TV.

    @tweek said:

    The gui thing just irritates me because it does. Blah blah, don't want to have to pay microsoft to show their gui or have to teach an actor how to navigate gnome or some form of bastardized CDE that still looks like it's from the 80's. (I assume all screens are either put in afterwards, or videos playing for the actors to react to on localhost.)

    Who cares? I'm usually much more distracted by the internal contradictions of movies than the fact they don't use a windowing system I recognize..

    @tweek said:

    It's all well and good until it's your boss going to see the movie and wondering why the product you work on can't behave that way. "Because it's make believe" is my stock answer, but he's tiring of that.

    Then your boss is dumb. We should change movies so it's just a dude clicking around a Windows desktop just to keep your boss from finding something to be dumb about? Your boss will just find something else to be dumb about, then.



  • @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Cassidy said:
    Nerd joke

    Necrophilia joke

    Ninja joke

    Technically not necrophilia since Satan is raping what remains of Steve Job's spirit in Hell rather than raping his lifeless corpse on Earth.


    Man.. have you ever re-read something you just wrote and thought to yourself "My life went horribly awry at some place very far back"?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @Cassidy said:
    Nerd joke

    Necrophilia joke

    Ninja joke

    Technically not necrophilia since Satan is raping what remains of Steve Job's spirit in Hell rather than raping his lifeless corpse on Earth.


    Man.. have you ever re-read something you just wrote and thought to yourself "My life went horribly awry at some place very far back"?

    Yes. That's why I stopped reading things.



  • My dad was a Boeing engineer, and would always complain whe, for example, the outside shot used a 737, but the interiors were shot on a 727.

    What I learned from that, is that noone outside of your clique gives a crap about those little nitpicks.



  •  What I don't get is how product placement can possibly co-exist with the standard "Any resemblance to actual anything is purely coincidental" disclaimer.



  • @bgodot said:

    My dad was a Boeing engineer, and would always complain whe, for example, the outside shot used a 737, but the interiors were shot on a 727.

    What I learned from that, is that noone outside of your clique gives a crap about those little nitpicks.

    I have a friend who doesn't think the Thieve's Guild quest in Skyrim was a horribly-written piece of shit. There's no accounting for tastes.


  • Garbage Person

    @pjt33 said:

    Only 4 overt sponsors? That's not bad at all. I just finished a novel (the 2010 winner of the Prix Goncourt, no less) which seems to be sponsored by Budweiser, the Emirates Hotel in Abu Dhabi, McDonalds, Carrefour, Lexus, Audi, and possibly Michelin, although that particular brand has a justifiable reason for being mentioned... Not to mention a blatant Mary Sue.
    Huh. I've never read anything that had serious product placement. Occasional name-drops for setting (using the brands more as a trope than anything else) or played for humor (I recall reading a far-future sci-fi novel where corporations had gone through some pretty serious line-of-business changes and ridiculous mergers, resulting in amusing things like Saab-Microsoft cargo trucks) yes, product placement of the sort someone might pay for, no.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    ...thought to yourself "My life went horribly awry at some place very far back"?

    Yes. That's why I stopped reading things use Go.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    ...thought to yourself "My life went horribly awry at some place very far back"?

    Yes. That's why I stopped reading things use Go.

    You know what else I hate about Go? It uses zero-indexing. It was created this millennium and it still uses fucking zero-indexing.

    How long are we going to be stuck with this idiom? How many bugs are created because--counter-intuitively--the last index of an array is size-1? You see this shit even with experienced programmers. Every time I write a for loop I have to remind myself "the tools you are using are so steeped in cargo cult, traditionalist bullshit that they stick to this godawful zero-indexing scheme, so you'd better make sure you less-than the size of the array and not less-than-or-equal."

    People make mistakes. Even experienced people make mistakes. Making your tools so they encourage mistakes is just shitty. It would be like airplane engineers putting a button in the cockpit which causes the plane to blow up. Just hope your pilot never gets distracted and accidentally hits the centrally-located button that blows up the plane and is indistinguishable from every other button around it.

    Okay, I get it, we're never going to pry this stupidity from C. Or C++ or Java or any other established language. But they the fuck do people insist on propagating it? Why must every new language carry this goddamn cross? Do people insist on propagating every other mistake from C? "What Ruby needs is a declaration syntax that makes it look like your text editor wolfed down a numeric keypad, got a tummyache and puked the whole thing back up, along with any hopes and dreams you had of software engineering being a fulfilling career!"

    "Java's newest feature: bitfields, motherfucker! And the best part is, since it's Java each one is implemented as an instance of a Bitfield class that sits on the heap and spans 256 bytes! Ha ha, remember when your guidance counselor told you computers were a dead end and you should become a monorail mechanic since that was The Future? He may have been a crazy drunk who hung himself, but at least he's not sitting here, ashamed for his profession."

    If anyone reading this is creating a new language, please do not have arrays start at zero. And do we even need any new languages? I actually think there is a market for a well-designed language that fills a specific need--something high-level, object-oriented, garbage-collected but also compiled, with an eye towards performance and parallelism. The problem is, nobody ever follows through.

    We end up with dozens and dozens of half-finished languages where the IDE is vim (or worse, Eclipse), the debugger is console.print() and the entire raison d'etre is so nerds can be like "Oh, I can't wait to build some new project with Language X. At work. You know, the place where I get paid to do real work but I'm going to be a shitty, incompetent fuck-up and piss away precious time and money teaching myself a language that nobody is going to remember in 5 years, except for the poor fuck who gets stuck maintaining this turd I'm about to drop! Oooh, and it has an obscure concurrency model that seems more destined for abuse than a girl named 'Crystal'! Woo-hoo, wait until the boys on reddit/Slashdot/I-don't-even-fucking-know-anymore-do-people-still-read-kuro5hin see the size of this toilet stromboli I'm cookin' up!!"



  • Morbs == Bridget99?

    Someone check, have they ever both appeared at the same place at the same time?


  • Considered Harmful

    @morbiuswilters said:

    "Oh, I can't wait to build some new project with Language X. At work. You know, the place where I get paid to do real work but I'm going to be a shitty, incompetent fuck-up and piss away precious time and money teaching myself a language that nobody is going to remember in 5 years, except for the poor fuck who gets stuck maintaining this turd I'm about to drop!

    The sad thing truth is, there's big money in buzzword bingo. Everybody's throwing cash around trying to find the Next Big Thing, and the ones making it rain don't know the difference between a Ruby and a Perl.

    It seems like the one thing we're sure of is that nobody's gotten it right yet, technology is at that awkward age where it's experimenting with things it will never own up to once it's all grown and matured. There's one gold rush after another toward any language with promise, because different must be better.

    And I actually do believe someday this process will yield something that makes sense, but we've got to follow a lot of dead end paths before we can find our way to that promised land.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @jamesn said:
    See also: http://www.oracle.com/us/ironman3/omag-mj13-ironman-1936895.pdf

    I'm glad it says "Fiction" in the upper-left. Otherwise I might have thought Oracle was really helping to build robot super soldiers.

    Once Oracle start building robots, either we are doomed, or Oracle ought to change its name to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Severity One said:

    Once Oracle start building robots, either we are doomed, or Oracle ought to change its name to Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
    I think we'll be OK. If it is like their database, it will be slow and unable to move without a vast amount of cash being thrown at it all the time. It will also spend its time claiming that the world is in error and holding its robotic hands over its eyes. Getting harmed by it (other than in the wallet) will require being in exactly the right place at the right time (or wrong place at wrong time, depending on POV) and a fantastic amount of inattention.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Morbs == Bridget99?

    No, no, no, dammit: the == operator isn't overloaded for the RantyForumPoster class. Should be: Morbs.equals(Bridget99)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Someone check, have they ever both appeared at the same place at the same time?

    There was that Kenny G concert back in the early 90s... That.. that was a dark time in my life.

    Seriously, though, the only thing I could think of that you'd take issue with is the zero-indexing thing. Why must you love things that make no sense??



  • @joe.edwards said:

    The sad thing truth is, there's big money in buzzword bingo. Everybody's throwing cash around trying to find the Next Big Thing, and the ones making it rain don't know the difference between a Ruby and a Perl.

    It seems like the one thing we're sure of is that nobody's gotten it right yet, technology is at that awkward age where it's experimenting with things it will never own up to once it's all grown and matured. There's one gold rush after another toward any language with promise, because different must be better.

    And I actually do believe someday this process will yield something that makes sense, but we've got to follow a lot of dead end paths before we can find our way to that promised land.

    Exactly. It's just sad because we've been doing this long enough that better stuff should have bubbled up. But trends and fads and "make the programmer feel special" seem to do more to drive technology than critical thinking.



  • @dkf said:

    ...it will be slow and unable to move without a vast amount of cash being thrown at it all the time. It will also spend its time claiming that the world is in error and holding its robotic hands over its eyes. Getting harmed by it (other than in the wallet) will require being in exactly the right place at the right time (or wrong place at wrong time, depending on POV) and a fantastic amount of inattention.

    Wow, that sounds just like the Federal government.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    If anyone reading this is creating a new language, please do not have arrays start at zero.

    WTF?? If anyone is reading this and considering creating a new language with 1-based arrays, please commit suicide right now. Or take a few math courses above elementary-school level (or above high-school if you're in the US). Please.

    1-based causes a lot more bugs than 0-based.



  • @Planar said:

    Or take a few math courses above elementary-school level...

    WTF does that have to do with anything? The math involved is extremely basic arithmetic.

    @Planar said:

    1-based causes a lot more bugs than 0-based.

    [citation needed]

    Seriously, stop making shit up. Starting at 1 and ending with the number of items is just basic fucking counting. Starting at zero and end with number-of-items-minus-one is asinine. I can point out countless examples of zero-indexing causing bugs (in fact, I can guarantee every single person reading this has had at least one.) Please show examples of all the bugs that would be caused by starting with the 1st element at 1. Or, hell, just try to contrive an example for me.

    I'd wait around, but I don't have to, because I know you aren't going to come up with any. There is no rational argument for starting at 0 in a modern language. None. It's purely historical baggage carried around by mental midgets like yourself because you lack the critical thinking skills to analyze its worth.



  • I'm going to write a language where arrays start at 3.

    Is there that much of a difference between

    for (i=0; i<max; i++)

    and

    for (i=1; i<=max; i++)

    ? They're different conventions. As long as you're consistent in which one you use, you're fine.



  • @Snowyowl said:

    Is there that much of a difference between

    for (i=0; i<max; i++)

    and

    for (i=1; i<=max; i++)

    ? They're different conventions. As long as you're consistent in which one you use, you're fine.

    Yes, there is a difference. Starting at zero is wrong. It is different from the way counting is done everywhere else humans count things. When you're introducing your kids to people do you say "Here's my zeroth child, Kevin. And here's my first, Susan"? Of course not.

    Say you want to jump to the 5th element: with 1-indexing that's simple, array[5]. You do it without thinking. With 0-indexing it's like "Oh yeah, it's array[4]." I'm not saying the latter is hard, just that's it's: 1) an extra thing to remember; 2) a cause of a lot of bugs. And here's the thing: in a modern language, there is no reason for it to exist. None. It's just a stupid, historical appendage we've been unable to shake off.

    Hey, why don't we inherit some other obnoxious, bug-creating conventions from C: let's say all strings must be terminated with a special character. And that you must always remember to declare your strings as size + 1 to accommodate this character. And if you forget to put it on somewhere, well ha ha ha, fuck you.

    Sane people are like "Man, that was pretty sucky. Thank God we didn't keep C strings around!" But then those same people will be like "Oh, well, it's just sensible for arrays to start at zero because, uh, that's how programming works!"



  • @morbiuswilters said:


    Say you want to jump to the 5th element: with 1-indexing that's simple, array[5]. You do it without thinking. With 0-indexing it's like "Oh yeah, it's array[4]." I'm not saying the latter is hard, just that's it's: 1) an extra thing to remember; 2) a cause of a lot of bugs. And here's the thing: in a modern language, there is no reason for it to exist. None. It's just a stupid, historical appendage we've been unable to shake off.

    Why would you want to jump to the fifth element? Is there something special about the value at the fifth element? Put it in a variable, then, not in an array. Arrays are for iterating over; it shouldn't matter that array[4] is actually the fifth element because there's nothing  to distinguish it from array[3] or array[5].

    ... and having said that, I suddenly remember a table I was manipulating last week in Javascript where the third column had some important data in it, and the correct jQuery snippet was .getElementsByTagName("td")[2]

    Sir, you have convinced me. Though I maintain that it hardly ever makes a difference, and whichever one you were taught first is the one you'll always use, but 1-indexing is slightly better in the few places where it makes a difference.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Say you want to jump to the 5th element: with 1-indexing that's simple, array[5]. You do it without thinking. With 0-indexing it's like "Oh yeah, it's array[4]." I'm not saying the latter is hard, just that's it's: 1) an extra thing to remember; 2) a cause of a lot of bugs. And here's the thing: in a modern language, there is no reason for it to exist. None. It's just a stupid, historical appendage we've been unable to shake off.

    Yeah, the problem is that you're not getting the nth element. You're still in pointer arithmetic mode, and really saying, get me the element that's offset n places from the start. I've come across places where 0-based and 1-based have advantages over each other. In general, I prefer 1-based, because it's more intuitive for the most common cases. 0-based is often easier when you have to calculate things. Anyways, I've had off by one errors in both cases.

    What's really inexcusable is when someone puts months into an enumeration and January is zero. That's when you know that the cargo cultism has gone too far.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Planar said:
    Or take a few math courses above elementary-school level...

    WTF does that have to do with anything? The math involved is extremely basic arithmetic.

    @Planar said:

    1-based causes a lot more bugs than 0-based.

    [citation needed]

    You want to implement a simple XOR-based encryption obfuscation. Or an animation script. Or anything else where you have to continuously loop over your array, depending on a counter.

    Which one is more intuitive?

    This: currentValue = array[counter % array.size]

    Or this: currentValue = array[((counter - 1) % array.size) + 1]



  • They start at zero because mathematicians start counting at zero, coming from a maths heavy background I find it makes sense. If senior level programmer hasn't grapsed how to write for loop correctly I doubt they should be called "senior".

    If you don't like zero based indexing, functional languages or languages that let you do foreach are probably more your cup of tea. In C# and JavaScript I rarely have to iterate over a collection while counting, or I manipulate the array/collection before looping.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Snowyowl said:

    I'm going to write a language where arrays start at 3.
    It's been done. Ada and (I think) ALGOL 68 can do that. Code that uses that feature a lot is very confusing.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @lucas said:

    They start at zero because mathematicians start counting at zero, coming from a maths heavy background I find it makes sense.

    Bullshit. Mathematicians count from 1 just like anyone else. Zero based indexing comes from pointer arithmetic. If you're working at machine code / ASM level, that's obviously how you have to operate. And C isn't much above that level, so it makes sense for those things.

    I actually find the one based years to be retarded. Not because I think there was a year zero, but because it makes so many things stupid, like 1990 is part of the 80s. Since the BC/AD distinction came several hundred years later, what difference does it make if we have one retarded decade / century in the distant past in exchange for reasonable dates now.

    @lucas said:

    In C# and JavaScript I rarely have to iterate over a collection while counting, or I manipulate the array/collection before looping.

    In languages like this, I typically only use an integer to iterate when I need to remove elements. In that case, I'll use a while loop, so I either increment the index or remove an item each time through. Of course, with javascript, foreach can get you into a whole other brand of trouble.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I actually find the one based years to be retarded. Not because I think there was a year zero, but because it makes so many things stupid, like 1990 is part of the 80s. Since the BC/AD distinction came several hundred years later, what difference does it make if we have one retarded decade / century in the distant past in exchange for reasonable dates now.

    But... but... think of all the heated debates in 1999 and 2000 whether new years was really the start of the new millennium or not. Think of all the new years parties that'd have stuck up with boring molybdomancy instead.


  • @Snowyowl said:

    ... and having said that, I suddenly remember a table I was manipulating last week in Javascript where the third column had some important data in it, and the correct quick and dirty jQuery JavaScript snippet was .getElementsByTagName("td")[2] .querySelector("td:nth-child(3)")
    FTFY.

    If not using semantic classes why not just go with tr.cells[2] ?



  • @boomzilla said:

    1990 is part of the 80s
    Weird, in my mind 1900 and 2000 were part of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, and yet I've never considered that 1980 would be in the 70s and 1990 in the 80s.

    OMG, I WAS BORN IN THE SEVENTIES! I'M SO OLD!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Zecc said:

    @boomzilla said:
    1990 is part of the 80s

    Weird, in my mind 1900 and 2000 were part of the 19th and 20th centuries respectively, and yet I've never considered that 1980 would be in the 70s and 1990 in the 80s.

    Yeah, if you follow the year 1 logic through, you end up with all sorts of weirdness and inconsistencies, or you can just do the obvious and everything except one point in time just works, and you don't have an unending procession of special cases. Normally, I bow to no one in my pedantic dickweedery, but it amazes me how many people love to make 1900 part of the 19th century (i.e., the 1800s) as a consequence of counting backwards.


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