I understand that these variables have a rich and long history, but if you have ever heard a professor or anybody else say "foo" in lecture you will understand why I detest them.
They have absolutely no connection to the matter at hand. Since foo is often used before bar, you would think there is an ordering between the two but there doesn't have to be. They are hard to pronounce and easier to confuse.
Whenever I give an example I use variable names that actually make sense and are related to the example. I'm glad that I have been fortunate to not see "foo" and "bar" anywhere in all of the code I've seen in recent memory.
> They have absolutely no connection to the matter at hand. Since foo is often used before bar, you would think there is an ordering between the two but there doesn't have to be. They are hard to pronounce and easier to confuse.
I couldn’t disagree more. The entire point is that the variables are disconnected from the matter at hand. They’re widely recognised as placeholders, single syllable, distinctly pronounced from each other, and have an implied ordering.
This isn't so much of an advantage for "bar" and "baz". Those sound pretty distinct to Americans, now, but "r" -> "z" is a known type of sound change, which implies that for some people they'll sound the same. "R" -> "s" is attested in Latin, presumably because "z" wasn't an option. (Latin fricatives don't have voicing distinctions.)
For an only slightly different current example, the second consonants in "virile" and "vision" are perceived as distinct in American English, but identical in Mandarin Chinese, which is why the sound is spelled as "r" in Hanyu Pinyin and as "j" in Wade-Giles.
I would agree with the comment you're responding to, too often in tutorials or especially in off hand comments here, I find their usage to assume some common but unindicated convention or subtext and obscure the concept they're trying to convey.
They’re the programmer equivalent of ‘x’ and ‘y’ in mathematics — which programmers don’t use as generic variables because they’re used for “math” embedded in code such as coordinates or measurements.
Proof that for any little thing that existed, exists, or could ever exist in this universe, there will be a non-zero list of human beings unhappy with it. Until the end of humanity, at least...
When I started to learn programming (by myself), I had a really hard time understanding what foo and bar were and what they meant in various tutorials and blogs. I was already trying to learn the syntax and programming concepts, throwing some unknowns words in the mix did NOT help. For some time I thought foo had special meaning in PHP, or that it meant something in English (not my first language, and I was much less proficient in English at ~14 than I am today).
Using foo bar baz qux is lazy when you can easily find countless examples.
The very reason you say something like foo is to avoid using any specific example that might actually mean something and confuse the listener into thinking it matters and focussing on some irrelevant detail instead of the actual concept being illustrated.
You detest that someone says "thing" instead of "house" or something?
"...so you take a thing-"
"what thing?"
"It doesn't matter. It might be anything. So you-"
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A real benefit of the Socratic method is that those magical moments of insight are all yours. You discover a new insight yourself, guided along the way.
It's more fun and exposes any weaknesses. It's easy for the student to say they know something when they actually don't. Drawing links themselves exposes everything. Then a quick detour can fix the foundation before continuing.
It's also very effective for large classes. You are forced to pay attention, because the teacher could call on you at any time.
"Share" seems to just use the built in device sharing, and shares the URL. It's much more interesting if you can copy your personal results (how long it took, if you got hints) to your keyboard and then share it however you like!
I'm on Oxygen OS 10.3.8 (based on Android 10) and I got the mediocre "share to app" menu. I chose Gmail to see the text, and it was just the URL. I'll blame about 50% on this share menu, since it doesn't even include "clipboard" (which is weird, I've had that in the past on Android, but maybe OxygenOS removed it for some inane reason), but I'd still prefer the "copy to clipboard" default behavior that Wordle/Dordle/Nerdle have.
There are environments for Python for Android and iOS, there are also web based ways to use an interpreter [1]. You can also get going with online tutorials instead of getting a book. Python has way way more options than just about anything else.
Considering your limitations you will probably not get beyond the basics of programming until you get your hands on a computer. Even if it is only a Raspberry PI. Entering large amounts of text or running even slightly larger scripts will be painful.
You will be better of trying out basic syntax to the point you understand it and only read the longer examples. One of the experiences of learning programming is entering longer texts and having them not work. Errors are usually small things and you need to be able to find them. In the beginning this is extremely frustrating and I don’t recommend doing this on phone.
I read your article, and it seems like the primary thesis is that large institutions (primarily universities) act as a sheltering mechanism for leftist radicals who promote violent social change.
I’m not assuming you wrote the article, but I want to ask to try to gain insight. If this is true, why is it that business institutions, that have a lot to lose from social upheavals, require 4-year degrees for professional positions, from these leftist institutions?
I read THAT article, and found that it neither affirms, nor refutes the claim that universities shelter violent revolutionaries.
The thing it says about education is that it’s harder to get into a college now than before. That is a change, but it can occur with or without also acting as a retirement home for “the shock troops” that was mentioned in GPs article.
That's a fun article but also so ridiculously, obviously biased that it's difficult to take the details seriously. The author really does the subject a disservice because of that, although at least the are being open about their bias.Because it really is an interesting part of US history. And although I'm not that old and I already knew about most of it, minus some interesting details, like supporting the murder of Sharon Tate, I would imagine he is right when he points out that a lot of people do not remember or know of this history. Especially considering how dangerous people think our society is nowadays.
I had never heard anything about the Puerto Rican separatists though. That's some crazy. Thanks a bunch for the link! The supposed analysis at the end is absurd though and can be effectively skipped. The author does not understand anything about the institutions that hold power now, along with a whole lot else.
Arbitrary knees in exponentially-growing metrics lined up with the introduction of fiat currency due to carefully chosen Y-axis scales by someone who makes money when you invest in Bitcoin.
(Some of those graphs -- especially the first one -- probably have interesting stories behind them, which may or may not relate to fiat currency. But all we get from that page is a Hayek quote structured to suggest he too would love Bitcoin so...)
Hadn't read this before, thank you. Mind blown. It's the missing articulation of why some of this stuff today is so serious.
The first half reads like it would be an amazing epic series, if it were written from the perspective of the complex anti-hero protagonists. I knew about Tupac's family link, and one of my high school teachers was among the white feminist women who were a part of the black liberation movement and told us stories about it, but to write about it as a history of before hiphop, before gangs, and before blacksploitation, after civil rights, this shit was real.
The second half about the mechanisms of right/left conflict is spot on, and describes undercurrents today very well.
I've always been fascinated by the depiction of the 70's in media: an era of excess and debauchery. the linked article (thanks!) reinforces the notion "truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." Each rabbit hole feels more bewildering than the former.
In more industries than not, it's still a thing. There is a lot of companies (that I've worked with at least) where coke usage is still happening at relaxed events, especially when it's a "management-only" event.
As a software consultant for many different industries, from materials, real estate, industrials, fashion and everything in-between. Usage seems the same across all of them.
It’s very much alive, the war on drugs is a racket.
A friend sold car stereos in the 80s, he would get tips in coke. He was paid a lot to cut a early projection tv in half so it could fit in his airplane and be taken back to South America.
I don't think I understood the extent until I watched a Studio 54 documentary - iconic, super popular NYC nightclub where everyone did loads of cocaine out in the open all night.
The cocaine culture and the disco culture were very much intertwined. Maybe it was not as much in the open as at Studio 54, but it wasn't limited to just NYC.
Definitely not comparing to coca leaf use. To your point though, refined THC in the form of hashish has a much longer history than refined coca leaves. As has breeding for more THC.
Hashish does not actually have to be "refined" at all. There's zero chemical process involved. You're just taking the resin glands off the surface of the plant. Refining cocaine is starkly different from this, of course.
Not sure about magnitude. Well, maybe Cocaine yeah magnitude, but when it comes to Coca, I'm pretty sure tribes in South America have been using them for as long as people been using Cannabis. At the very least, the Incas were using Coca back in the day.
They have absolutely no connection to the matter at hand. Since foo is often used before bar, you would think there is an ordering between the two but there doesn't have to be. They are hard to pronounce and easier to confuse.
Whenever I give an example I use variable names that actually make sense and are related to the example. I'm glad that I have been fortunate to not see "foo" and "bar" anywhere in all of the code I've seen in recent memory.