Greg Ward

Hmmmm. If I rent this mystery car model, it's $10 cheaper than a compact. But it will consume the world's entire economic output for 100,000 years to buy the fuel to drive it 100 km. What the heck. 10 bucks is 10 bucks, right?

@brandon_rhodes Couple of years ago I saw you give a PyCon talk on writing prose in a diff-friendly way with carefully chosen line breaks. Is there any text online that I can point my co-workers at to recommend this technique? Thanks!

@hillelogram No, but it sure helps! You don't need to know how CPUs or compilers work, but it helps. You don't need to know how human psychology works, but it helps. I'm a way better programmer than I was 20 years ago, and that's not all due to programming experience.

Been mulling over how to respond to this. Allen is right: you don't need to know math to program effectively. But he's not going far enough. There is NOTHING, not one single thing, you need to understand to "program effectively", except for software bullshit.

Today's PSA: caching out of process is not free: it exchanges slow network traffic for fast network traffic. It's generally a win, but even fast network traffic is a lot slower than a memory fetch! Use ngrep to sniff your local redis traffic: sudo ngrep -d any port 6379

Roses are red, roses are blue depending on their velocity relative to you

"I know! Let's impose some completely arbitrary and pointless constraint, then write a *lot* of code based on that!" Great way to make life hell for the people who will be maintaining your code in 5 years.

1988: After a bad day at work, I bought a copy of Slayer's South of Heaven on the way home. Filling the house with speed metal was my teenage rebellion. 2020: After my girlfriend's bad day at work, South of Heaven still does the trick. Great art is timeless!

@TrueFarnz @_moonstorms IIUC: inflation is good if you have debt. Lots of people have debt in the form of mortgages. The money you owe on your mortgage becomes worth less over the years, so it's less of a burden to pay off. Not an economist, just something I vaguely recall reading somewhere.

Some programmers know the Principle of Least Privilege. Some programmers understand Separation of Concerns. It takes a special kind of sickness to put those two things together and decide that the Principal of Least Separation is a great way to design software.

If I was in charge of naming TV shows ... Queen's Gambit → Chess Girl The Expanse → Space People Game of Thrones → Sword People The Last Kingdom → Dirty Sword People Mad Men → Sad Men

I stumbled across Lark this morning for writing parsers in Python: github.com/lark-parser/la…. Awesome library. Really well done. But: do NOT google "python lark". The images are not pleasant. IRL, pythons do bad stuff to nice little birdies.

#Python peeps, I got email today about an "Online Global Python Summit". Not PyCon -- same organization seems to have done JS and Java "summits". Is this a scam? Something to ignore? Or actually something useful and interesting?

@bbelderbos That I can be persuasive and win arguments on dispassionate technical grounds even when I am DEAD WRONG.

What is one thing you think you should have learned earlier in your career?

@raymondh Ouch. I'm basically the person responsible for that idiom. (Well, optparse: OptionParser and add_option().) It's all there for a reason. Could probably be crunched down to a short everyday wrapper, if someone cared enough.

Repeat this #python tongue twister five times fast, "import argparse parser equal argparse dot ArgumentParser parser add argument arg args equal parser dot parseargs print args dot arg."

@desmondrivet You think THAT'S annoying? Haven't you ever noticed that chocolate bars come in packs of four, but razor blades in packs of FIVE??? Come ON, people!

@dabeaz Yes, C has static typing. But it has _discipline_? Not sure about that ... ;-)

@rosielefaive I find that having an _uninformed_ opinion is just as much fun as having an informed opinion, and a lot less work. Works great for many prominent politicians too! ;-)

I just realized the social distancing length is 1 fathom.

@gecko I think it's the use of Roman numerals on the clock face that confuses them.

@rosielefaive On your behalf, I will now go for a walk in the snow. Computers are terrible!