Erica Sadun

Where technology meets something or other

Archive for the ‘Humor’ Category

Pronouncing all the things: Jumping into my bin folder

After dutifully training people to pronounce simctl correctly (“sim control”, not cuddle or kittle), I stopped by my binary folder (/bin, also pronounced “bin”, like the thing you throw stuff into) this morning to see how I pronounce all sorts of things. I’m curious as to how my pronunciations compare to yours.

Here is a list of how I say things from my highly unscientific survey of /bin:

  • cat: Meow. Does anyone not say “cat”? (From “concatenate”)
  • csh: See shell. See shell run. Run shell run. Who’s a good shell? Yes you are!
  • df: Dee Eff or occasionally disk free. Mostly “Run df to see how much free disk there is” (notice the inversion from “disk free” to “free disk”).
  • chmod, chown: Change mod but I mostly say “make it executable” or “add read permission”. I almost never say it out loud. Similarly, chown is just “change owner” because saying “change own” is just weird.
  • cp, rm, mv: See Pee (no 30) or copy. Are Em or remove. And “move”. Don’t let anyone convince you it’s “mivv”.
  • ls: Ell ess. I almost never say “list” but I do say “list the contents of the working directory with ell ess”.
  • rmdir, mkdir: Arr emm dear or remove “dear”, and “make dear” (which, you know, is really sweet when you think about it.)
  • pwd: I only ever say “print the working directory”.
  • ln: Going against the trend, it’s always “ell enn”, not “link”. Probably because I never use this and always use lns instead.

I’m not sure this post has much of a point other than to amuse you by how I waste time in the morning before the caffeine kicks in. Let me know how wrong I am and what the correct pronunciation of some of these items are.

Announcing the Thud Programming Language

Thud is an uncompiled programming language based on rocks (also known as “sedimentary development”). Thud is natural, organic, easy to read, and easy to write, as it consists entirely of the keyword Thud.

Thud is type safe and thread safe as Thud has no types or threads. You may type the word Thud in any medium regardless of physical state, with an intrinsic guarantee that each atomic Thud cannot and will not metaphysically interact with any other Thud.

Thud has a low learning curve, regardless of language background. Most developers will be able to Thud in as little as thirty easy lessons.

As Thud is uncompiled and will not run on any computer, it has a very low memory footprint, depending on the local geographic features of the implementation site. Individual instances may be thrown at LLVM developers, who will emit ouch, although this is an unexpected benefit and not a result of the non-existent optimizations built into the toolchain.

Thud is static. Any Thud errors (for example, Thump or GastricDistress) can safely be ignored by any Thuddist developers. Type annotations are unneeded, as are Thud debuggers or Thud unit tests. To ensure correctness, one may throw a Thud at a nearby barista, tax auditor, or neighborhood association chairperson, regardless of LLVM background.

Thud is inherently nullable. That which has no Thud, is not Thud. All instances are therefore automatically guaranteed for thuddability, as non-thuddable elements are not Thud, or on every second Thursday, spork.

Thud includes a powerful macro system for metaprogramming, consisting of leaving Thud instances alone, as they aren’t meant to do anything in the first place.

Thuds can exist concurrently, although there is no mechanism for cross-Thud communication, shared memory, or metamorphic rock formations. Although Thud has a “C-Binding Manifesto”, a lack of developer availability means that at the current time, developers must make their own mean-spirited comments towards C-APIs rather than relying on each Thud‘s natural disdain.

Thud does not allow dependencies, ensuring that you will never encounter errors when using ThudPods or Delenda Est decentralized repository managers.

Thud is not hosted at GitHub, simplifying the need to respond to trivial pull requests and user-sourced corrections. You can support Thud by sending large envelopes of unmarked cash to my personal address.

Don’t attempt tech conversations after anesthesia

“Does anyone know if I need to capture self as weak in a UIView.animation block?”

Once I was afraid. I was petrified. Scared I couldn’t render without view at my side. Then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, and I referenced strong, and I learned how to pass my ARC along…

And now you’re back from @nonescape. I just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face.

I should have made you dereference, should have made you leave your key, if I’d known for just one second, you’d need to be released

Go on now, walk out the door. I’m not the same calling instance, you’re not needed anymore

Weren’t you the one who tried to create a reference cycle with goodbye, do you think I’d crumble, deallocate and die?

My value will survive!

Cue Sax solo.

p.s. you want self to live throughout the animation and possibly into completion. stay strong.

Swift Style vs ProseLint: The Smackdown

ProseLint is great. As I’m writing a book about style and linting, it’s natural to try to lint the book that lints your programming. In using this tool, I’ve encountered some amusing “lint fails” that I’d thought I’d share.

ProseLint vs Nil Coalescing: “hyperbolic.misc ‘`??`’ is hyperbolic.” Winner: Swift Style.

ProseLint vs discussion of Forced Unwwrapping: “leonard.exclamation.30ppm More than 30 ppm of exclamations. Keep them under control.” Winner: ProseLint. Any forced unwrapping, even in a discussion about forced unwrapping, is an obvious fail. Save the kittens, drop the !’s.

ProseLint vs Meaningful Variable Names: “typography.symbols.multiplication_symbol Use the multiplication symbol ×, not the letter x” Winner: Swift Style. As Freud said, sometimes an letter  “x”  is just a letter “x”. (Or was that Groucho Marx? I forget.)

ProseLint vs “Use American English Spelling” rule: “consistency.spelling Inconsistent spelling of ‘color’ (vs. ‘colour’)” Winner: Swift Style. When writing for a global audience, prefer “color” to “colour”. (See? I did it again. — B. Spears)

Winner? Forget the points. It’s ProseLint. This summary doesn’t include the great catches made and fixed, like excessive use of “very”, repeated word detection, etc. Great tool, check it out.

The unbearable Swiftness of web search

Swift proposal SE-0086 removed the NS prefix from many types in the Swift Foundation library. In doing so, it moves Swift away from its Cocoa roots to establish a cleaner language palette to work with. Swift adheres to a philosophy that type names should be clear, consise, and without needless prefixes.

The result are names that are intuitively obvious, easy to understand, and a real pain to search for. If you thought tracking down information on Swift filters, conversions, mapping, strides, streaming, and notifications was hard, then you may appreciate what it’s like to search for Swift Bundle, Operation, Process, or Thread.

Swift (the language) is now gaining sufficient traction that searches are far more responsive for programming than they used to be. Still, it  helps to throw in an extra word or two like code, sample, or type to focus your search. You may also want to limit searches to, for example, “site:apple.com”.

And, yes, you can always pick up one of those Swift Calendars and read about Swift Dates. Swift wasn’t named after a certain pop star. It just sometimes acts like it was.

p.s. For Dave Abrahams: COW optimization.

Did the Verge just insult me?

Me, a few weeks ago:

When your brain and fingers are absolutely wired for Emacs editing, it’s a frustrating experience to have to work on the iPad, with all its touching. As a touch-typist, any time I have to move my hands away from the keyboard, it feels like I have failed.

After some searching around App Store, I eventually downloaded a few Emacs-style editors. Of these, em notes (about five bucks) offered the best solution. It links with your Dropbox account and enables you to edit text in an application folder there, ensuring you can load and work on documents and have them available as well in the “real world”, aka anywhere you’re not working on an iPad.

The Verge, today:

Oh and it should go without mentioning, that the keyboard itself is only a solution for geeks and no one else…for a regular person who wants to regularly use an iPad Pro with a keyboard, your only solution is using the UI with your fingers constantly. This is simply true; just as it’s true that only the nerdiest of nerds should learn how Emacs and its keybindings work…

Sniff.

Fact: Sets are the Jan Brady of Swift Collections

Swift can infer array types:

let myArray = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]

Swift can infer dictionary types:

let myDictionary = ["key1": "value1", "key2": "value2"]

But what about sets?

let mySet = ["a", "b", "c", "d"] as Set // or
let mySet: Set = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]

These johnny-come-lately collections offer no automatic inferencing. Don’t sets deserve love too?

Parentheses are already taken by tuples. Angle brackets are protocol/generic specific No one wants to type 《》. Face it. Sets are Swift’s Jan Brady collections.

Swift playgrounds use braces to show sets in the results sidebar:

Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 10.34.41 AM

But of course, braces mean closures:

Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 10.36.50 AM

And even if Swift could infer a set from comma-delineated braced items, should it?

let mySet = {"a", "b", "c", "d", "e"} // wrong, bad, wrong 
let mySet = {members | "a", "b", "c", "d", "e"} // nope

You could do a lot worse.

let mySet = ~1, 2, 3~ // The "mustache" delimiter
let mySet = ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 1,2,3, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
let mySet = •< 1, 2, 3 >•
// ...etc...

Even if there were a way to infer sets, Swift still wouldn’t be able to infer option sets, bags, ordered sets, ordered dictionaries, counted sets, fashionable totes, shopping satchels, and unique arrays.

let myTotes = [(Gucci, Prada, Louis Vuitton)]

You could try (or try! or try?) but you’re just (ahem) setting yourself up for failure.

So what should Swift do? You tell me.

Thank you everyone in #swift-lang IRC for your suggestions.

Why tech writers can’t do fiction

Especially romance.

“She looked longingly at him. Starting with the upper-left corner of his face, her eyes tracked down and to the right, making sure to scan all emotional features while paying careful attention to possible outlying data points.”

“He carefully rested his hand upon hers with a minimum of pressure to avoid damage to her extremities.”

“‘Darling,’ he said. ‘It appears you are in good health, with adequate teeth and other markers of youth and vitality. Would you like to move east approximately 25 feet into the bedroom, and assume a supine position upon the provided rest area?'”

“‘Oh yes,” she replied, intending to fully comply with the technical specifications he had established. ‘Let us run unit tests without full coverage!'”