Promises do have applications in all sorts of async tasks though.

[ begin_rant ]

I agree they're over-used, but it's hardly the end of the world. Even the polyfill versions of them are performant enough that you're unlikely to hit their limits. And if you are, it's a good sign that you're abusing them!

Personally, I think a much bigger problem is the clusterfuck way in which stuff gets standardized into JS (now ES). From Promises (yes, I sort of agree with you!) to the insane drag-and-drop API, it seems like the JS world tends to simply pick whichever implementation "got there first" and standardize on that, with nary a consideration for whether the resulting API is sane to use. I mean, when IE 5.x is your reference impl, you just *know* that something is up... That's how you end up with "oh, none of this works until you return false to this handler" and shit like that. And why you have both 'dragover' and 'dragenter'. I guess because the Outlook web team didn't want to maintain event counters?

One of the best programmers I know -- responsible for some *seriously* widespread libraries that pretty much swept the games industry -- always says: "try to write the calling/usage code before you write your library. Because if you as a future caller can't use the API you had in mind, it's crap."

And I tend to agree with him. There's a lot of stuff where that falls over, and I can only imagine it was because the spec/lib authors didn't really think through a real-world use-case for the stuff that they were turning out. If they did, they'd probably have made some changes. (Even Sun, who did a great job with some stuff like the Collections API, has plenty of these architectural brain-farts, particularly surrounding authentication and authorization. They built something super complex and flexible that nobody in their right mind can actually use, so everybody uses a third party lib or two which offer a simple, sane API.)

React actually isn't too bad, particularly compared to Angular or similar! As a functional programming fanboy, I dig the "data drives UI changes" model and the one-way data flow. But "native" DnD, file upload? It's pretty clear that nobody thought through how it is to be on the receiving end of those APIs before ship time. Is it doable? Sure. I've written plenty of code that deals with the "raw" DnD API. But it's damn sure not easy or pleasant! It's hack city because too much was left up to the browsers, and across three browsers you got four opinions on what events should look like. Not to mention the flat-out bugs that nobody cares about fixing because, fuck it, handling backwards compat. is hard! Yeah, you can do it (or use a lib if your use case fits it -- ours didn't), but for something that should be simple and should be a total non-issue, god*damn* did they make it complex.

The interesting thing about JS is that new additions are rarely straight-up terrible. They're usually just sort of "death of a thousand papercuts" bad. No one standout, but a bunch of really annoying bits that make the whole experience an exercise in pain compared to, say, writing for Cocoa or even .NET. I mean... I'll still do it, 'cause I need a paycheck. But for stuff on my own, I tend to shy away from painful APIs... and I imagine that sort of casual dev loss times however many opinionated programmers there are out there is a significantly non-zero number. Maybe not enough to get the ES spec authors to care, but it's still not something that they should take lightly. That's the thing about us old grumpy bastards... we're starting to move into "influencer" positions where we can shoo our junior members away from tech that we know is labour-intensive...

On the other hand, ESWhatever got just about everything right with lambdas, so it's very much a mixed bag. Not quite right on the JIT optimizations (at least on FF), but I'm sure they'll sort that out soon enough!

So yeah, go lambdas. React? Eh, getting there. Drag model? Fuck that noise.

Maybe I'm more optimistic, but I'll at least try briefly. Yeah, I'll give up if 30 seconds seems like it's not making progress, but fuck it I may as well try, right?

So the analogy I use is this:

A programming language is an instrument. I can use it to express ideas, but the instrument itself isn't the focus of my work. It's what I can create with the instrument So if I learn some language that alone doesn't mean much. It's what I do with the instrument (programming anguage) that makes the whole thing worthwhile. [If you're talking to an artist, replace "instrument" with "brush" or "sculpting tool".]

It's all about finding non-threatening parallels that the person you're speaking to can relate to. I mean, yeah, we can "not bother", but that doesn't really help the stereotype of the socially-ignorant, aloof nerd, does it?

Coinbase user here:

This should not be surprising to any user for two reasons:

1) Most of the *coins* are not anonymous. Or rather, they're not private. The ledgers are public, which means that:

2) You're only anonymous if you *never* do anything that connects to you. And as any Coinbase user knows, you have to supply a bunch of identifying and relatively-hard-to-fake info when you sign up. So as soon as you trade on their platform(s?) you are tying your coins to the info they have on you. If you don't want to give up your privacy in exchange for the services they provide, the time to bring out the pitchforks is during signup. After you give your SSN and/or gov. ID, you can't really feign shock and horror when they supply the info to the IRS just like they warned they might in their ToS. I mean, personally I'm cool with that since I do report my cap. gains to the IRS, but yeah, if you're dodging taxes I can see how this is terrible news. But the answer isn't "hate on Coinbase", it's "pay your damn taxes." Shit, cap. gains are a joke in the US anyways... it's not gonna eat into your mad Bitcoin profits that much to pay them... And if you think it is, read on:

3) There are anonymous ways to cash out BTC (not so sure about ETH or LTC). You'll pay a fat premium for them though, and honestly I can't think of any reason to do so aside from strict adherence to libertarian philosophies or ill-gotten gains. Personally my cryptocurrency involvement has been strictly speculation and all above-board, so I'm already de-anonymized as soon as I buy the coins. But I'll grant you if you mine them the equation might be different... if you do, I can at least see the argument for keeping your identity anonymous, if only because anonymity is a nice thing to have in general.

But yeah, no Coinbase user should be surprised by this. They all but come out and warn you that they'll report to your country's tax agency on demand during signup. You can't be pissed when they go and do just that!

You mean aside from Silence, which

1) Is entirely open source.

2) Is based on SMS, not IP (plus or minus, depending on whether you view SMS as being the more universally-available transport in your area)

3) Does not have a central server.

4) Supports easy, in-person key exchange.

5) Requires no Google anything, and is the default messaging app for several Android spins that have no Google integration.

Uh oh, it looks like you don't know what you're talking about.

The last devices to go through RIM's NOC were the old BlackBerries. The ones running BlackBerry 10 didn't, nor do the Android BlackBerries.

Then they can have a soda once in a while.. assuming it's cane sugar-sweetened, not HFCS, not aspartame, not sucralose. In my opinion, stevia is OK, but as with most things YMMV.

Or, since aspartame and sucralose are both GRAS (the former after decades of intense scrutiny), have a soda as often as you'd like provided it's a sugar-free one.

Welcome to 2012! as it was when compressed memory was introduced in Linux.

AA 191 isn't the best example to cite here.

While it's true that bad maintenance procedures led to the failure, the crash would have been avoidable if the pilot or FO had reacted correctly. Instead of increasing the throttle position of the remaining engines and using it to get the plane to where it could land safely, however, he reduced throttle and stalled out.

Maintenance caused the failure, but it was unquestionably pilot error that caused the crash.

I can easily afford even the most expensive Apple watch, no problem. I still think it's a near-useless waste of money...

.
 
... for me. So I won't buy one. If you want one, buy one. I might think it's a waste of money for you too, but then it's not my money, so why should I care?

Mod parent up. Zoe and some of her supporters aren't always innocent...

Interesting, then, that you cite the Asian and Middle Eastern airlines as examples of the "right" way, as many of them are heavily subsidized.

You're right. They don't deserve threats. Few, if any, people do.

But they *have* done things that deserve media attention. Zoe in particular seems to have behaved rather reprehensibly in a couple different ways. (I have no idea about whether she sleeps around, and frankly I couldn't care less. I'm referring to the stores of her DMCA [ab]use, trying to muscle out competing game jams, etc.)

Professional gaming journalism sucks for many reasons (anyone remember Gamespot axing a reviewer because he didn't review a sponsoring game well enough?), and this is one of them.

We shouldn't give a free pass to crap journalistic standards and assholes who can't play nice in the community just because some other set of assholes threatened the first set.

As a correction to the counterpoint: Apple has paid for full time development of Clang + LLVM, as they use it. Despite being under no legal obligation to share the source back to the community they have done so; in essence donating their time and money to a BSD project. Their users benefit (by having a better compiler), and other Free software users benefit (by having a better compiler, plus the ability to build their own IDE around the same underying compiler tech. as Xcode).

There are plenty of examples of BSD software getting "eaten" by a proprietary stack, but much of Apple's usage is actually one of the worse examples you could provide, as they often do contribute quite a lot back.

Some of us do. We just don't all have the same zealous pursuit of Free software as others.

For me at least, I write stuff under the BSD license because it means that more developers can use my projects to build theirs. Simple as that. With the GPL or LGPL, the number of potential users shrinks.

In short, I want to write software for other developers regardless of whether they're committed to the cause of Free software. BSD lets me do that, GPL doesn't. Simple enough.

And that right there is the difference between GPL and BSD developers.

I develop stuff under the BSD license because I want to help people regardless of whether or not I view their projects as being congruent with my views on software distribution.