Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

The last pieces are finally falling into place. After years of design and implementation, 2015 will be the year that Perl 6 officially launches for production use.

— Larry Wall

The Sixth Wall will be built from the things you wear on your body and arrange on the shelves in your bedroom. Nest, QOL, Hue. Automatic. Smart TVs. HAPIfork. Vessyl. Autographer. Memeto. Glass. Dropcam. Jawbone. Fuel. Withings. Fitbit. Healthkit. Little policemen in your pocket, little policemen on your skin.

The Sixth Wall will be made of intelligent dust which settles in the folds of your clothes and communicates your position and heart rate to orbiting satellites. London’s citizens will dream, and the images of their dreams will dance on the telescreens of Piccadilly Circus, and be found wanting.

— James Bridle (Thanks to Paul Wise)

It is rare to hear somebody talks about Git without having "sucks" in the same sentence ;-)

— Junio C Hamano

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Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 13, 2014 15:53 UTC (Thu) by diederich (subscriber, #26007) [Link] (2 responses)

Larry, and everyone else in the Perl community, thank you.

Perl 5 has been my goto language for 21 years now. I've been keenly looking forward to Perl 6 for more than half of that time.

I truly think that Perl 6 has a solid chance of bringing Perl back to the 'main list' of programming languages. It's so innovative, and has so much potential.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 14, 2014 14:53 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

It was time to pick a scripting language to go deep on when Slashdot came out with the 01Apr "Parrot" gag.
Knowing that Perl6 was looming, I opted for Python, to minimize the re-learning.
"Good news? Bad news? Who can say?"
http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2009/02/parable...

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 22, 2014 11:28 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Um... No. Dynamic typing is a mistake. Always has been, always will be. It makes good tooling basically impossible and leads to maintenance nightmares because such code is so hard to refactor. And no, "gradual typing" is not the answer, it's a fig leaf.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 17, 2014 21:51 UTC (Mon) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link] (8 responses)

I find the git quote weird.

I love git. Everyone I know loves git.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 18, 2014 17:12 UTC (Tue) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link] (4 responses)

Indeed. git is such an awesome tool it's impressive. Kudos to Juno!

My favorite features are git add -p (which I'll confess to overuse) and git rebase -i (who needs quilt?).

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 18, 2014 17:50 UTC (Tue) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link]

I don't know who needs quilt, but I do know that stgit is awesome.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 19, 2014 16:54 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you overuse git add -p? (Well, OK, I never use it at all, but that's because I use magit, and *always always* stage a chunk at a time, because that lets me review each chunk for stupid thinkos as I do it. Under the cover, magit runs 'git apply --cached' and feeds it a diff, but could equally well use 'git add --edit' with an appropriate machine-driven 'editor'. It's conceptually the same as 'git add -p' anyway.)

I guess if poorly used it could lead to committing untested changes, but the solution then is to test them after committing them. I can't imagine another way than 'git add -p' or similar feature to prise apart your changes into coherent chunks for review. It's a lifesaver.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 19, 2014 17:16 UTC (Wed) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link] (1 responses)

As you say, the solution is to test the changes after committing them, because there's always the risk that you forgot something, or that the changes you added do not have the same effect once isolated (side effects, etc.).

Maybe it's this testing that I should do unconditionally.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 19, 2014 20:37 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I have a script which checks that a branch is bisectable and every commit builds:

========
#!/bin/sh

base="${1:-master}"
shift

GIT_EDITOR="sed -i -e '/^pick/p;/^pick/cexec ./build.sh'"
export GIT_EDITOR

exec git rebase -i "$( git merge-base HEAD "$base" )"
========

The sed command might need some help on OS X and FreeBSD.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 22, 2014 11:35 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

Git isn't bad, but I think we've hit a plateau when it comes to SCM. Improving them further would require to move away from purely text/line-based diffs and have it operate on syntax trees instead. Alas, that's probably just a wet dream.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 22, 2014 14:29 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

There's plasticscm, but it's nonfree. I think you can use its semanticdiff with bit though if you pay for that part of it.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 22, 2014 19:40 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

git supports using arbitrary diff programs, so if you write a syntax aware diff program, git will readily use it. It's just a matter of adding an entry to the git config to tell it to use a different diff/patch program for a particular file type.

This is done by some people for XML formats for example.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 18, 2014 14:39 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Another way to note that 'automated imagery criminalises its subject' is to note that because it is always ignored until a crime has happened, it can *only* be used to track people down post facto, and because doing so is fairly expensive this is only going to be done if it benefits the people doing the tracking.

So, the Third Wall could be used to recover lost property and return it to its owners -- after all, you can see it being left on the ubiquitous cameras. But no, that's too expensive: instead, there is no lost property at all, and your property, if lost, is used as the excuse for a piece of immensely inconvenient security theatre which will probably result in your property being destroyed as a possible bomb. If they do track you down for leaving your property, it'll be to arrest or caution you. Brave new world indeed.

(Though some of the comments are totally over the top. There is no "longer term plan to remove our hard-won freedoms and return us all to serfdom slavery": the terrifying thing about this is that no malice is involved, no giant conspiracy of black-hatted implausibly evil villains needed. It's all the effect of lots of small, reasonable erosions of rights, like the right to take photos in public places or to walk where you will without being tracked, that were never explicitly guaranteed because nobody thought they could possibly be infringed.)