I know Google’s styleguide discourages auto, but other C++ places I’ve worked weren’t scared of it. The type deduction rules usually do what I expect, unless I have a weird pre-C++11 proxy type that somehow hasn’t been updated in the last 14 years.
It so happens I went to high school in California. My math teacher mentioned how much interaction she had with the state universities, and also lamented the fact that universities offered remedial math courses. She felt that if somebody needed remedial math, they shouldn't be in a university; a junior college would be a better fit.
At the time it felt elitist, but now I agree with her. Yes, this example shows that the high schools are doing a bad job, but it's not clear to me that the universities should clean up the mess. There are other possibilities.
Colleges need to figure out how to advertise those benefits, and the colleges' role in providing the benefits. The fact that they've been flat-footed for a decade tells me either (1) they're incredibly bad communicators, or (2) they don't really believe their own claims.
I'm not sure American universities are still issuing things similar to 1990s 4-year degrees. They issue documents claiming to be degrees, but the quality has dropped, and they aren't what they used to be.
Having taught the new engineers, and having worked with those 1990s mechanical engineers, I strongly disagree. It’s a recurring belief that the new generation is regressing. When typewriters became common, teachers worried about handwriting. When calculators became common, math teachers worried about mental math skills. If anyone alive was old enough to protest, “the greatest generation” probably would have a different name.
Edit: initially i said “ People bemoaned the loss of chalk-on-blackboard skills when paper and pencil got cheap”, but apparently that’s not true, it was first claimed in a piece of satire, and then became mistaken for the truth.
Yeah, people still go to college as high school students who don’t know much and come out as almost-engineers, so degrees definitely still have value. And I don’t see a lot of difference in skill between the generations after accounting for experience.
I remember being very enthusiastic about helping people on, say, Stack Overflow. It didn’t take much extra effort to be nice and made me happy.
But I also burned out relatively quickly. I’d happily answer new questions nicely, but the third or fourth time I saw the same question I spent much less effort to give a welcoming answer than I had the first time I saw it.
Of course, getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned.
I don’t know any good way to keep helpful volunteers helpful for a long time. The best idea I have is constantly recruiting new experts to continually replace the ones that burn out and chase off newbies.
> getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned
Yes! There was a lesson in that and we all missed it. That was probably one of the failings of perl. It ran into a generation of people who never knew about "man pages", or couldn't read (jk - but only somewhat: for some people reading is very hard because various flavors of ADHD, dyslexia, executive disfunction, whatever) and the man page is then useless, or they go to google first and '$|++' failed (because google was raised on python).
Better marketing of the documentation would have helped.
I would say "we'll do better next time" but then perl 6... I'm not happy with perl 6 documentation. There is a lot of it - no problem there. But it insists on living online which necessitates a hosted search function. Which is always broken. And there is still no "local doc" solution.
man I hate that always online stuff. why isn't there the comprehensive man pages thing for perl 6? rhetorical question tho, I don't have much interest in perl 6.
I worked at Booking.com for a year or so around 10 years or so, and most of their stack was in Perl. Folks there had mixed feelings about it, I'm not sure what things are like now, but I assume they're working to replace it.
Ah yes, that's it. I had to hack on Bugzilla to customize it for our start-up.. Back in the day BEFORE they added a lot of end-user customization... UGH..
Correct, this is a discussion of which language version the compiler should follow if the programmer doesn’t specify one. It’s not about which features are acceptable when implementing the compiler.
> [Original, emphasis added]: the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s
> [Response, emphasis added]: The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946
Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?
Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.
> the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s
> The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946
How does the existence of a food program in the 1890s, or 1946, automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation of the food programs into 2025 is due to the efforts of the black panthers? Similarly, one could attribute gun control laws in California to the black panthers focus on arming black neighborhoods, rather than some kind of liberal anti-gun attitude.
> automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation
Goes the other way around too? Regardless government continuing doing what they were already doing for the past half century seems reasonable. Without any additional evidence that seems like an inherently much more valid argument that attributing it to the Black Panthers. So equating them seems disingenuous...
I wasn't a big fan of floating point until I worked with a former college professor who had taught astrophysics. When possible, he preferred to use respected libraries that would give accurate results fast. But when he had to implement things himself, he didn't always necessarily want the fastest or the most accurate implementation; he'd intentionally make and document the tradeoffs for his implementation. He could analyze an algorithm to estimate the accumulated units in the last place error ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place ), but he realized when that wasn't necessary.
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