Peter Amstutz @tetron@octodon.social

@kara_dreamer @mona @tobascodagama @natecull I believe there are formal verification systems that let you do that. The challenge, of course, is that like test cases, complex constraints become programs in their own right that can have mistakes.

@natecull @kara_dreamer @mona @tobascodagama it also (sometimes) allows you to evolve your underlying data model while maintaining the original API contract. Harder to do that with code that reads the underlying fields directly & doesn't expect it to change (end up with denormalized models etc).

Is the Republican Senate "health care" bill really called BRCA? As in, the gene mutation most associated with breast cancer?

@Ronflaix thank goodness this is just a meme and not the coming of "promoted toots" on mastodon

@pixelpaperyarn
- True, and anyone that says otherwise is probably engaging in macho brogrammer BS

- Very little software that is being used on an ongoing basis can ever be "finished". Embedded assumptions constantly change, requiring either the software be updated or some backwards compatibility/emulation layer stuck underneath. Starcraft, originally released to run on Windows 95, recently got a patch to run on Windows 10.

- Yes!

Not only I get thr usual LinkedIn email, and email from recruiters finding me through LinkedIn, now I get email from LinkedIn itself trying to recruit me. What's next, are they going to show up at my house?

Watching a Syfy original movie. Best part so far is that the particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory apparently looks exactly like a water treatment plant.

@skquinn sounds interesting. Link recommendations?

Programming in the small ("hacking") and #programming in the large ("software engineering") are so different that people end up talking past each other. Shortcuts that work for a 1,000 line program may be disastrous for a 10,000 line program, while other techniques that seem like annoying boilerplate for a 10,000 line program might be absolutely essential to manage complexity at 100,000 lines.

@skquinn I've never written a program in Forth so take this with a grain of salt, but my impression is that it is similar to lisp in that there are some really elegant underpinnings but the hard problems in software are usually not about finding the most beautiful way to express your algorithms, it is finding the right abstractions to tame the inherent complexity of your problem domain

Simplicity in #programming tends to mean two contradictory things. Sometimes it means "can accomplish a goal using simple parts". On the other hand, it might mean "complex parts that make it simple to accomplish a goal". Consider CSS. It gets a lot of well deserved hate for being complex, but actually, setting a few CSS properties is a lot simpler than writing a "simple" layout in code!

Simplicity in #programming is overrated. The lisp curse is that things made of elegant small pieces are no more likely to be elegant in the large, when the complexity of the problem overwhelms simplicity of expression. Complex languages (eg C++) are that way for a reason. Having a bigger toolbox makes it more likely there is a feature that addresses your particular problem.

Spent yesterday trying to get a web app based on Angular 4 up and running. Not normally a front end guy so this involved fighting the node/npm/yarn ecosystem. It's really fragile! Currently resisting the urge to create a build & packaging system based on http://commonwl.org and show people how it is done.

@xor I think the phrase is "I told you so"

@boots instead of sectors you need to use four dimensional complex numbers to find your data

@boots isn't that Turing's infinite paper tape?

@jason hard to prove a negative! Also Ozersk is sort of what the SyFy show "Eureka" would probably be like in real life

@jason there's a documentary on netflix about Ozersk. The US equivalents are probably places like Hanford, Los Alamos. Company towns, but not quite as locked down as the Soviet secret cities.