You Know What I Haven’t Thought About In While? Ruby. Maybe I Need To Polish Off The Old Gemstone. 

It has builtins that let you change the color of the text in the console! By far my prettiest Hello World to date.

Scene: I’m sitting in my dorm room the first semester of college.

I finally get my code working and am doing the final cleanup before submitting. I delete some lines that I had commented out because, you know, I was scared to get rid of them at the time in case they became useful later.

I run my code after deleting the aforementioned COMMENTS just to make sure everything still works. As expected, it works! Then it doesn’t. Then it works again! And again! Then it doesn’t. I put the comment back in just in case that’s what was keeping everything together (see: superstition) and it works for 6 straight tests, which thoroughly confuses me.

I ultimately found out that the problem was not, in fact, with the comments that do nothing but actually with an integer I was declaring and incrementing without ever initializing, creating “random” behavior.

It really be like that sometimes

Reblog if you’re a student actively ignoring an assignment

Thanks Visual Studio + Chromium browser for making a nice warm section on the UNDERSIDE of my desk below my laptop.

I like Cilk++. It’s so nice to just be like “Hey I want this for loop to have some parallelism” then only have to replace the “for” with “cilk_for”. 

Black People in Programming/Computer Science

This is BY NO MEANS an exhaustive list. In fact, there are MANY, MANY, MORE. I’m just trying to draw attention to the major contributions black people have made to the Computer Science / Programming community. 

BLACK LIVES MATTER.

- Lindsay Grace : Designing games with social impacts.

- Marsha Williams : First black woman to earn a PhD in Computer Science. She also lead many initiatives to increase black representation in STEM careers.

- Clennita Justice, Aggrey Jacobs, and Travis McPhail : Employees at Google improving Google Play Books and Google Maps.

- Katherine Johnson : Her work with NASA was critical in putting humans in space.

- Clarence Ellis : First black man to get a PhD in Computer Science. He pioneered Operational Transformation, early group collaboration software for plaintext documents.

- Dorothy Vaughan : Paved the way for African American females at NASA and in programming in general. TAUGHT HERSELF FORTRAN. BEFORE THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED. Imagine trying to learn a low-level programming language WITHOUT Stackoverflow or even ctrl + f. 

Hey! Computer Science B.S. passing by. CS, like the last reply mentioned, is a science. A lot of schools will lump it in with the college of engineering (e.g. the one I went to), which isn’t necessarily wrong, but ultimately the discipline is a natural science.

In fact one could argue that hardware computers aren’t even necessary to perform the activities of pure computer science: people like Leonhard Euler were discovering its principles long before the first transistor had been made. Heck, even if your laundry-sorting process is rigid enough you could call it computer science.

I think of computer science as the study of the ways to move and store data. The best way to accomplish those activities happens to be with computers, so we concern ourselves with applications on the creations of our computer engineering friends.

hey! could you help me with the difference between computer science and computer engineering?

hi! my background is experimental physics, so you might be better off asking someone who is actually from one of those disciplines. but my understanding is that computer science focuses on software (eg data structures, coming up with algorithms) while computer engineering is a marriage of cs and electrical engineering, which involves more work on the electronics/hardware side of things. because of this, you'd need to learn a lot more physics for a computer engineering degree.

Submitting a PR without unit tests is like having a manhattan without a cherry

Sure, it’s easier, but exceedingly less satisfying

An epistle on an “oh duh” moment I just had while pondering switch functionality in Python.

Every couple of months when I get back into some hobbyist Python development I find myself DuckDuckGo-ing “switch in Python” and am subsequently always reminded that that’s not explicitly a thing. You, of course, get that functionality from dictionaries.

I’ve always thought that was dumb, but today I was considering it and realized that it’s all because of the interpreted nature of the language. Switch statements have the wicked performance improvements over if ladders in compiled languages because the switch tells the compiler to put a bunch of branches in the intermediate assembly so a lot of unnecessary condition checks are skipped.

Without in-depth knowledge of how the interpreter works, it now becomes clear why you have to use the dictionary. It’s not the Python lords being pretentious and imposing their pythonic ways; you have to be more explicit to the interpreter about where to look for the logic to run because the interpreter doesn’t craft intermediate assembly, it just plows straight through. So a switch in Python would ultimately perform no better than an if ladder.

That doesn’t mean a switch wouldn’t make me happy, mind you.

C is a shot of American Rye (100 proof, bottled-in-bond)

Python is a Ramos Gin Fizz

Javascript is a bone-dry, dirty, vodka martini

React a Cosmopolitan

Angular an Appletini

Express an Espressotini (yea I say that instead of “espresso martini” because I find it more fun this way)

C# is a Sazerac with equal parts cognac and whiskey, and the person making it will HAVE to tell you how “a lot of people say it’s the first cocktail, but that’s not really true”

if i were a drink i’d be cherry vanilla coke