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I call it mario driven development, because oh no! The princess is in a different castle.

You end up with seemingly no code doing any actual work.

You think you found the function that does the thing you want to debug? Nope, it defers to a different function, which calls a a method of an injected interface, which creates a different process calling into a virtual function, which loads a dll whose code lives in a different repo, which runs an async operation deferring the result to some unspecified later point.

And some of these layers silently catch exceptions eating the useful errors and replacing them with vague and useless ones.

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Interesting. I once didn’t update the arch system on my laptop for several years, while it was sitting in a drawer. Had to manually update the keychain but besides that the update just worked

That’s why I included “do research”. I absolutely agree that reinventing everything is not the way forward, but I also think it’s important to get stuck on a problem before looking up what the possible solutions are, because that is when you are in the best position to understand them and how / why they work to solve the problems.

If you write nested if after nested if, hopefully at some point you go “hold on, is there a better way?” And then you do research and learn. That is not to say that learning for knowledge’s sake is bad. It isn’t. In fact it’s great. But it might also be a bit dull to just follow tutorials and such.

Quick guide on how to get better at X: do X a lot.

Programming is no different. Write programs and do research (aka google stuff) when you get stuck or when you want to further your knowledge. Repeat 100000 times and you’ll know lots.

To answer you: no, x += 1 cannot mutate my_var, because it’s a copy. If you wanted something else you would say auto& or auto*.

And if the type of x is such that even a copy can mutate the original (e.g. maybe it’s a wrapper around an index with an overloaded operator+=() that mutates the original entry in the storage), you are probably working with a specialized system of some kind, since that breaks the semantics of the language, and hopefully you would know from context that you have such cases.

And yes, in such an environment I would see “never use auto for this wrapper type” as a valid additional strategy to help ensure code correctness.

But by and large my direct experience is that using auto “almost always”, as Herb Sutter puts it, is beneficial and doesn’t harm readability or understandability.

auto doesn’t really hide all type information, but that is besides the point. The point is that in the vast majority of cases you don’t really care about the specific types your code is dealing with, you only care about the properties of the type.

If I write get_descriptors()[some_idx] what is the type returned by get_descriptors()? You can’t know, because nothing tells you, but you know it must be a type that supports random access indexing. If I put the result of the function call in a for loop, it must support iteration. If I return it by move, it must support being moved.

99% of code is like this. Then you have specialised code that might be doing bit wrangling and what not, in which case you must know that you are dealing exactly with, say, an uint32_t and not just something that supports left shift.

For the 99% of cases, auto makes the code simpler, more correct, more robust, more consistent, and shorter to write and read.

The post I replied to in particular got angry at documentation that uses auto. I have written documentation that looks like this

auto my_var = MyConcreteType { /* … */ };
auto const* x = my_var.get<uint32_t>();
auto const& y = my_var.get_or<uint32_t>(42);

How would such code benefit from not using auto?

MyConcreteType my_var = MyConcreteType {}; just repeats the type, adds zero useful info.

MyConcreteType my_var {}; is inconsistent. Where is the equal sign signifying that this is an assignment?

Similarly, what would you gain by saying uint32_t const* x = my_var.get<uint32_t>();? Nothing, you just doubled your maintenance when you need to change the type passed to the template parameter.

https://herbsutter.com/2013/08/12/gotw-94-solution-aaa-style-almost-always-auto/

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Fair, a desktop-oriented distro is what I meant :)

My expectation: nothing. At least, nothing on the OS side. I don’t think windows is very important to microsoft strategically.

Nowadays, the way to capture audiences is not so much via a proprietary OS, but via proprietary apps.

And in that sense, microsoft is proceeding exactly as expected: more and more of the windows ecosystem either exists on the web, or is available on linux and macos too.

I can see a future where windows only exists for backwards compatibility, but otherwise:

• dotnet apps run on linux (via dotnet core)
• edge runs on linux
• powershell runs on linux
• visual studio code runs on linux
• most of the rest of microsoft’s suite runs in the web

So what does microsoft need to do once windows collapses in the desktop space? Imo not much, really. Those people and companies that are tied to microsoft products will still be. Only, they might be running them on linux.

Edit to add: I am gonna place a bet that we’re gonna see an official microsoft linux distribution by the end of 2035

You got it right with your last sentence. The point is not to find solutions to problems. The point is to spy on everyone.

If the point was to protect children, pedo politicians would be arrested and tried.

That’s how I feel and I’m somewhat positive I don’t have adhd. I mean do you have any idea how much effort it is to do one thing, when “doing nothing” means (at least according to my girlfriend) at minimum selling 8 hours of my day + commute, walk the dog, clean the cat’s litterbox, filling and / or emptying the dishwasher, and sometimes buying groceries?

You better believe I feel like fire when I do one thing, that one thing was likely in the works for several days.

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Which is doable with some snippet engine or simple file template and very minimal scripting to integrate that with your editor of choice.

Not exactly a smart investment of trillion of dollars.

I guess not, after all redemption is only partially located in the middle ages. Anyway, this dawnwalker sounds interesting on the surface, I should keep an eye on it

Successor to VtM Redemption then? First time I hear about this game

I think in this context the impoverishment is implied to be that of content, not liquidity.

I.e. poorer (quality) streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy.

But, yes, fuck them greedy fuckers.

Compose key and 3 minus signs for an em dash. Compose key, 2 minus signs, and a space for an en dash