Ethan

That’s an artifact of JavaScript, not JSON. The JSON spec states that numbers are a sequence of digits with up to one decimal point. Implementations are not obligated to decode numbers as floating point. Go will happily decode into a 64-bit int, or into an arbitrary precision number.

hackthebox is essentially a puzzle solving platform where the puzzles are designed to teach you hacking. You’re not supposed to hack the platform.

I was trying to make a point without starting a flamewar that was beside the point. Personally I’d never choose a dynamically typed language for a production system. That being said, Python and Ruby complain if you try to add an array, dict/hashmap, string, or number to another (of a different type) so they’re certainly more sane than JavaScript.

I thought it was clear I was saying JavaScript is not a sane language for this very reason

Sure. But in a sane language doing something totally nonsensical like that is an error, and in a statically typed language it’s a compiler error. It doesn’t just silently do weird shit.

I used GitLab’s version of Copilot when it was free and that was net helpful. It predicted for loops and stuff and was close enough, enough of the time that it was net positive. Not enough that I’d actually pay for it…

It’s hard to distinguish whether a line is wrongly indented or not.

That’s very much not my experience. I use YAML regularly and while I’ve had copy paste indentation errors when I look at the offending line it’s always obvious to me how to fix the indentation. The only indentation thing that’s ever given me trouble is embedding YAML as a string within a file that uses tabs.

As someone whose first language was C, I plan to never use C++ for anything more than programming an Arduino precisely because of the multitude of pointer types. A pointer should just be a pointer. Having five hundred different flavors of pointers is confusing as fuck.

Ananace and the article they linked are using their dislike of Go to conclude that it’s a bad language*. It is not a bad language. Every language has hidden complexity and foot guns. They don’t like Go. Maybe you won’t like Go. That’s ok. But that doesn’t make Go a bad language. The language designers are very opinionated and you might dislike them and their decisions.

I haven’t used Rust but from what I’ve seen, it’s a lot less readable than Go. And the only thing more important than readability is whether or not the code does what it’s supposed to do. For that reason I doubt I’ll ever use Rust outside of specific circumstances.

*I’m using “a bad language” as shorthand for “a language you shouldn’t use”. Maybe they don’t think it’s bad but amounts to the same thing.

I think it’s a joke about the song being copyrighted

For references within a scope, you’re probably right. For references that cross scope boundaries (i.e. function parameters), they necessarily must consume memory (or a register). Passing a parameter to a function call consumes memory or a register by definition. If a function call is inlined, that means its instructions are copy-pasted to the call location so there’s no actual call in the compiled code.

The whole point is that random character sequences are often valid Perl

When I read the headline I also assumed “valid Perl program” meant it did something interesting. I was expecting to read an article about an interesting image to text conversion process that produced non-trivial Perl programs.

“Feeding garbage to OCR” is a really boring way of generating text. I was assuming it would be something more interesting, like creating a symbolic representation of the splatters and generating text from that. Using OCR is basically piping /dev/urandom to perl and seeing what happens. The fact that they’re valid perl programs is worth a laugh but the generation method is totally uninteresting.

Making good UX is fucking hard. I say UX because making it good is really about the user’s experience, not graphic design. An ugly front end can be good if it’s intuitive and easy to use. But a visually gorgeous front end will still be garbage if it’s clunky and confusing.

It’s really something you have to experience to fully understand. Ultimately it comes down to this: front ends have to deal with people, backends only have to deal with computers. So backends can be cleanly organized and well structured. Applying backend design principles to a front end will get you a CRUD interface - something that’s usable but no one really wants to use.

Agreed. Even self-reviewing a few days after I wrote the code helps me see mistakes.

Ah, yeah that makes a lot more sense

Better to not have version control!? Dear god I hope I never work on anything with you.

Programming languages are tools. I couldn’t care less about learning a new tool just for the sake of learning. My interest in learning tools is exclusively practical - if they help me do my work better.

I find functional languages interesting, but that’s because I find the underlying theory interesting and worth learning for its own sake, not because I actually care about the specific language it’s written in. Even then these days I’d rather learn about woodworking (which is currently my main hobby) than a programming paradigm I’m probably never going to use.

The presence of semicolons is not a language killer.

I’m not saying it is. But every time I have to work in a language that requires semicolons I’m constantly forgetting them and constantly reminded of how nice it is to not have to care in Go.

After programming in Go for nearly a decade, the idea of going back to needing semicolons brings me pain. Rust seems cool, but semicolons 🤢