5 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
  2. Jul 2022
    1. maybe people today are more complacent about emergencies because they think someone will come along and save the day.

      The actual phrasing here (@39:03):

      maybe people today are more complacent about emergencies because at some implicit level they see there's more division of labor and they think someone will come along and save the day

      (No idea what's up with the transcript here. It omits some crucial wording/context.)

  3. May 2022
    1. Code can't explain why the program is being written, and the rationale for choosing this or that method. Code cannot discuss the reasons certain alternative approaches were taken.

      Having trouble sourcing this quote? That's because some shithead who happens to run a popular programming blog changed the words but still decided to present it as a quote.

      Raskin's actual words:

      the fundamental reason code cannot ever be self-documenting and automatic documentation generators can’t create what is needed is that they can’t explain why the program is being written, and the rationale for choosing this or that method. They cannot discuss the reasons certain alternative approaches were taken. For example:

      :Comment: A binary search turned out to be slower than the Boyer-Moore algorithm for the data sets of interest, thus we have used the more complex, but faster method even though this problem does not at first seem amenable to a string search technique. :End Comment:

      From "Comments Are More Important Than Code" https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1053354&ftid=300937&dwn=1

    1. Linux itself only started as an amateur project, not professional like Minix, right

      That should be "big and professional like gnu".

  4. Jan 2022