As a programmer working in the UK I've never been asked to rewrite something into British English. I have been instructed to convert some old codebase to American spellings to "avoid confusion". Probably about 6 times in 20 years of professional programming and usually by some product manager based in San José following an acquisition. This is why the library exists I expect.
To be clear, I don't think the library would actually be used to accomplish this task. Rather I suspect a tounge in cheek reaction to years of tedious spelling adjustment disguised as urgent feature requests.
When I worked on a big c++ codebase I found them essential for both ci/cd systems and actively debugging an issue. The valgrind suite of tools like cachegrind are very useful for both troubleshooting as well as classic static analysis and I heartily recommend investing some time in learning valgrind if you're writing c/c++ code for a platform valgrind runs on.
On the other hand commercial tools have been more of a mixed blessing but that is probably because every time ive seen them deployed the budget hasnt included sufficient engineering time, training or prof services to cut down huge numbers of false positives.
> The valgrind suite of tools like cachegrind are very useful for both troubleshooting as well as classic static analysis and I heartily recommend investing some time in learning valgrind
valgrind is not a static analysis tool. But it is a great tool, especially memcheck.
I think it's better than slacks sidebar threaded reply.
It also has better code blocks, less irritating pop up magic and no bots nagging you to fill in credentials all the time.
Yeah I guess, it does seem implausible they'd be able to fit it in with all the work they have fabricating pretexts to get their own countries involved with wars and invasions and regime change and assassinations.
This is interesting. I recently had a hive with 2 queens that stayed that way for a few months. It’s very uncommon as usually the mother flies off with a swarm or the daughter kills her mother. It was late winter/early spring and persisted for about 3 months.
Do you have a source for the guardian editorial policy being pro the toppling of Gaddafi's regime in Libya? The Guardian is far from perfect but generally they were and are against military intervention by the UK.
This reminds me, a company I worked at used a bash script + zenity to automate the programming of devices using open-jtag. It worked pretty well and let the workers (skilled mostly in soldering and electronics assembly) do the programming and flashing of a fairly involved embedded device.
We eventually ended up replacing it with a local web-app but the zenity version was fast to write and good enough that the quick and dirty prototype survived for several years.
My pitch for zenity would be - "Need a prototype gui for users that struggle in the console? Consider zenity."
Also, we have an annoying amount of red tape from both the UK itself and, at least for the immediate future, the EU. It gets in the way of starting a business, but worse, it gets in the way of taking significant steps necessary to grow a new business like taking on your first employees.
If you've got months or years of runway from external funding, that's irritating but not a big deal. You hire someone to deal with it and get on with more important things.
However, if you're bootstrapped and at first it's just three friends working out of someone's garage or a family business with an office in the dining room, that red tape can be a significant overhead that holds your business back from taking on staff and dedicated facilities and so on.
Given this culture, it's hardly surprising that a lot of UK start-ups with ambitions of hockey stick curves look to the US for support. The alternative is fighting your way out of being a lifestyle business for some number of years, at the same time as trying to do whatever it is you do that actually has value.
I wouldn't make the argument that regulations get in the way without specifying which one. I would make the argument that, philosophically, Europe is very conservative and risk averse in terms of terms of releasing funding. For the purposes, of this argument, I'd also ignore states and political unions. However, you segment Europe, the result tends to be same.
This is at all levels of banking and financing. In the US, the balance is very different for almost all types of business. Of course, you can find exceptions, but investors will engage without the level of due diligence, or qualification, that is required in Europe.
I don't think it prevents a bootstrapped business from doing well. My own are proof that this is not the case.
I do think it makes growing a business slower and more expensive than it needs to be.
Some examples that come to mind from from recent years are the Consumer Rights Directive (soon to be superseded, but the UK will probably have fully separated from the EU by then), the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive (ditto), and the VAT rules (of which there are so many variations depending on context that I won't even try to list them all here).
To be clear, it's not that I object to things like strong consumer protections or privacy rights. On the contrary, I am a strong advocate of such things, and my own businesses have never done the sort of shady stuff in these areas that tends to attract criticism. I just find the EU's approach to these things unnecessarily onerous and not always effective at achieving its intended goals anyway.
Starting a business is easy. I've personally done it in the early 2000s, and it's easier today. However, it's structured for traditional businesses which produce returns relatively early.
It is not structured to support "startup"-type companies like those in the US. Yes, Silicon Valley is the focus on HN, but the range of options beyond what you find in the UK is available in many more places than just SV.
In the UK and Europe you can potentially find an angel investor. Once you go to the next levels of finance then it gets tougher. In the US, you have access to the next level of VC finance which comes from a relatively large pool. Most financiers in Europe tend to be conservative, although there are efforts to change that. Hence, companies flipping to being US-based.
You want an office? Welcome to the wonderful world of business rates, commercial lettings, site security, ever-changing transportation and infrastructure arrangements that will be largely out of your control, etc.
Hiring your first employee? Welcome to employment contracts, documenting policies for things like grievances and disciplinary actions that you hope you'll never need, arranging pension plans, H&S regulations, statutory leave, benefits rules, and all the other HR fun and games.
Providing a service online, where your customers might come from abroad? Welcome to international tax regulations that you can barely keep up with, never mind properly comply.
Don't want to have users steal back all the revenue you ever took from them based on a legal technicality? Better have a good lawyer to write all your documents.
Don't want an intervention by the data protection regulator? Better make sure all your GDPR compliance processes and documentation are up to standard.
Remember to file your real-time payroll data and VAT returns and confirmation statements and annual financials on time. Don't forget you'll need to use suitable online systems for a lot of this stuff now, since HMRC insist on it, and you'll need to get anything else you're using for financial management integrated with them.
Don't forget your public liability insurance. And employer's liability insurance. And professional indemnity insurance. And property insurance. And...
Now, you can outsource a lot of this work. For some legal and accounting matters, you will have little choice, unless that happens to be your field of expertise. But of course the services offering to do it for you will charge you, and even if it's just a thousand pounds here or 3% of your revenue there, it will soon add up. Until you're big enough to have in-house people for things like HR, facilities management, IT, legal and financial, that's how it goes.
Now, run along and make sure your designated H&S officer has checked that all your employees currently working from home have suitably ergonomic workspaces set up, recent sight tests done and glasses/contacts provided if they're working with computers, and proper reporting in place for all the extra expenses they'll be claiming due to the sudden home-working this year, because you could be on the hook for a big bill if you get any of that wrong.
While I can't tell how you feel about these things, most of it sounds pretty good, from an employee perspective.
Sure, there's stuff that is infuriatingly misguided, but all in all I rather like living in a place that puts the onus on the employer when it comes to all sorts of financial and practical issues that an employee might deal with.
I definitely don't want things to be more like the US, much as it complicates things for myself as an entrepreneur and employer.
It is good from an employee perspective. For example, in a country where a lot of people aren't saving enough for retirement, there is logic in saying that employers must make pensions available to their staff as part of their compensation package.
The problem, as always with these things, is that this only helps you if you're employed in the first place. If the burdens of taking on a new employee, particularly the first one, are too high, then that lifestyle business run by its founders will remain a lifestyle business run by its founders, possibly for years or even forever.
Similarly, if you're a customer shopping for clothes online at the moment, it's great that UK consumer protection law requires vendors to give you 14 days after delivery to change your mind and cancel the purchase, and the vendor must accept the return without charge if you do. You can buy multiple sizes or colours to try things on, or just try a few different styles to see what you like, and then send the rest back, and all it costs you is a bit of postage.
It's less good as a merchant, when the reality is that a significant fraction of your returned items will come back unfit for resale and unless you can prove they didn't reach the customer already in that state you'll still be on the hook for the refund. Even for goods that do come back in as-new condition, you'll still have to go through the whole restocking process and you'll be missing that stock for as much as 28 days. Generous return policies didn't matter quite as much a few years ago when the law was introduced, as most people were still shopping for their clothes in bricks and mortar stores and would try things on in-store before buying. Right now, with fashion retailers going bust all over anyway, this surely isn't helping.
I have to work with a legacy Perl codebase most weeks and I've been ignoring Perl 6 because upgrading our interpreter version is difficult for a bunch of reasons to boring to go into.
I'd been naively holding out a hope that Perl 6 would improve things so I clicked on the Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers link from perl6.org.
They added code block interpolation to strings:
#!/usr/bin/env perl6
my $number = 3;
say( "{ $number * 4 }" ); # prints 12
Really? printf is cool and useful for it's own domain. But there is a reason that languages provide interpolation. And the simplest possible example above is not one of those reasons.
I'm not going to bother convincing you that printf is not the highest form of string interpolation. Seems like you've got your bases covered pretty well.
I never said printf is the highest form, nor did i imply it. If you think i did imply that, and you consider it to be ridiculous, then it would behoove you to ask if i did mean to imply that or not; instead of assuming that your interpretation of my words is fact and i am being ridiculous.
I consider printf an acceptable form of string interpolation, nothing more.
