moeris

It's very easy to find classics full of "bad" grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it's in fact not bad.

This is wrong for at least four reasons:

1. Incidents of "incorrect" punctuation in classics is due in large part to the role of various punctuation marks changing over time. For example, the semicolon was once used at the end of questions like a question mark. The em-dash was used in earlier modern English for long pauses, but is no longer.

2. "Classics" is a broad category, and they were written for many different purposes and audiences: they should not necessarily be held as paragons of style. If you're trying to write intentionally, and for a large audience, the grammatical use of punctuation is helpful. For example, Emily Dickinson's poems were primarily written for herself, and were highly stylistic. Not a style you'd want to replicate when writing, for example, a newspaper article.

3. There is a punctuation which explicitly denotes a pause: the en-dash. Why use punctuation which has a specific purpose to do the exact same thing?

4. Different dialects use pause in different ways. Just as purely phonetic spelling would be terrible for internationally audiences, purely phonetic spelling would make texts more difficult to understand. You say punctuation rules enforce a class divide. I say they help bridge class divides by giving a common set of rules not based on and particular English.

Constantly. I read Harry Potter every year (despite any misgivings I have about the author), lately to my kid before putting them down to sleep.

The God of Small Things, LoTR, the Hobbit, Dune, the Foundation series, the Nightrunner series (by Lynn Flewelling), the Left Hand of Darkness. One of my favorite things to do is to reread novels I loved as a child and see if they held up.

Reading a book again, you notice things you've forgotten or missed. And you've changed as a person, so your understanding is different every time.

Well, I can think of two reasons immediately. The first is in hermetic testing environments, where you may have two tests where you'd like to see the same entity. You can't always know the order in which tests execute. That means that either seeding operations should be idempotent, or you'd have to handle setup outside of the individual tests. (Which makes the tests, overall, harder to read.)

Another reason could be for resiliency. You may add a retry mechanism into your code in the frontend, to increase resiliency. If a request returns a 500, you don't know if the entity is created. (The server error could occur in post-processing.) You either have to rely on the creation to be idempotent, or you have to make an additional round-trip. Using a create-or-update mechanism reduces latency and simplifies error-handling code.

Mushroomgrowers/mycology (there's mycology@mander.xyz, but it'd be nice to have one focused on growing)

Pseudoscience/skeptics (for discussions scientific skepticism, the skeptic community, and shows like SGU, ONWRAC, etc.)

Whatsthisplant/whatsthisbug/etc. (For identification purposes)

myog (for diy outdoors gear)

Startups/indiehackers (for those wanting to start small, self-sustained businesses)

why would you choose to add several seconds to your reaction time in an unforeseen emergency where a fraction of a single second could be the difference between life or death — and not just your own?!

In those situations, it's not going to be a life-or-death situation. The surrounding traffic is going zero miles an hour. Even if someone hits you, they're going to do it at a couple miles an hour. And since you're surrounded by other vehicles going at most a couple miles an hour, you'd be hit anyway.

How thafuq does anyone think that it's safe at any point to be a stationary object in the middle of the damn road?!

Well, generally, stopping for stoplights, school buses, flaggers, downed trees, or pedestrians is considered a good idea.

Personally (m), one reason I used to hate it was because it made me feel uncertain about my sexuality. I used to think something along the lines of am I really into guys, or do I just want to be into them for some reason?. But the biggest thing that bothered me was worrying I was being unauthentic with others. I already felt like I was being inauthentic (implicitly lying to since small degree) to straight people. Once I came out as bi, and I felt more strongly attracted to women for a day or two, I started feeling like I was lying to my gay friends, too.

It no longer bothers me. Probably because I've been in a relationship with a guy, or because I'm used to it, or because I just care less about what others would think about how I identify. Or maybe even because I've met more bi folks.

Yeah, I think they're just the more vocal subset of users. The same thing happens in functional languages. (Especially Lisp.)

Array languages in general are fun to use because you can express a great deal in very little space. Of course, you have to think more about how to encode something, or even when reading. I feel like those are good muscles to exercise for when you're reading more densely written code in any language.

Professionally, I mostly use Kotlin, Typescript, and Java.

For fun, I've recently been using BQN, which is quite nice compared to J, which I had been previously using. I also use Elm, Rust, Python and a smattering of others.