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Category: Information Technology
RFC 2739
I’ve been doing a fair bit of development work of late on Upwork, joining the gig economy in my spare time. Yes, that gig economy time eats into my blogging time, and yes, the pay is… well, it’s gig economy pay. But I’ve missed programming, and I do enjoy it. Even if programming now, compared […]
Could the Quora bots pass the Turing Test by being mistaken for stupid uneducated humans?
Some might query whether this question is insincere, and a pretext for complaining about Moderation by Bot. I am not of that number. Our interaction with Quora Moderation is a preview of our interaction with Artificial Intelligence in general, as it becomes more and more widespread. We’re getting more of it here on the Quoras, […]
How is telecommuting working for you?
Question answered: How is telecommuting working for you? The plural of anecdote is Quora answers. Herewith mine. I worked for 3 years physically in a job that many of you will have already worked out by now, and 14 more telecommuting. The only way I could bear to keep working on that job was by […]
Why don’t Apple devices have an emoji of the flag of Ancient Rome?
The intention of the Unicode Regional Indicator Symbols was to represent current countries in existence (as encoded in ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), as locales for software; the flags are a lagniappe. (A rather unfortunate lagniappe.) Hence, no SPQR flag: the point of the codes is to indicate the country you live in, as a two letter […]
What reasons are there to not use Go (programming language)?
Tikhon Jelvis has just followed me, and I don’t want to annoy him by liking Go. 🙂 And I do like Go. But treating Golang as a general all-purpose language is silly and hype-y. Golang is a low level, strictly typed language. It is almost as pleasant as a low level language can get: a […]
What are some common beginner mistakes in Go programming?
They’re minor things, but they’re things I keep slipping up on: Sometimes Golang hides the difference between a type and the pointer to the type. That doesn’t mean the asterisk is decorative. Most of the time, Golang doesn’t hide the difference, and you do need to put that asterisk in. It is idiomatic to assign […]
What are the fundamental principles of the Go programming language?
The world has moved on since 1970 (C: Kernighan and Ritchie). But the world still needs a low level language. Pretty printing and statement termination are solved problems. The programmer does not need to be forced to deal with them. You can have a low level language and still have associative arrays, extensible arrays and […]
What are the characteristics of idiomatic Go code?
Just to get the ball rolling: Short variable names Error checking routines (the !err testing gets prolix quickly) Never use a var when you can use a := defer is your friend Answered 2017-03-10 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-are-the-characteristics-of-idiomatic-Go-code/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
What work jargon do you often use in daily life?
Often? I dunno, but I’ve certainly caught myself using use case rather more often than I should outside of work. It’s such a slippery term in IT, it’s very easy to overgeneralise. I get some mileage out of business plan too, mainly as something that institutions all around me don’t seem to have articulated. I […]
The Decalogue of Nick #3: I work in schools IT policy
For Scott Welch. When I walked away from linguistics, I walked upstairs into department IT support for the Languages Department. It was an underpaid but cosy sinecure, where I got to write papers, work on the side as a research assistant, and practice bad Italian, French, and German on my peers. That didn’t last, and […]