The only difference between a novice and a professional is that a professional checks what they are copying to understand it first before allowing it into their codebase.
Novices copy code to avoid having to understand it. Professionals copy code to avoid reinventing the wheel.
I replied to that thread.
OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.
Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.
No one said it was shameful?
It’s a huge win, but not the kind of win people reading the statistic with no context (like me) probably thought.
I’m sure a lot of us looked at “15 percent of desktop PCs in India run Linux” and, regardless of whether it was hasty and irresponsible for us to do so, extrapolated that to, “15 percent of Indian PC users are personally selecting Linux and normalizing its paradigms”.
But in reality, it sounds more like “15 percent of Indian PC users use Linux to launch Google Chrome”. Which is impressive, but not the specific kind of impressive we wanted.
It feels a bit like how I imagine, say, a song artist feels when they pour their heart and soul into a piece of music, it gets modest to no traction for a while, and then years later a 20 second loop becomes the backing track for a massive Tiktok meme, and almost zero of that attention trickles back to their other work.
Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don’t hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn’t do anything.
In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you’ve declared. You don’t query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.
HTML ““has state””, as in it has a DOM, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t mutate the DOM after it’s built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren’t trivially evident from the state you declared.
You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.
Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.
The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.
You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.
HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.
The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.
Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.
In a rather unorthodox way, yes.
Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.
The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.
I don’t really mind either way whether these posts are allowed to remain or should be culled.
If you keep them around, they will just keep shitting up the feed. The overall browsing quality of the community goes down, hindering the user experience. I don’t think it’s uncontroversial to say these posts have next to no value; they’re essentially equivalent to birthday notifications or “I voted” stickers. Like… congrats! You and everyone else! Now what? Where’s the discussion here?
On the other hand, I do want to think thrice about controlling this with moderation. All too often on Reddit I’ve see the trope of a sub that appears to be crawling, and you get the idea to join in with an enthusiastic post, only to get removedsmacked by automod because you posted this on the wrong day of the week, or this post type is outright banned because the community is sick of seeing it. It’s sensible, yes. But ugh, what a demoralizing filter for newcomers. Overly curated subs/communities are not public forums, they are increasingly impenetrable cliques. That may not necessarily be a bad thing if we think the tradeoff is worth it. But we have to keep in mind what we become when we make that trade.
The one thing I will say willl absolutely not help anything at all is making a designated containment community for this specific kind of post. The whole complaint here is rooted in there being no discussion value for these types of posts. You think a community comprised entirely of those would be a community anyone would want to post in? It’d largely be the Lemmy equivalent of a donotreply@ email address. A dumping ground where unwanted posts go to die. And I don’t know about anyone else, but somehow I find being directed to a designated dead-end forum by mods is an even bigger slap to the face than simply having my post removed.
Unlike Python, most languages do not endorse a specific concept of style. You’re free to dabble in all the bad style choices you like, on the off chance that once in a blue moon they prove to be situationally useful.