TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Package-local nicknames

Got around to reading this blog post, seems like something to ramble about myself as ultimately I disagree though I like his arguments. I will now proceed to jump into the shark pool, but while in the air let me babble--

First, I think if you're using the package-inferred-system style, then yes, nicknames are largely pointless. (Though not package prefixes, which I'll get to in a bit.) Most of the time it'll be fine to just :use the packages you need for that file. While in that file, you know all the symbols in use are defined at the top of the file if you're ever in doubt where they come from and don't feel like describing/hovering over the symbol or jumping to the source. Like Java, using this style also encourages to keep files relatively smaller as well, which helps keep the number of symbols at play per file relatively smaller.

I'm not a huge fan of package-inferred-system, at least in the way ADSF implemented it. Also, it seems like the linked post's main complaint isn't so much around nicknames, but around package names entirely. Their example Python code of preferring from sys import argv, exit over import sys and later using sys.argv and sys.exit suggests that to me.

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Books

Randomly looking at old post tagged books here, a bit sad how many I still haven't read. I only read ~12 per year, but still. (Here's a list if you're curious of my thoughts on any of them, but spoilers galore.)

From early 2010: never finished Probability Theory, Causality, or Purely Functional Data Structures, I only got through them to varying degrees of progress. I think I "finished" the Flex book but it was mainly useful as a reference anyway. The 2 listed for school, Sound Synthesis and a book on combinatorial game theory, I never finished cover to cover, though I passed the classes. (The sound class never used the book though...)

From late 2010: I read most of How to Read a Book but never finished. Read random bits of Judgment Under Uncertainty before giving it to a friend. Never read much of Real Time Rendering, there are newer editions now too... I did eventually read most of the others; only the first book in the Kushiel trilogy though.

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