1. It's also called the number sign
2. Size of a mathematical set S or a group G or whatever is notated as #S or #G.
3. This gets abstracted out into collections of all sorts and the length of a list is equal to the elements it contains.

holy shit i love this

# is the hashtag operator, it adds hashtags to your strings

because it's shorthand for number and it would represent the number of items in a list/array/map/whatever

how does # mean length of something?

Personally if I were to choose something for comments i'd say -- is pretty good but then again i have a huge soft spot for ada

it's ok because all comments should be written in the format xXx_comment here_xXx

...huh

The worst part is as far as I can tell the use of ** for exponent predates the use of // for comments so yeah what the heck

ok but he suggests all comments should be # when # could be used as a perfectly good operator to get the length of something

"i don't know how i want it to work before i write it;

What is specification, what is implementation, what is the difference, yada yada.

i know i should but it's a stream of consciousness."

The Greeks called this ataraxia, weakness of the will. Jesus. It's ok to be weak in the moment, but you probably could make a commitment to change and grow for the future.

lol it is not

Maybe sort of?

There's probably some cool implications about the study of artificial neural networks for real-life neural networks, and ANNs are based off biological NNs, but I definitely don't know enough about either to say

omg! i never knew you could do that! I knew about *args and **kwargs for variable-argument functions but I never saw this usage

I mean this is basically just what human memory is right?

I think my favorite feature along these lines is splatting.

def draw_circle(x, y, r, line_color="#ff0000", fill_color="#00ff00"):
    ...

args = [10, 20, 2]
kwargs = {"line_color": "#0000ff", "fill_color": "#ff0000"}
draw_circle(*args, **kwargs)

it works the other way too. It's such a useful feature!

also I write security software for offices in scratch

I haven't really done very much programming, but I think Warcraft 3's world editor counts. There's Jass which I never learnt, but the trigger system is quirky and weird and the hoops you have to jump through to avoid memory leaks are fun.

i looooove emacs. the main reason i don't write more of my own stuff in elisp is because the language shows its age in terms of multithreading and background computation.

i also really like _why's projects hackety hack and potion.

oh man i gotta check out Coq, that sounds Really Rad tbh

i also definitely need to check out Pico 8 someday (i blame you oakreef for this interest)

I think Emacs must count for being very idiosyncratic, at the very least, even if it's well known. I wish it was more robust though.

CoqIDE is for the Coq theorem prover and using it has this weird video gamey vibe to it. When you're proving a theorem in Coq, you're essentially manipulating equations until they "match" the target one. In essence, you write a "sentence" in Coq - commands actually do end with periods, then hit the next step command and Coq checks whether your command compiles or not. If it does, your reasoning was valid in a way that Coq could verify. I think it would be possible to write a very good puzzle game along these lines, actually.

There's this fantasy video game console called Pico-8 that actually houses a development environment in itself, including a music sequencer, sprite editor and an editor. It uses Lua, which is honestly a bit too quirky a language for me.

Also any time there's an actually usable repl, it's both weird and quite welcome. Weird because they're rare, welcome because it's such a fast way of trying out things. But I do feel they could be loads better if they weren't subject to the idiosyncrasies of terminal emulators. Like setting up a custom prompt for each language is a lot of work for such a little thing. For GHCi (for Haskell), I have the current working directory, loaded modules and a pink lowercase lambda as my prompt which is cool since now I can distinguish between terminal windows at a glance, but of course I had to assimilate a bunch of tutorials all around the place to make it happen.

mercurial is also a heck of a lot easier to write plugins and extensions for so it's much easier to hook it in to other, larger scale source control systems.

Facebook wrote a blogpost on the topic, it's four years old by now though.

huh that's interesting. i have used hg in the past and thought it was very easy to understand compared to git but moved to git because mercurial was too slow. i guess its speed has improved over the years, i'll have to give it another shot!

Facebook uses Mercurial because Git was too slow.

i agree; git is good but for some reason people act like it's the only DVCS out there; I've always found mercurial to be easier to use and less convoluted and easier to learn.

My controversial opinion: what Git does is valuable enough, but the way everything works is super convoluted.