This could be the beginning of the end for Google. As soon as they start pandering to advertisers instead of users, things are all downhill. People want to find file sharing sites, and if they can't find them on Google, they will go somewhere else.
Suppose I was punching holes in cardboard cards and feeding them to a card reader. How does the fact that emacs improved my productivity reflect how proficiently I was punching those holes?
I actually have to agree if you are coming to something like
a = b[:]
in code you are going to understand what it means or you are probably going to be missing a large portion of other things that are going on in the python code.
With that said I must also state that I think
a = list(b)
is much prettier and is easier to understand to me.
They need to learn it, then. Honestly, anyone who read and comprehended my first post now understands slice notation (with the exception of the more rarely used stride argument), so it's not like it's a ton of effort. Unless the post author is claiming that slice notation itself is cryptic, I don't even understand where he's coming from.
I happen to agree that it's more intuitive to use list() instead of slice notation, but back when I had no idea about slice notation and first saw it, it caused me to wonder what else could be done with it. After some reading, I learned a lot more about different slice tricks than I would have if I were just presented with list().
Prehaps entrepreneurs should stop reading and start doing. Some things are just impossible to learn from a book, and even the things that can be learned from a book can be learned faster and better through personal experience.
That's way too broad and general. The problems that hit entrepreneurs along the way are often things they don't know they should be learning before it's too late. By that point, the only thing you're learning from is your mistakes, and that's no way to learn if you can avoid it.
Why do you have the same 10 characters on 10 consecutive lines? Sounds like that is probably a violation of DRY, at least it always has been when I encountered something like that. Also, if you are comparing vi(m) to something, please don't compare it to notepad. Every editor and IDE I have used in the past few years has rectangular selection. Commonly with alt+click and drag, or shift+alt+arrow keys.
- braindead configuaration files.
- data files that need some massaging
- commenting out code blocks in languages which need a prefix comment delimiter on each line (e.g. python's # or haskell's --)
- any time you are doing a series of operations calling functions in a module or from a single class/object and the name changes (e.g. foo.x();, foo.y(); foo.z(); and so on);
OK, I can potentially see where vi(m)'s rectangluar selection would be good for editing config files and such, but I'm pretty sure all modern editors have rectangular selection anyway (notepad is not a modern editor). My IDE has the ability to rename a variable and to comment/uncomment a selection which solves your last two problems.
I wasn't defending vim over your editor, just answering the question of when there are valid times to do 10 lines of block change. 2 more that came up for me yesterday:
We changed the data format being sent over JSON now I needed to:
1) make a bunch of int declarations into float declarations, fortunately those tend to bunch up.
2) Change a bunch of getInt calls to getFloat calls, but those are also bunched up together.
Something thats been on my list of potential project ideas for a long time is a suite of tools built for distributed teams. From this article, I am now convinced that this problem needs solving.
I've been aggregating all my messaging to facebook for awhile, my emails are forwarded to my @facebook address, and I used facebook for communication whenever possible. Maybe Facebook can finally replace the outdated tech that is e-mail and SMS? I hope so.
