I prefer mailing lists to forums, and forums to IRC, Slack to Discord and Discord is dead last just because it’s so fucking annoying. Forums can be annoying too but they are far more usable/searchable than the stream of consciousness, ephemeral nature of chat.
Even if you’re a Discord user it’s still annoying as fuck.
You’re not as familiar with IRC as you think you are if you believe it doesn’t have (sometimes large) servers and it works in a peer-to-peer arrangement with each user contributing to the “power of the network”…
I know I’m an outlier, but I prefer text mode IRC, then slack, and then all the other shit (telegram, signal, discord, teams, etc) fall way behind. “Everything is a walled-off app” is a horrible way to communicate. I get why these companies do it, and I also even understand the headache over maintaining useful open APIs, but honestly, they drop that ASAP because it doesn’t make them money.
Agreed except for the variables. You can pry the iterators i, j, k, the pointers p and q, and the temporary buffer buf, from my cold, dead hands.
Short variable names increase code clarity, particularly when the functions employing them are concise and named appropriately. There’s not much worse than using something like sourcedata[databufferiterator] instead of src[i]. It reminds me of authors who think that big words make them sound more intelligent. Needing or advocating auto complete in IDEs is a symptom of this kind of code smell, IMO.
Code should be clear and concise; it’s also why I fight for 8 character indentation; if your code is creeping across the screen it’s a damn good indication that the function might be too complex and should be broken up.
It’s a compromise; the discussions aren’t lost, Reddit doesn’t get to have the data anymore, but like you said, there’s no engagement. The engagement needs to occur over here with new topics, possibly linking back to the copied old ones.
This. Trying to find anything in a brick and mortar store in the last decade has been such a godawful experience that I don’t feel the least bit sorry for them. Groceries are largely delivered (not using Instacart, but the store’s own delivery or pickup service), tech stuff is all aliexpress or amazon, clothing I still largely go in to buy, but don’t buy very often. Appliances? Research the shit out of it online and usually order online from a local retailer with a decent website. Heck, even hardware is online through Home Depot and auto stuff is either rockauto or similar.
It’s called the asshole tax. Don’t be an asshole and you won’t be charged.