“Systems that break email already exist, so let’s add more to the world.”

Please, no.

My (least) favorite in this category is email addresses. It’s astonishing how many developers screw this up by trying to validate an email address by some means other than sending a message to it.

Geany or (with a lot of reconfiguration) Kate.

Geany is built upon the same text edit control as Notepad++.

One reason we don’t get much practice in this area is that the vast majority of common tasks can be accomplished with data structures and algorithms that are already implemented in libraries.

Have you considered learning a new programming language, and then helping to develop/expand its standard library, or to optimize what’s there already?

It might make more sense to expose a standard library API for unicode data provided by (and updated with) the operating system. Something like the time zone database.

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And now for something completely different […]

I missed that section at first glance. I’m glad someone called my attention to it.

Are you saying that the parent poster is giving incorrect information?

Yes. mosiacmango’s comment repeated what others had already said (right down to specific words that I used in the original thread and here), and then jumped to this conclusion:

Pretty clear that this is a very old screenshot of what is now a non issue.

Everything about that statement is false. While the circumstances made it seem likely that the screenshot was old, it was not clearly so, and in fact, it turns out the issue is still present. I checked it. A registration email from the test I ran yesterday looked just like the screenshot in question, cleartext password and all.

Given that Larian reported the issue fixed three years ago, it’s possible that they fixed it locally and some time later upgraded to a new version of the forum software, thereby overwriting the local fix. Perhaps mosiacmango should have considered that before posting incorrect speculation as if it were fact.

FWIW, it’s not fixed. The screen shot may very well be recent.

(The post in question was still bad reporting, though, for the reasons I detailed in my other comment here.)

I think the OP of that post would have had a better reception if they had:

• Responsibly disclosed what they found, rather than using it to stir up drama on social media.
• Mentioned that it’s just a web forum account, not connected to game accounts or anything else of value.
• Targeted the software vendor (https://www.ubbcentral.com/) instead of picking on one particular customer who used that software.
• Refrained from spreading misconceptions and unfounded assumptions about how the technology works.
• Responded to the reasonable follow-up questions, such as those that came when readers discovered that the problem was reported fixed three years ago.

People in that thread responded with skepticism and criticism to an irresponsible, misdirected, misleading, alarmist mess of a post. That’s hardly surprising.

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I only just started learning Nim, but from what I see so far, it might soon become my favorite.

it wouldn’t surprise me if the majority of those who like those 2 technologies were 40+, maybe even 50+.

I don’t think it should surprise anyone if people with more experience and skills are more comfortable with simple tools than the rest of us. They’ve had more time to find good workflows for those tools, after all.

It might be more interesting to ask why people prefer any one comms method over another. For example, do they like irc/email because they’re old dogs who can’t learn new tricks, or because those are open systems that can’t be taken over by some greedy corporation?

IRC and email work fine for me. Leagues better than having it locked away behind Discord’s policies and whims.

An issue/patch tracker (and maybe a wiki) would be nice, but I don’t feel they’re necessary. The linux kernel manages without them, after all.

And I don’t think it is reasonable to expect people to understand the basics.

If we assumed everyone asking a question knows nothing at all of the surrounding topic, and responded at length addressing every related detail instead of what was asked, our answers would be tedious, and often annoying. It’s called overexplaining (among other things). It’s usually better to tailor the answer to the cues given by the person asking, and let them ask more questions if necessary.

If they did, then they wouldn’t have asked.

OP didn’t ask about the basics. They clearly know them already, as we can see from the language and specificity of their question. I was happy to answer and provide a link for deeper detail.

But then someone else came along who apparently knew less than OP did, and decided express anger at me for not preemptively guessing and catering to their unstated special needs, in an answer that wasn’t intended for them in the first place. That was incredibly entitled and rude.

I see you’ve met Jira. :)

You can if you have those man pages installed.

You might also enjoy man ascii, man operator, or even man intro.

Unfortunately, there are still some gaps:

$ man love
No manual entry for love

The id number is then an identifier for the corresponding section of the printf entry,

Nit: 3 is the manual section in which to look for the named entry (aka page), not a section of the entry.

This answer makes me so angry like revisiting trauma from learning programming.

If you bothered to read the documentation, which exists in abundance on the web, in many books, in the built-in manuals of various operating systems and dev tools, and which I also linked in my answer, you would see a full explanation with clear examples.

But you can’t be bothered with any of that, and instead expect other people to spend their time writing custom tutorials just for you?

Your anger is misplaced. Please consider taking a walk.

I just remember asking questions early on and getting answers more confusing that are even harder to parse

When you ask people questions about their field of knowledge, and they don’t know you, it’s reasonable for their answers to assume you know the rudimentary basics. (Just as it would be reasonable for a fourth-year group to assume a that a stranger asking them questions has at least taken the first-year class.) Asking beyond your level of experience is not necessarily bad, but you should be ready to describe what you don’t understand about the answer, so that people can either elaborate with a helpful level of detail or send you to a forum more appropriate for your needs. For example:

!learn_programming@programming.dev

Programmer time is more expensive than computer time.

That might excuse inefficiency if all of these things were true:

• The programmers (or their employers) were buying new computers for all their users
• The new computers were fast enough to keep slow software from wasting users’ time
• The electricity to run them was free and without pollution
• The resources consumed and waste produced by that upgrade cycle had no impact on the environment

What’s really happening here is that producers of software are making things cheaper and easier for themselves by shifting and multiplying costs onto the users and the environment.

The amount of waste is staggering. It’s part of why I haven’t enjoyed professional software development in years.