Doc Avid Mornington

Not actually a doctor.

  • 0 Posts
  • 263 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • If your SQL model has nulls, and you don’t have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn’t have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it’s certainly the most straightforward way.

    The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I’m not up to date on either of them, but I’m also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

    I am not the other person you were talking to, I’ve only made one comment on this, so not really “hellbent”, friend.

    Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you’re making me wonder if I’m missing one. What specific comment, what “case specified above” are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don’t see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I’ll be glad to reassess.




  • At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means “this value exists but is unknown”. Conflating that with “this value does not exist” is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means “explicit omission”, but that isn’t the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It’s perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.






  • It’s better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn’t writing useful comments as well - in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I’d be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that’s not the tradeoff in reality - it’s always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn’t the dev’s fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they’re just trying not to get fired or whatever.




  • I agree, it is a very bad sign, but the idea that we are either a “failed state” on the way to oblivion, or doing great, and there’s nothing in between, is silly. We’re a lot better now than we were when only landowners could vote, right? Or before the civil war and the second founding? Or before women gained suffrage? Or in the leadup to our entry in WWII, when it looked like we might just join the Axis powers? Or the nineteen forties, when “separate but equal” was basically unchallenged? Or in the nineteen fifties, when a woman was a housewife or nothing? Or the nineteen nineties, when “don’t ask don’t tell” was actually considered a victory for LGBTQ+ rights? Or the twenty-aughts when people were noy allowed to marry based on gender? We’re trying to decide, right now, if a former president can be tried for crimes - it seems wild that this should even be a question, but when it was Nixon, Johnson pardoned him, and that was it - we might be on the verge of a huge step forward, in even just going ahead with the trial, no matter the outcome. Does all this mean everything is awesome now? Oh, oh, HELLS NO! It’s a mess, but it doesn’t mean we are a “failed state”, it just means we aren’t there yet, and we gotta keep struggling.


  • I dunno why people are downvoting this. You’re absolutely right. Biden doesn’t give as good speech as Obama or Clinton did, but he is pretty charming when he turns it on. He should definitely be in front of cameras, and crowds, more often, especially as we get closer to the election. He’s not perfect, and his tepid stance toward Palestine is saddening, but on domestic policy, he’s been far better as president than I personally expected - probably the most progressive president since LBJ. He’s done more with less political capital than past Democratic presidents, yet a lot of people don’t really realize that, because he’s not talking directly to the populace as much as he could and, I think, really should.




  • The pardon power should be eliminated, and that’s been clear since Nixon was pardoned. Sure, just about every president has a feel-good set of pardons, people who were railroaded by bad laws and bad court practices, but those corrections are only a tiny fraction of the outrageous injustices committed by our system, and their existence is used to justify the injustice in the first place - “oh but surely there will be a pardon for people who really need it” - as if depending on a single King-figure at the top to make good decisions, instead of improving systems, was ever a good idea. But in the meantime, just about every president also has a list of political pardons they trade for favors, or use for people who committed crimes on behalf of the president, or the party. Why the fuck does it make any sense at all to say “hey, this person was elected head of the executive branch, they should be able to just shield people from the rule of law”, if the rule of law is an important basis of a free democracy? It’s weird, when you think about it. End the pardon.


  • Pretty sure they meant to not have review. Dropping peer review in favor of pair programming is a trendy idea these days. Heh, you might call it “pairs over peers”. I don’t agree with it, though. Pair programming is great, but two people, heads together, can easily get on a wavelength and miss the same things. It’s always valuable to have people who have never seen the new changes take a look. Also, peer review helps keep the whole team up to date on their knowledge of the code base, a seriously underrated benefit. But I will concede that trading peer review for pair programming is less wrong than giving up version control. Still wrong, but a lot less wrong.