Me, trying to learn flat assembler: "What is even an object?"
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Haha! Reminds me when I arrived in a team whose API accepted JSON and all the booleans were "True" or "False" (meaningful case, obv.) That was fun.
This certainly Tcl'd my funny bone.
God, that reminds me of the debate on XML that I had with a developer about fifteen years ago.
Both our companies were working for a client who needed to publish product catalogues in several languages twice a year.
They had implemented a sort of Content Management System which they used with a plugin to feed data into Quark Xpress files as well as their website, IIRC. Cross-media publishing, essentially, and they had their own little set of format instructions to make words appear in bold, different colors, etc.
Since my company was tasked with translating the text into various languages, I suggested they come up with a way to store their data as XML. The standard tools in the translation industry can be easily customized to work with that, and XML would be a good way to future-proof their software. After a lot of delaying, grumbling, and ho-hum, they agreed to implement this plan.
Lo and behold, when the first meeting on the new XML format came around they showed it to me for the first time and... everything was in CDATA sections. Entire paragraphs of text with proprietary formatting instructions. 😐
When I tried to explain, very politely, and very patiently, that this was not going to work, the lead dev started insulting me. I swear to God, I've never been this close to punching someone in the face at a business meeting. 🤬
Thankfully, the client understood the issue and we eventually got an XML-based data exchange going. It is probably still in use today.
I am strongly strongly statically typed pilled and I will not apologize.
[Laughs in computed TypeScript strings]
There are two genders: string and null
There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, "0", {}, and "".
I took great pains last week to convert a big python project to make it typed. (shoutout to MonkeyType)
It's so much nicer to develop now...
Oh that's a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don't have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.
Yeah, I stopped developing in JS for good ~1.5 years ago. After using TS, it seems crazy to go back.
where my Ada bros not committing war crimes at?
Empty string used to be like my own version of null pointer.
easy there satan
Oh, you worked at Oracle by any chance?
Ah, the SQLite approach!
Me: Puts a boolean into sqlite
Me: Asks for that boolean
SQLite: "Here's that int you asked for"
They finally added strict tables which avoids most (all?) of those shenanigans.
I never really minded the shenanigans, after reading the docs once it all mostly made sense
I don't really mind them either, it's just exciting that there is finally a way to make it actually act type safe.
It is also the bash approach, isn't it?!
Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).
more directly, sqlite was originally for tcl which is why they share the semantics.
also I'd argue that sqlite is a bigger contribution than tk, but I suppose in a more roundabout way
Does GNU make count? It's crazy what you can do with the macro expressions, basically a Functional language using only string types. There's even a math "library" that will do arithmetic with numbers in strings.
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at the end of the day everything's a []u8 if you want it to be
void*
We don't touch that unless we really know what we're doing.
Everithing is bytes.
... Little Endian or Big Endian?
Middle Endian ftw!
I made a joke about that lately after someone suggested YYYY-DD-MM.
how big is your word and how would this work
You know, I was just joking, but turns out, Middle Endian really does exist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Middle-Endian
And it's just as crazy as one'd think. It's a 32bit value consisting of two 16bit little endian words jumbled together in big endian. So the byte order is B A D C.
Whenever I think "This is a really stupid idea, nobody would do that", turns out, someone actually did that.
oh lord why but that is about what i thought itd be
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