Here is a writing tip: if you talk about a hypothetical person of undefined sex, choose "he" or "she" and stick with it. Some writing teachers say one should always use "she" to avoid sexism, but that is obviously not followed. As long as you do not actively reinforce stereotypes (i.e., you call all hypothetical flight attendants "she" and all hypothetical lawyers "he"), I think using "he" is fine.
But if you mix "he" or "she" up then you just raise questions in the reader's mind. Here the author has half "he's" and half "she's" which opens him (or her!) to bunch of accusations of sexism. Why was the newbie a "she"?
In this article it would have been fine to use singular ‘they’ especially since each fictive person is really a group of people, so even read as plural ‘they’ works.
I use 'singular they' because at some point 'one' started to connote pretentiousness. I don't see how Spivak pronouns solve that problem, but this off-topic sub-discussion has convinced me to go back to using 'one' (for disambiguation's sake).
Oh man I wish these were in widespread use. It would simplify things greatly for everyone. I kinda wish HN just started using them and it spread out from here.
ha that is so me: Distinguishing code features: Only writes in dynamically-typed languages with a strong functional component. At first glance her code looks remarkably similar to the newbie’s, except there’s less of it and the variable names make sense.
Strong typing and dynamic typing aren't mutually exclusive. Most dynamically typed languages are strongly typed, and C, a statically typed language, is weakly typed.
In the poll at the end, there are plenty of people who have been through the early stages, but significantly fewer who claim to have been through the guru/veteren stage. I presume that means they are still in the guru/veteren stage? :D
I'm finishing up my final project for university (which is FPGA based), and I'm stuck with the supplied tools, so I can't really compare different vendors.
All the FPGA tools are closed-source though, and the free versions treat you as a criminal. I'm using Quartus II Web Edition. Altera finally came out with a Linux version, which is nice of them, but the list of annoyances is long:
1. Incremental compilation is disabled. You'll wait at least 5 minutes to try each change.
2. The signal analyzer is disabled. Debugging is a pain.
3. The source code for the supplied Altera components is encrypted.
4. Your design is on a timer, and stops working 1 hour after being programmed into the board. There goes that hobby project.
This is for the trial version, which I supposedly would use to learn. Yet they make learning about as painful as possible. I simply don't have 3 grand for the full version of Quartus.
I can't comment on Xilinx or Lattice, but I suspect the story is similar. FPGAs are hostile to hobbyists.
Oh yeah, boards :) Get a full-featured dev board. Sparkfun has simple breakout boards, but you have to add your own power, clock source and flash for storing the FPGA config, at least, before you can do any work.
But if you mix "he" or "she" up then you just raise questions in the reader's mind. Here the author has half "he's" and half "she's" which opens him (or her!) to bunch of accusations of sexism. Why was the newbie a "she"?